Three months into the second arc, the city had changed in ways that no official report had captured and no institutional framework had yet found the language to describe.
The change wasn't in any single measurable data point, though the data points existed and were measurable and Elara reviewed them every morning with the focused attention of someone who understood that numbers were the institutional world's primary language and fluency in that language was its own form of protection. The change was underneath the numbers — in the quality of the environment those numbers described, in what it felt like to be a person living inside the thing the data was measuring.
The western schematic segment had been operational for eleven weeks.
