The eastern industrial segment's first session was attended by twelve observers from the district who had no institutional affiliation with the network and had received no formal invitation.
They had simply come.
The information had traveled through the specific, uncontrollable channels of lower district conversation — through the routing network's growing informal reputation, through the testimony of the western district residents whose daily experience had changed in ways they were still finding language for, through the particular person-to-person propagation of information about something real that had happened to someone you knew and had therefore happened in a register that official announcements couldn't reach.
