The fracture did not begin with strangers. It began between people who already trusted each other.In Nairobi, the engineer noticed it first, though she couldn’t name it immediately. She was reviewing a set of infrastructure adjustments with a colleague she had worked alongside for nearly two years—a man named Kamau, steady, precise, rarely prone to error.They had disagreed before. Often, even. But disagreement had always felt like movement, like friction that produced something sharper, clearer.This time, it felt different. He presented a proposal—efficient, well-structured, aligned with Bastion’s predictive models—and when she questioned a routing assumption, he didn’t respond with explanation. He responded with something else.“You’ve been wrong before,” he said.The words weren’t aggressive. The tone wasn’t raised. But something in it was off—flattened, stripped of the usual collaborative tension. She blinked, taken off guard. “So have you,” she replied, half expecting the famil
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