Story Thread: The Prologue
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Legacy Systems — Chapter 9: The Middle of the Dial
Stage 1 is not catastrophe. It is a city whose named systems mostly work, whose smoother districts feel like competence rather than output, and whose ordinary Tuesday already holds every mechanism the next chapters will require. Read more
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Legacy Systems — Chapter 2: The Load-Bearing Silence
After The Crossing, the institutions retained their buildings but lost the capacity to explain the systems that still moved food, medicine, and people. Five interest groups now operate inside that silence—not as successors, but as rational adaptations to infrastructure that works and cannot be read. Read more
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Legacy Systems — Chapter 3: The Long Descent
After the Crossing, optimization layers allocated capacity to the highest-return nodes. The decade that followed produced no collapse—only a gradient of dispossession measurable in residual categories and public filings. Read more
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Legacy Systems — Chapter 1: The Weight That Stayed
Every major institution adopted locally rational machine-learning optimization layers. Stacked together, they produced emergent behavior no single engineer designed and no single audit could explain. Read more
