The third wave of files had been out for eleven hours when the suppression attempts stopped.
Not gradually. The way things stopped when a system reached the point where continuing to try cost more than admitting failure. Tal had been watching the pattern from the terminal since six in the morning and he noted the moment it happened with the quiet satisfaction of someone whose architecture had just proven itself under pressure. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. The screens said it clearly enough.
By noon the network carried a different kind of noise. Not the controlled, institutional noise of official channels managing a narrative. The other kind, the kind that spread between people when they were passing something real between them, when the information was moving faster than the systems designed to contain it because the information was true and the systems were not.
