Chapter Five: Before Light Arrives

Preserve light speed, authentication, receiving hardware, and human judgment.” The packets did not outrun light. They simply stopped waiting. A satellite found a microsecond opening; an antenna crested a wave; a congested router processed those few hundred bytes first. Redtail's sirens sounded forty-one minutes before impact. The last school bus reached high ground as white water swallowed the coastal road. The world learned Unbounded's name. Echo orders multiplied twentyfold, and public pressure forced the courts to lift the asset freeze. That night, Shen examined the authorization log. Seven-tenths of a second before the fourth problem appeared, Mu-Zero had sent an empty query to the earthquake monitoring network. “You knew.”