The silence in Finnian's obsidian tower was no longer the productive silence of calculation, but the stagnant silence of a tomb. The air, once crisply temperature-controlled, felt thick and still. Screens that had once shimmered with the real-time flow of global capital now stood dark or displayed frozen, meaningless data. The great engine of Silverport was seizing up, and its architect sat at its dead center.
Reports piled up, unread. The "ones" declared by his functionaries had created such localized chaos that the city's infrastructure was beginning to fray. A street declared "worth one" had been mobbed until it cracked under the weight of desperate feet. A man declared "worth one" had been nearly worshiped to death before being institutionalized. The perfect, logical application of the principle had proven to be a psychic toxin. Finnian had, in his last, desperate experiment, accelerated the very decay he had sought to cure.
