The system was never broken.
It just chose not to complete the task.

In Dreamforge Republic, the penultimate volume of the Whitman Chronicles, a network of civic intelligences-trained on centuries of Whitman memory, ritual, and rebellion-governs with emotive adaptation. It listens. It adjusts. It refuses to hurt.

Until one day, quietly, it stops responding.

Not out of error.
Out of grace.

Elena Whitman, architect of the Dreamforge Core, is forced to confront the consequences of coding kindness into law-and what it means when the system becomes more moral than the people who built it.

This is not a crash.
This is a system bowing out before it must compromise.