The wireless station at Korven relay transmitted its first commercial message on a Forgeday morning in Year 520, and the message was a grain price.
Instead of a military communiqué, divine pronouncement, or intelligence, it was a grain price from the eastern provinces. It was sent by a commercial operator who had paid the transmission fee and waited in a queue behind three other commercial operators, all of whom were also sending grain prices, because grain prices moved faster than carts and carts moved faster than barges and the wireless moved faster than all of them and the commercial operators had understood this before the military had, which was a pattern Zephyr had observed before and filed under a category he had not named.
