“Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject; the actual enemy is the unknown complexity.”
-Thomas Mann-
Chapter 132: Ghost patterns
The city behaved like a trained dog.
That was the first thing Dominique noticed.
No stalled shipments. No sudden outages. No frantic calls layered over each other like panicked breathing. The screens in the operations room glowed with obedient green, routes flowing, numbers aligning, the machine pretending it had never learned how to lie.
She didn’t trust it; so far, no problems meant that there were hidden ones.
Dominique stood with her hands folded behind her back, gaze drifting across the wall of data as if she were looking through a window instead of a display. Calm, contained, almost bored. The kind of stillness t
