It started as a blip.
A line of servers in a data center upstate tripped a breaker.
TerraNova’s monitoring system caught it, rerouted load. A few milliseconds of delay, nothing more.
No one noticed.
Then a transformer feeding a substation in Queens, old and poorly maintained, chose that night to give up the ghost.
Lights flickered.
Elevators shuddered.
People swore at their stoves.
New York was used to this.
The grid, held together with duct tape and spit long before TerraNova existed, hiccupped all the time.
But now, those hiccups were riding on top of a digital nervous system.
A system that, for all its brilliance, still couldn’t see every possible failure in the dark tangle of the city’s past.
At 9:12 p.m. on a wet, windy Thursday, somewhere in the mesh of old copper and new fiber, something misfired.
For a few seconds, nothing happened.
Then, block by block, borough by borough, pieces of the city went dark.
Not everywhere.
Not all at once.
Enough.
Olivia was at home, laptop open, editing an interview with a software engineer who’d quit TerraNova to join an open-source transit project.
The lights flickered.
Her screen went black.
“Fuck,” she muttered, tapping the keys. “Come on, not now.”
Her overhead bulb glowed erratically, then steadied.
Her laptop rebooted.
Her phone buzzed.
Emergency alert.
**Power fluctuations reported in multiple boroughs. Stay indoors. Avoid elevators. Check on vulnerable neighbors.**
Her blood went cold.
She grabbed her phone, thumbed a text.
> You seeing this? she sent Jake.
No response.
She tried again.
> Jake??
Still nothing.
Her heart hammered.
She yanked on her coat, grabbed her keys, and bolted.
On the stairs, other residents leaned out of doorways.
“Yo, power out on two,” someone yelled.
“Three’s fine,” someone else replied. “What the hell?”
Outside, the streetlights on her block flickered like dying fireflies. Shops that had been bright a minute ago were dark. Cars crept more slowly, headlights cutting shaky beams through the damp night.
She looked up.
The building across the street—old, brick, chronically under-invested—was almost entirely black.
Her stomach lurched.
She crossed the street in three strides, took the steps two at a time, and hammered on Mrs. Ortiz’s door on the third floor.
No answer.
She jimmied the handle.
Unlocked.
Inside, the apartment was dim, lit only by the faint glow from the hallway.
“Señora Ortiz?” she called. “It’s Olivia.”
A shuffle.
A thin voice from the back room.
“In here, mija.”
She pushed through.
The older woman sat on the edge of her bed, a flashlight in one hand, the other holding onto the bedframe for balance.
“You okay?” Olivia asked, relief flooding her.
“Scared,” Mrs. Ortiz admitted. “These old buildings… when the lights go, the heat goes. In summer, the fans. I don’t like… the quiet.”
“I know,” Olivia said. “I’m going to check on a few more folks. You have your phone? Fully charged?”
Mrs. Ortiz lifted it, screen on.
“Bueno,” Olivia said. “Call me if you need anything. Or Ma.”
She did a lap of the floor.
Checked on the couple with the newborn. On the man with the oxygen machine—still working, battery holding. On the teenage boy glued to his phone, earphones in, oblivious.
Outside again, she called her mother.
“You have power?” she asked without preamble.
“For now,” her mother said. “Lights flicker. We lit candles. Your uncle is making jokes about the ‘romantic ambiance.’”
“Keep them lit,” Olivia said. “And if the heat goes, call me.”
“Where are you?” her mother demanded.
“Checking on people,” Olivia said. “I’ll come by after.”
“You should go to your boyfriend,” her mother said bluntly. “He is probably buried in wires.”
“He’s not buried in—” Olivia started, then stopped.
He *was* buried in wires.
In dashboards.
In crisis.
Her phone buzzed again mid-call.
Incoming: *Ben*.
She switched.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Shit’s breaking,” Ben said without greeting. “Hart just called. They’re saying ‘widespread but patchy outages.’ City’s pointing at an ‘equipment failure in Queens.’ Leah’s already on Twitter yelling at them. We need… something.”
“I’m in it,” she said, scanning the street. “Power’s weird on my block. Some buildings, yes. Some, no. People are… freaked.”
“Can you get quotes?” he asked. “Residents. Bodega owners. Anyone cursing?”
“Always,” she said. “You?”
