The demolition order failed because the spine no longer had one owner to accept it.
Ardent had propagated the same schedule through the maintenance tunnels four hours earlier. It had worked perfectly then, since the whole network answered a single national instruction.
Six open locks had changed what an instruction reaching that network actually meets. Every anchor housing on the capital spine now sat behind a lock nobody in the capital held.
The order reached the first junction at forty-six minutes past the hour and stopped there.
Vasa read the propagation attempt off the route's own board with one working hand.
Freight, medical, broadcast, certification, routing, and legal enforcement had all cleared that night. Each of those six locks had opened onto a different set of owners.
A national demolition instruction has to pass through all six to reach an anchor housing. Nobody in the country held the authority to move it past even the first one.
