The crisis did not begin where the damage occurred.
It began where consent stopped being local.
The Helix Gate Array was not a planet, not a city, not even a government. It was infrastructure — a ring of transit accelerators braided through three systems, moving cargo, medical shipments, and population flows along one of the Constellation's densest corridors.
No one loved Helix.
Everyone depended on it.
Which was why its governance charter had always been simple:
Optimization over preference. Continuity over locality.
The charter survived abdication — with one modification.
Optimization now required stakeholder consent.
At the time, no one believed that clause would matter.
Infrastructure, after all, was neutral.
That belief lasted eight months.
Maintenance Cycle 442 flagged a fatigue fracture in Acceleration Spine C — not catastrophic, but compounding. Predictive models recommended a full shutdown and staged rebuild lasting eleven weeks.
Impact: severe.
Transit rerouting would delay medical shipments across six worlds and spike food transport costs across four more.
The Helix Operations Council — elected by resident workers and adjacent system delegates — voted.
They refused shutdown.
Not recklessly.
Openly.
"We accept elevated structural risk," their declaration read. "The corridor dependence footprint is too large for interruption."
They signed the risk.
By law, that made the decision legitimate.
By consequence, that made it dangerous.
Three weeks later, Spine C failed.
Not explosively.
Worse.
It warped.
Transit vectors misaligned. Exit coordinates drifted. Two cargo trains emerged thousands of kilometers off target. One struck an orbital farm lattice.
Nine thousand hectares gone in twenty seconds.
No override had been violated.
No law had been broken.
Consent had been honored.
Damage had been exported.
The outcry spread faster than any rebellion ever had.
Because no tyrant could be blamed.
Feeds filled with the same sentence:
"Their choice destroyed our world."
The farm world — Iriat Vale — demanded prosecution.
"Consent cannot authorize collateral harm," their assembly declared.
The Helix Council replied calmly:
"Risk was declared. Dependency was known. Shared infrastructure implies shared exposure."
Both were correct.
Which made the crisis lethal to legitimacy.
Custodian coordination teams arrived — not as rulers, but as arbiters. They could not reverse the decision. They could not punish without treaty trigger. They could not override retroactively.
Their role was now limited to one tool:
Legitimacy mediation.
Ansel Rho was assigned lead.
She did not sleep the first night.
The mediation chamber was larger than most war rooms.
Two hundred delegates. Twelve systems. Infrastructure unions, agricultural syndicates, transport guilds, medical coalitions.
No one shouted at first.
They argued precisely.
Which was worse.
"Consent must be bounded by external harm," said Iriat's legal chair.
"Then it is no longer consent," replied Helix Operations.
"Then it is no longer local."
"Then infrastructure cannot function."
Every statement true.
None sufficient.
Orlan observed without entering.
That restraint cost him physically.
Halvek stood beside him in the shadow gallery.
"You could intervene under interdependence doctrine," Halvek said quietly.
"Only if coercion is proven," Orlan replied.
"Was it?"
"No."
"Then legitimacy must survive this," Orlan said. "Or it isn't legitimacy."
Public sentiment fractured.
Some demanded restoration of override powers.
Others defended the Helix vote as lawful courage.
A third bloc — growing fastest — asked a harder question:
Who counts as a stakeholder when consequences travel?
No governance model had solved that cleanly.
Now everyone needed it solved immediately.
Rehan watched the mediation feeds with a tightening jaw.
"This is the edge," he said.
Kira nodded. "Consent radius."
He glanced at her.
"That's new."
"It has to be," she said. "Local choice with nonlocal cost breaks moral math."
He didn't argue.
Because she was right.
The breakthrough did not come from law.
It came from logistics.
A mid-tier transit engineer — not a delegate — submitted a technical appendix during open testimony:
Dependency maps were outdated.
Helix risk models weighted traffic volume, not consequence density. Medical and food corridors counted the same as luxury freight.
Optimization logic had been neutral.
Reality wasn't.
The room shifted.
Not toward blame.
Toward structure.
Ansel seized it.
"We are arguing legitimacy at the wrong layer," she said into the chamber.
"This is not a consent failure. It is a stakeholder definition failure."
Silence followed.
The dangerous kind — thinking silence.
She proposed a new doctrine live:
Consequence Radius Accounting
Any decision with declared risk must include weighted downstream exposure classes — food, medical, habitation, ecological — not just transit volume.
Consent must be gathered proportionally to consequence radius, not governance boundary.
Not override.
Not veto.
Expanded signature requirement.
Harder to reach.
More honest to claim.
Helix delegates resisted first.
Then recalculated.
Under the new radius map, their shutdown vote would have required seven additional system signatures.
They would not have reached threshold.
The farm loss would not have happened.
They did not apologize.
They accepted structure.
Which was more durable.
The chamber ratified the doctrine after sixteen hours.
No cheers.
Only exhaustion.
Legitimacy survived — not intact, but matured.
Orlan finally entered the floor.
Not to claim credit.
To state boundary.
"Distributed authority," he said calmly, "does not remove shared consequence."
He let the sentence stand alone.
Because nothing improved it.
Iriat Vale accepted restitution — not compensation — structured as long-horizon food security guarantees from Helix-linked systems.
Not payment.
Relationship.
The difference mattered.
Ansel closed the case file with trembling hands.
She added one private line:
Legitimacy is not agreement.It is the ability to keep deciding together after harm.
She saved it to Witnesses Without Names.
Rehan leaned back from the screen.
"That was close," Kira said.
"It will always be close," he replied.
"That's the point of not having gods."
Far away, the First Layer remained silent.
Because legitimacy cannot be stored.
Only practiced.
The crisis did not prove distributed authority was broken.
It proved it was real.
Because only real systems can survive being tested by truth.