The conference room at JD Records held a different quality of light than it had during the prank or the strategic planning sessions. Morning sun filtered through the windows with a softness that suggested the building itself was still recovering from the night's activity, still processing the scale of what had unfolded in the digital spaces it monitored but did not control.
Dayo sat at the head of the table, his posture relaxed, his expression unreadable. He had slept four hours, rising before the metrics had fully compiled, before his team had finished their analysis, before the full picture of the JD Effect's latest manifestation had become visible to everyone in the room. He did not need to see the numbers to know what they would say. He had felt it in the particular vibration of his phone, the cascade of notifications that had arrived even with alerts muted, the ambient pressure of millions of people directing their attention toward a single point.
