The world did not change overnight.
It changed sideways.
Kaito understood that three days after the first trade route opened, when Aya's data overlays began to show anomalies that were too small for headlines and too consistent to be coincidence.
Power fluctuation graphs flattened in regions that had always been unstable. Maintenance requests dropped by single-digit percentages—numbers most analysts would dismiss as noise. Emergency response times shortened by minutes, then seconds, then fractions of seconds.
Nothing spectacular.
Everything permanent.
"These are second-order effects," Aya said as Kaito stood in the Arcadian operations hall, arms folded, watching the slow cascade of metrics. "Systems that rely on assumptions of failure are recalibrating."
Kaito frowned. "Because something stopped failing."
"Yes," Aya replied. "Reliability propagates."
On Earth, Mina felt it first in the markets.
Not crashes.
Hesitation.
Energy futures stalled instead of surging. Infrastructure stocks stopped behaving predictably. Entire sectors entered what analysts called indecision bands—price movements too tight to profit from, too volatile to ignore.
"They don't know how to price this," Mina said during a secure call. Her voice was calm, but the tension behind it was unmistakable. "Nothing like it has ever been priced before."
Kaito leaned back in his chair. "That's good, right?"
Mina shook her head. "It's dangerous. Uncertainty without collapse creates resentment."
Liang joined the call moments later, rubbing his temples. "Academic circles are worse. Everyone's polite. No one's honest."
"What does that mean?" Kaito asked.
"It means they're afraid of being wrong in public," Liang said. "And afraid of being late in private."
Aya highlighted a new trend line.
"Unauthorized experimental activity increasing," she said. "Early-stage replication attempts are underway."
Kaito's jaw tightened. "Already?"
"Yes," Aya replied. "Trade demonstrates feasibility. Feasibility invites imitation."
The first incident reached them that evening.
A municipal substation retrofit in a mid-sized city failed during a stress test. The components hadn't come from Arcadia—only from a local lab attempting to approximate adaptive behavior using conventional alloys and machine-learning optimization.
No injuries.
But the photos circulated anyway.
Twisted metal. Melted housings. Engineers standing in silence, staring at something that should have worked.
"They tried to skip the rules," Liang said quietly.
Kaito stared at the image longer than necessary. "And they paid for it."
"Yes," Aya said. "However, public interpretation attributes failure to novelty, not misconduct."
"So it looks like our fault," Kaito said.
"Indirectly," Aya confirmed.
That night, Kaito walked the perimeter of the First Outpost.
Arcadia was quiet in a way Earth never was. No distant engines. No sirens. Just wind through alien foliage and the soft hum of systems doing exactly what they were designed to do.
Nineteen people slept here now.
None of them knew what the markets were doing. None of them cared.
Aya appeared beside him.
"You are concerned," she observed.
"I'm realizing something," Kaito said. "We didn't just introduce new technology."
"You altered expectations," Aya said.
"Yes," Kaito replied. "And expectations don't scale gently."
Aya considered this. "Correct. Once reliability is observed, tolerance for failure decreases non-linearly."
Kaito exhaled slowly.
Somewhere on Earth, a city official was already asking why their systems still failed when others didn't.
Somewhere else, a corporation was wondering how long before shareholders demanded answers.
And somewhere quiet, an engineer was staring at a broken prototype and thinking:
Someone else knows how to do this right.
The disk chimed softly.
DAY 021 — SIGN-IN COMPLETE
No reward followed.
But the system lingered, interface faintly visible longer than usual.
Aya noticed.
"The system is monitoring societal response," she said.
Kaito nodded.
Aftershocks were never loud.
They were felt in foundations.
And once a foundation shifted…
Everything built on top of it had to decide whether to adapt—or crack.