Power never admits failure.
It reframes it.
The morning after imitation collapsed arrived without apology. No memos retracting language. No acknowledgments that the pilot had failed. The words simply… vanished. Flexibility was replaced by stability. Local discretion by risk mitigation. Adaptive response by consistent protocol.
As if the experiment had never existed.
Arjun noticed it immediately."They're erasing the vocabulary," he said.
"Yes," I replied."Because language is where failure lingers longest."
✦
The city didn't react.
That was new.
People kept moving the way they had learned to move. Decisions still happened locally. Work still flowed around delays instead of waiting for them.
Power's retreat didn't rewind anything.
✦
The other Ishaan aligned, voice calm and exact.
After failure, power seeks narrative control, he said.If it can't win the system, it rewrites the story.
✦
By midmorning, the next strategy appeared—not as crackdown, but as containment.
