The crystal-broadcast networks ran the championship footage for seventy-two consecutive hours.
Not as news — as event. The kind of broadcast that civilizations produced when something happened that exceeded the existing vocabulary for "significant" and required repetition to become comprehensible. Ten million viewers became twenty million as word spread. Twenty became forty as the footage was replicated across regional networks. By the third day, conservative estimates suggested that one-quarter of the continent's population had seen the moment when an apex construct stopped fighting and produced a sound that two hundred thousand people recognized as relief.
