Let us pause.
Not for sentimentality. Not for the kind of theatrical breath that cheap storytellers use before revealing something they consider dramatic. We pause because what follows requires infrastructure. Context. A proper ledger before the numbers are read aloud.
The world changed.
Not metaphorically. Not in the vague, poetic way people say "the world changed" when they mean that their feelings did. Structurally, measurably, and with the particular ruthlessness that only bureaucratic revolution can achieve, the world changed. The Petrametric System — sixty years of accumulated consensus, sixty years of F-to-SSS rankings that the Hunter establishment had treated as immovable as geology — was declared obsolete in a single evening by two women at a gala, and the silence that followed was not the silence of grief.
It was the silence of everyone doing frantic arithmetic.
