LYRA'S POV
(TWO YEARS AFTER CONTINENTAL CONGRESS)
The emergency summons reached me at dawn, cutting through forty-one dimensional states with urgency that made my consciousness snap to full alertness despite having been coordinating restoration documentation across multiple frameworks simultaneously.
**Silverpine Territory. Violence against the marked population. Three dead. Seventeen injured. Territorial Council claiming self-defense. Marked witnesses saying unprovoked attack.**
My forty-one states went cold with fury that consciousness expansion amplified rather than managing through distributed awareness. Two years. We'd had two years of relative peace after Continental Congress established market governance. Two years of blessed populations building autonomous authority, demonstrating capability, proving consciousness evolution enriched rather than threatened territorial stability.
And now this.
