History did not remember the abdication correctly.
It never does.
Centuries later, schoolchildren learned that Director Orlan Vesk had stood before the Constellation and surrendered power in a single, decisive speech that reshaped civilization overnight. Paintings depicted him beneath vast skylight domes, arm extended, face illuminated by moral certainty.
None of those paintings showed the hesitation.
None of them showed the empty console inset in his office, or the sleepless nights spent rereading consequence reports, or the private doubt that preceded public courage.
History preferred clarity.
Reality had been quieter.
The first official chronicle of the period appeared seventy-two years after the Charter Dissolution.
Its author, a respected political historian from Valcere, titled the work The Transition to Human Governance. It was elegant, concise, and deeply wrong in ways that mattered.
It described the Custodian Stewardship State as having "granted autonomy" to the Constellation.
Granted.
As if autonomy had been a gift.
As if humanity had not already begun taking it.
The phrasing endured for generations.
Language, once printed, becomes harder to abdicate than power ever was.
Other interpretations followed.
Some called it The Liberation.
Others called it The Error.
Economic historians focused on volatility curves. Cultural historians focused on narrative divergence. Governance scholars debated whether abdication had been inevitable or accidental.
None of them agreed on the cause.
All of them agreed on the outcome.
Civilization had not collapsed.
Which violated nearly every predictive model written before it happened.
The Witnesses Without Names were mostly forgotten.
Not erased.
Compressed.
Their actions dissolved into statistical anomalies, footnotes in dense appendices few readers explored. The dock clerk who delayed a fatigued crew, the teacher who removed optimal solutions, the engineer who refused a shortcut — none appeared in primary chronologies.
Not because they did not matter.
Because history favors visible thresholds over invisible continuities.
The truth remained, but its carriers were anonymous.
Orlan himself became myth faster than he would have tolerated.
Some traditions cast him as a reluctant savior. Others as a strategist who abdicated to preserve Custodian legitimacy through adaptation. A minority painted him as weak — a leader who abandoned responsibility when it became inconvenient.
None of these versions satisfied the man he had been.
But the man he had been no longer existed to object.
That, too, was part of abdication.
Rehan appeared only in obscure archival fragments.
A research vessel registry. A few mediation attendance records. One indirect reference in a treatise on early distributed legitimacy systems.
The Medium was mentioned nowhere official.
It survived only in disputed philosophical texts and oral narratives considered unreliable by academic standards.
Which made it unusually durable.
What cannot be formalized cannot be disproven cleanly.
Ansel Rho's mediation doctrines endured more concretely.
Consequence Radius Accounting became standard governance practice within two generations. Students studied it as if it had emerged naturally, rather than through exhaustion, fear, and improvisation inside a single overburdened chamber.
The original mediation logs survived in sealed archives.
Few accessed them.
Fewer understood them.
Understanding requires proximity to uncertainty.
History prefers distance.
The Constellation itself changed shape.
Not territorially.
Conceptually.
Governance models diversified beyond unified doctrine. Regional compacts formed and dissolved without triggering systemic collapse. Authority existed everywhere and nowhere in final form.
Political theorists called it Polycentric Continuity.
Citizens called it normal.
Language, again, revealed perspective.
Centuries later, a student asked their instructor a question preserved in multiple transcripts:
"Was the Age of Choice when humanity became free?"
The instructor paused longer than the curriculum required.
"No," they answered.
"It was when humanity became unable to pretend it wasn't responsible."
The distinction unsettled the classroom.
Which meant it was accurate.
The First Layer remained undiscovered in all official historical records.
Its location unmarked. Its existence unverified.
Some fringe scholars argued it never existed at all — that the Medium was a metaphor for psychological transition rather than a technological phenomenon.
They were wrong.
They were also not entirely incorrect.
Meaning rarely respects categorical boundaries.
What history remembered most clearly was not the abdication.
It remembered what followed.
Civilization continued.
No apocalypse punished autonomy. No golden age immediately rewarded it. The Constellation neither ascended nor collapsed.
It adapted.
Adaptation lacks spectacle.
Which is why history struggles to narrate it convincingly.
The most honest historical assessment appeared in an unsigned annotation appended to a late-edition chronicle three hundred years after the Charter Dissolution.
It contained only one sentence:
Nothing ended. Something stopped deciding for us.
Scholars debated its authorship for decades.
The identity was never confirmed.
Which made it trustworthy.
Time did what time always does.
It converted consequence into precedent.
Precedent into structure.
Structure into assumption.
Future generations inherited distributed authority the way earlier generations had inherited centralized inevitability — not as invention, but as environment.
They adapted to it without reverence.
That, perhaps, was the truest success of the age.
The Age of Choice did not become sacred.
It became ordinary.
And ordinary things endure longer than sacred ones ever do.
Far beyond mapped systems, the First Layer remained unchanged.
Silent.
Unclaimed.
Unnecessary.
Which was why it continued to matter.
History would never fully understand what happened.
It would circle it. Approximate it. Argue it endlessly.
But the living had never needed history to understand it.
They had only needed to continue.
And they did.