The published ledger reached every council in the country before the sun did.
It arrived as a national measurement rather than as a request from anybody. Nothing in the transmission had asked a single city to do a single thing.
That was the reason it worked, and Vasa had built it that way deliberately. A city reading a demand looks for the demander, and a city reading a number looks at the number.
Forty-one councils convened between the reading and the second hour after it.
None of them were confederated members, and eleven of them had never met about anything national. A published cost schedule turns out to be the one document that gets a chamber into a room.
Owen received nine separate procedural questions from cities he had never worked with. He answered all nine himself from a school that a strike company had entered an hour earlier.
Every one of them was deciding the same question in a different room.