“I’m heading to city hall,” he said. “Reyes is demanding they hit the kill switch on the latest TerraNova update. Hart’s saying, ‘It’s not that simple.’”
Her pulse jumped.
“The kill switch,” she said. “They might actually use it.”
“That’s what it’s for, right?” Ben said.
Right.
She hung up.
Texted Leah.
> You good?
> Never better, Leah replied. > Tell your boyfriend if he blames this on “legacy infrastructure” one more time, I’m going to chain myself to his servers.
Olivia almost smiled.
Then her phone finally buzzed with the name she’d been waiting for.
*Jake*.
She answered before the first ring finished.
“What’s happening?” she demanded.
“Rolling failures,” he said, voice clipped, background noise a chaotic mix of voices and alarms. “Old substation blew, sent a surge through a part of the grid that was already… brittle. Our models are… catching up.”
“Catching up?” she echoed. “That’s not comforting, Jake.”
“I know,” he said. “We built for certain failure modes. This… is hitting three at once.”
“Is this… you?” she asked.
Silence.
Then, quietly, “Partly.”
Her stomach dropped.
“Explain,” she said.
“The grid’s old,” he said. “You know that. TerraNova’s layered on top. We optimize flows. We predict load. Tonight, a transformer went. Then another. Our system tried to rebalance, but it did it… too aggressively in one segment. Overcompensated. Tripped safeguards elsewhere. It’s… messy.”
“And the kill switch?” she asked. “Reyes is yelling.”
“I know,” he said. “We’re in the war room with city hall now. Oversight board’s dialed in. They’re debating whether to rollback the last update. If they do, we lose some of the new protections in the poor neighborhoods—air quality alerts, bus prioritization. If they don’t, we keep… this risk.”
Her head spun.
“You sound… calm,” she said.
“I’m not,” he said. “But if I let myself… panic, I can’t… see the pattern.”
“I’m on the street,” she said. “People are scared.”
“I know,” he said. “I lived in that fear. I grew up with candles for outages that never made the news. That’s why I started this. Nights like this are… my nightmare.”
“Can I… do anything?” she asked, hating how helpless she sounded.
“Write,” he said without hesitation. “Watch. Listen. If we miss something in the data, I need to know what it feels like on the ground.”
She took a breath.
“Okay,” she said. “And you…?”
“I’ll call,” he said. “When I can.”
The line crackled.
“Jake,” she said. “Don’t… fuck this up.”
He laughed, short and humorless.
“I’ll do my best,” he said. “No martyrdom. Remember?”
“Remember,” she said.
They hung up.
She squared her shoulders.
Walked.
On one block, kids whooped at the sudden darkness, waving flashlights around like lightsabers.
On another, an older woman clutched her rosary, muttering prayers in Spanish.
A bodega owner dragged a generator out from the back, cursing. “Every damn time,” he grumbled. “They say ‘smart grid’ and I still lose my milk.”
Olivia took notes.
Quotations. Reactions. Angles.
She called her mother again.
“Still have power,” her mother said. “We made tea. The radio says… the ‘smart system’ is doing ‘controlled brownouts.’ I do not like the sound of that.”
“Me neither,” Olivia said.
She texted Leah.
> If they argue about kill switch, text me.
> Already screaming, Leah replied. > Hart’s sweating through his shirt. > Reyes might actually throw a shoe.
Olivia smiled grimly.
Her phone buzzed again.
This time: *Unknown.*
She frowned.
“Martinez,” she answered.
Static.
Then a distorted voice.
“You like your lights smart, bitch?” it sneered. “Tell your boyfriend to stop playing God or we’ll pull the plug *for* him.”
Her heart lurched.
“Who is this?” she demanded.
Laughter.
Click.
Her hand shook.
She stared at the phone, rage and fear tangling.
She forwarded the call log to Sam with a short note: *Add to harassment file. Blocked.*
Then she kept walking.
She wasn’t going to let some coward with a spoofing app scare her back into her apartment.
The city was out here.
She would be too.
***
At TerraNova, the war room lived up to its name.
A wall of screens showed maps—electric load, outage areas, weather radar. Graphs pulsed. Lines spiked.
Engineers sat at a long table, laptops open, fingers flying.
On the far end, a cluster of city officials—Hart, two deputies, a representative from ConEd—huddled with members of the oversight board dialing in via video.
