The Wound
Bottleneck concentration
also: Vale's finding · the concentration law
The cost of traversal is not spread evenly across the sky — it concentrates on the routes that carry the most traffic.
In full
The official model held that the cost was uniform, slow and distributed: a flat tax on the whole endowment, safe by averaging, millennia away. The finding is that it is nothing of the kind. Damage concentrates nonlinearly along heavily-used routes, so the dark stars are not a distant prospect — they are the first failures, dying in decades. Earth dims slowly not because it is quiet (it is the busiest place in the network) but because its traffic runs on thousands of mature, redundant routes, while a frontier hangs on a handful of narrow corridors where all the stress lands. Damage follows bottlenecks, not totals. The comforting arithmetic was a lie of averaging.
Key facts
- Damage follows bottlenecks, not totals.
- The dark stars are the first failures, not a distant forecast.
- Earth is safe by redundancy, not by restraint.
- Proving it requires authenticated records from a place and time — which is why it takes a ship, and a people who kept their own sky-records.