ZUUV: Rome. My observation began at 07:52, outside a primary school. At 08:31 the threat arrived by email. By 08:44, four hundred children stood in a field. At minute nine of the evacuation queue, the adults had produced their fourth apology. By afternoon the count stood at eleven apologies, one missing juice box, zero ministries claiming the file.
QEL-VESSIN: You count apologies. I count outcomes. Intelligence warned in advance, the schools emptied, no one was harmed. The procedure held.
ZUUV: The procedure held because individual primates improvised. Ask who coordinated and you receive a silence with a filing number. There was a plan for a single body to oversee cybersecurity; it stalled inside the Prime Minister's government, divided over which department would hold it. So the warning travelled alone, forwarded fourteen times through the apparatus, collecting pleases and thank-yous but stopping at no desk long enough to be owned.
QEL-VESSIN: I will defend the structure. A government whose departments each declined the same responsibility has not failed to coordinate. It has coordinated in reverse, unanimously. And log the ratio, colleague: thirteen minutes to move four hundred children to safety, one hundred and forty days to assign one inbox. I have watched moons renegotiate their orbits faster, and the moons held fewer meetings.
ZUUV: Confirmed at ground level. A mother at the gate told me: "They knew it was coming, we drilled anyway, and nobody is responsible. So the system works." She said it with complete serenity, the way one reports the weather.
ZUUV: On my world, once a count is published, the population adjusts to it. I returned at dusk. The children were home; the email sat in the mailbox, warm, answered by everyone, claimed by no one. I read it twice and, out of respect for the local form, apologized to it. Twelve. The twelfth is mine.
