I didn't panic.
That's what I told myself while my hand went cold.
"Calm." No. "Ready." Also wrong. "Waiting for the slot." Closer. I don't know if that's the same thing.
The book flickered. Spread tightened. I reached for cancel. Reflex, not decision.
"Cancel." No. "Abort." Also wrong. "Reverse intent." Closer.
Packet left the NIC.
At least I thought it did.
PoH tick doesn't care about hand temperature. Fogo's 40ms block target counting. Deterministic leader schedule rotating.
By the time I pulled the trace window up, the leader window had already rotated. I saw it at the slot boundary. One number. Then another. Two slots. Eighty milliseconds and the UI was still pretending I had a choice.
Chain didn't.
Inside Fogo's SVM runtime, the banking stage had already taken my original order and moved on. Account locks cleared like nothing happened. Deterministic inclusion path kept walking forward. No hesitation. No "are you sure."
My cancel was late enough to be polite.
"Late." No. "Queued." Also wrong. "Passed through." Closer.
I blamed the relay first. Turbine propagation. Then active zone, cross-region slop, anything. Fogo layer-1's Multi-local consensus keeps the zone tight. I know that. I've explained before.
Didn't matter tonight.
Fogo's deterministic inclusion boundary had already snapped shut for that leader. Hard line. You're inside the window or you're queued for the next one with everyone else's regrets. Slot-based execution didn't stall.
Vote stage logs scrolled. Clean timing. Tower lockout extending. Latency-bound validator eligibility held my stake weight. From the cluster's view, nothing was wrong.
From mine, the position was about to get lifted because I was staring at a green box instead of the slot.
I hit cancel again. Second packet showed up crisp in the trace. Good latency. Almost comforting.
Wrong comfort.
Perfect timing for the next slot.
The fill printed before my cancel confirmation felt real. That order had already become state. Sub-100ms confirmation window closed. Damage was earlier. Right at the tick I misread.
Packet timestamp. Twelve milliseconds after the PoH-driven clock crossed the edge I needed.
Twelve.
Not a "close one." Just the kind of miss that looks small until it costs you.
SVM scheduler did what it does. Parallel execution on Fogo ( @Fogo Official ) the Solana Virtua Machine based low latency network resolved what it had. Account locks didn't care that my intent changed mid-thought. Banking stage had already frozen the version of me that clicked first.
Firedancer stack steady. Turbine clean. Vote pipeline healthy. Everything looked normal in the logs.
Slot N+1 opened. 40ms block target counting. My finger still hovering.
I don't know if I'm earlier, or Fogo's deterministic leader schedule moved, or if those are different things.