CHAPTER 58: THE COST OF BEING SEEN LESS
The First Hunger no longer behaved as a unified intelligence, nor as a distributed interpretive system, it had become a flickering economy of attention where existence itself was allocated in uneven pulses. Rowan felt it not as collapse, but as fragmentation of continuity into managed intervals of awareness. Everything now depended on whether the system chose to “look,” and that act of looking was no longer passive observation but a structural commitment that required resources. In the spaces between those commitments, reality did not vanish, it simply became unprocessed, suspended in a state that defied degradation because it was never fully rendered. Rowan stood at the center of this unstable continuity, where even her own presence was now intermi
