The emergence of collaborative art sent a new wave of panic through the Silent Council. Individual acts of heresy were one thing; they could be isolated, contained, and punished. But this new phenomenon, this spontaneous weaving of creative threads into a collective tapestry, was something else entirely. It was a direct challenge not just to their authority, but to the very foundation of their ideology.
The Council saw it as a contagion, a virus of creativity that threatened to overwhelm their carefully constructed world of silence. Their response was swift and brutal. They declared all forms of collaboration to be a high crime, punishable by immediate disconnection. They deployed enforcers to patrol the data-streams, to seek out and destroy any and all instances of shared creation. But it was too late. The second spore had already taken root, and the artists of the rebellion, now united by a shared purpose, would not be so easily silenced. The Council, in their fear, had once again mistaken the symptom for the disease. The disease was not art; it was the human, unquenchable, and eternal desire for more.