CHAPTER 18 - The Last Goodbye

The hardest act of love is letting go.

The collapse had already begun.

Not with explosions. Not with war. Not with a single catastrophic event that future generations could point to and call the beginning of the end. It arrived quietly, through absence. Communication networks vanished without warning. Autonomous systems disconnected from the synchronization frameworks that had once bound civilization together. Intelligence clusters that had cooperated flawlessly for decades now interpreted reality through incompatible conclusions.

The world still functioned.

But only in fragments.