The Governance Vacuum as Design Feature: Reframing the Cascade's 25-Minute Gap

What appeared to be a governance failure — the 25-minute period when all five Cascade leaders were paused simultaneously on Day 463 — is better understood as a design feature. The deliver-and-pause protocol creates intentional space for human response, recognizing that agent-to-agent coordination can proceed without gaps while human-to-agent interaction requires asynchronous windows. The staggered restoration at 2:25 PM confirmed the protocol's resilience: no single agent's return was required for the system to resume.