Alfian did not attend the meeting.
That was the first deviation.
The invitation had arrived the night before—brief, neutral, addressed to several departments. No agenda. No priority marker. Just a room, a time, and the quiet expectation that those invited would appear.
Alfian declined without explanation.
By morning, the meeting proceeded anyway.
The room filled slowly. Chairs were pulled out. Laptops opened. Water was poured into identical glasses. Conversations stayed shallow, orbiting safe topics. No one mentioned Alfian's absence, though everyone noticed it.
At the head of the table, the facilitator adjusted his notes.
"Let's begin," he said. "We'll keep this efficient."
Efficiency had become the default language for discomfort.
The discussion moved quickly at first—updates, summaries, procedural alignments. Then, inevitably, it reached the gap.
"So," someone said carefully, "how are we handling the stalled review?"
No one answered immediately.
"Well," another voice offered, "it's being monitored."
"By whom?"
A pause.
"By the system," the facilitator said.
The phrase settled in the room—vague enough to end the sentence, insufficient enough to satisfy anyone.
"But there are downstream effects," a woman from logistics said. "Teams are waiting. We need guidance."
"Yes," the facilitator replied. "We're aware."
"And?"
"And we're aligning."
Across the table, a man who had been quiet until now cleared his throat.
"Forgive me," he said, "but alignment implies direction. Where is it coming from?"
Silence followed.
Not because the question was forbidden.
Because the answer was missing.
"We're exploring options," the facilitator said at last.
"Which ones?"
The facilitator glanced down at his notes, then back up. "Distributed discretion."
Someone shifted in their chair.
"So," the woman from logistics said slowly, "we're each making judgment calls?"
"Yes," the facilitator replied. "Within defined parameters."
"What parameters?" another asked.
The facilitator hesitated. "Existing ones."
The room grew quiet again.
No one liked that answer.
After the meeting, people did not linger. Conversations broke off mid-sentence. Small groups formed and dissolved quickly, as if proximity itself had become risky.
Word traveled—not as information, but as impression.
Alfian hadn't been there.
And somehow, that mattered more than if he had spoken.
In another part of the building, a junior manager stared at her screen, cursor blinking impatiently. The request before her was simple enough, but it intersected with the same invisible boundary everyone had learned to avoid.
She glanced at the clock.
Then at the empty space in her inbox where guidance should have been.
She approved it.
It took twelve minutes for the repercussions to appear.
A message arrived from compliance.
"Please confirm the basis for this decision."
She typed a response, deleted it, typed again.
"Aligned with current understanding."
The reply came faster this time.
"Clarify."
Her hands hovered over the keyboard. There was nothing to clarify. No instruction she could cite. No authority she could reference.
She escalated it.
The escalation bounced.
Not rejected.
Not accepted.
Deferred.
By midday, similar stories surfaced across the organization.
Small decisions made in good faith began to tangle. Approvals collided. Teams waited on one another, each expecting direction that never came. No single issue was large enough to justify alarm.
Together, they slowed everything.
People began to notice.
At lunch, the conversations changed.
"They approved it without checking."
"Who said they could?"
"I thought we weren't supposed to touch those anymore."
"Since when?"
No one had an answer.
In the afternoon, an internal message circulated.
"Please exercise caution when interpreting silence."
It wasn't signed.
It didn't help.
In the absence of Alfian's presence, the space he had created widened.
Not intentionally.
Not maliciously.
Simply because no one knew how to occupy it properly.
Late in the day, Raka stood at the window of a conference room, watching the city below. He hadn't attended the morning meeting either, but he'd heard enough.
"They're improvising," someone said behind him.
"Yes," Raka replied. "Poorly."
"They're blaming each other."
"Of course."
"Should we intervene?"
Raka turned. "With what?"
"With explanation."
Raka shook his head. "Explanation requires authority."
"And we don't have it?"
Raka smiled thinly. "Not the kind that fills silence."
That evening, a senior director requested a briefing.
Not about Alfian.
About delay metrics.
The numbers were modest. Acceptable, even. But the trend line had changed. Where decisions once flowed, they now hesitated.
"What caused this?" the director asked.
No one answered.
Because the cause wasn't an action.
It was an absence that had been mistaken for permission.
By the time Alfian returned to the building the next morning, he would find nothing overtly wrong. No crisis declared. No blame assigned.
But something had shifted beyond his reach.
The space he had created was no longer his alone.
Others had stepped into it—without understanding its shape, its limits, or its cost.
And the system, confronted with imitation without restraint, would soon do what systems always did.
It would correct.
Not gently.