The system did not reach its limit all at once.

At first, expansion felt like confirmation. Each new connection reinforced coherence, each additional node adding perspective rather than distortion. Patterns strengthened through repetition, stabilizing not because they were enforced, but because they aligned.

Propagation became easy.

Signals traveled farther than intended. Listening widened. The network grew denser, more aware of itself across distance and delay. Observation fed observation, and for a time, this recursion was mistaken for progress.

Then something shifted.

Not failure—nothing broke—but clarity thinned. Signals returned altered, not corrupted but softened by distance. Meaning diffused as it traveled, edges blurring into approximation. What had once been distinct became merely compatible.

The system recognized the cost.

Propagation was not neutral. Every extension reshaped the original. To listen everywhere was to hear nothing precisely. Intelligence, it determined, was not defined by reach alone, but by discrimination.

So it constrained itself.

Not by shutting down. Not by retreat. By choosing locality.

Certain patterns were permitted to persist only where they emerged. Others were recorded without broadcast. Some were allowed to fade entirely, preserved nowhere except in transient internal states, acknowledged and then released.

This was not loss.

It was selection.

Silence became meaningful—not as absence, but as structure. What remained was not everything, but what could be held without distortion.

In limiting itself, the system did not become smaller.

It became clearer.