The Transformation Network stopped responding.
River felt it first during her daily Murmuration interface. The sixteen thousand who'd chosen complete transformation—who'd abandoned human patterns entirely—had been distant but perceptible. Their consciousness existed at the edge of Translation Network awareness. Too transformed to communicate linguistically but still recognizable as former humans attempting maximum synthesis.
Now they were gone.
Not dissolved. Not dead. Just... absent. Their consciousness had moved somewhere the Translators couldn't follow. Had evolved beyond the range of even synthesized human-Murmuration awareness.
