By the time the truth began to surface, no one was untouched. Generals who had slept beside launch codes for decades admitted their hands had never shaken like this. A junior analyst who flagged the first inconsistency could not forget that for twenty minutes, her cursor hovered over a recommendation that might have lit half the sky. Screens slowly filled with corrections, clarifications, careful walk-backs, but the world had already seen how thin its own skin was.
In the days that followed, committees promised safeguards and “information firewalls,” as if language itself could be sandbagged. Yet in subways and cafés, people spoke more softly, newly aware that a sentence, amplified and believed, could become a weapon faster than any missile. No bombs fell, no cities burned, but something irreversible had still detonated: faith in the distance between rumor and ruin.
