The central administrative segment's assessment revealed, in its first thirty minutes of work, why the original architects had placed it fifth in the sequence of six.
Not because it was the most technically demanding — the northern industrial segment had required more sustained geometric precision. Not because it was the deepest — the southeastern residential channels had demanded the highest volume output over the longest sustained period. The central administrative segment occupied a specific functional position in the full system that made the order of configuration not a matter of practicality but of necessity.
It was the regulatory core.
The point through which all five other segments connected. The channel network that, when properly configured, would allow the five individual segment configurations to communicate with each other and produce the unified dampening field the full schematic had always been designed to create.
This was not another segment.