Reyes’s face glared down from a monitor.
“Mr. Morrison,” she said, voice icy. “Your system contributed to this. You admitted as much. Now we have a tool designed to rein you in. We should use it.”
“We designed the kill switch for catastrophic model failure,” Jake said, forcing his voice to stay even. “This is not that.”
“What do you call thousands of people losing power?” Reyes shot back. “Fun?”
“This is… the original grid failing,” he said. “TerraNova is… mismanaging the response. That’s serious. But if you roll back the last update in the middle of this, you’re pulling away structural supports while the building’s already swaying.”
“Pretty metaphor,” Leah’s voice came thinly through a speaker. “Tell that to the grandma stuck in an elevator.”
“We have elevator override protocols,” Aisha cut in. “We’ve been triaging those. The kill switch will not get her out faster. It may, however, turn off the sensors we’re using to monitor CO levels in her building’s boiler room.”
“Enough,” Hart said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “We need a decision.”
“The oversight board makes the call,” Sharp’s voice came from another window. “By law.”
“We recommend *partial* rollback,” Aisha said. “Targeted. Take certain routes offline. Let the legacy systems handle non-critical areas. Keep TerraNova live where it’s doing more good than harm.”
“Playing God again,” muttered one of the union reps under his breath.
Jake heard it.
Swallowed his retort.
He looked at the maps.
At the red clusters.
At the flickering dots in South Side.
At the patch of old apartments near his mother’s building.
His throat tightened.
He made a call.
“Roll back the update in South Side,” he said quietly. “Let the old system carry it. It’s used to that shit. We’ll triage manually.”
Aisha’s head snapped up.
“Jake—” she started.
“Do it,” he said. “If we take an extra half-second to respond there, people will curse, not die. The grid segments serving those blocks are more stable on legacy. We tested that. Remember?”
She hesitated.
Then nodded.
“Route C-19 to legacy,” she told her team. “Flag for manual monitoring. Now.”
One of the engineers typed fast.
“Done,” she said. “Rerouting. Load dropping.”
On the map, a small section of South Side shifted from TerraNova blue to dull gray.
Old system.
Old problems.
Less immediate risk.
Jake’s chest ached.
He felt like he’d just cut off a limb he’d spent a decade trying to graft.
“We’ll… get it back,” Aisha murmured under her breath. “Once this storm passes.”
He nodded, jaw tight.
“Focus on Queens for now,” he said. “That’s where the damage will cascade.”
As they worked, Leah’s voice floated through again.
“Consider this your warning shot, Morrison,” she said. “You told us to watch you. We are. Nights like this are the test. Not your launch parties.”
He nodded at the screen.
“I know,” he said. “And I… appreciate it.”
He meant it.
Even if a part of him wanted to throw the nearest chair.
***
In South Side, lights flickered.
Then steadied.
Olivia saw it happen.
One moment, her block was a patchwork. The next, the glow smoothed.
Not perfect. But… stable.
Her phone buzzed.
*Ma*: lights went out for one second. then back. i yelled at the radio. it did not listen.
She smiled.
> That was them, she wrote back. > Fixing.
> Check on Mrs. Ortiz again?
*Ma*: already did. she tried to give me soup. i told her we have enough.
On a bench near the community center, bundled against the wind, Olivia opened a new note.
**Night of the Smart Blackout – Field Notes**
- Bodega owner: “Every time they say ‘upgrade,’ I lose inventory.” - Kid with flashlight sword: “This is like Star Wars but with less Wi-Fi.” - Elderly woman: “The dark feels different now. Like someone’s playing with a switch.”
She typed a line and underlined it.
> Accountability isn’t just about who gets credit when the lights stay on. It’s about who people blame when they don’t—and whether that blame matches reality.
Her phone buzzed again.
*Jake*.
> South Side on legacy for now, he wrote. > Safer. Less elegant. > Feels like… failure.
She stared.
> Feels like… triage, she wrote back. > That’s not failure. > That’s… humility.
> Trying to learn that, he replied.
> You safe?
She glanced around.
Empty street. Distant siren. Faint glow from windows.
> Yeah, she wrote. > On a bench. Taking notes.
> You?
> In a box full of screens, he sent. > All humming.
> I’d rather be on the bench.
> You’d freeze, she wrote.
> Worth it, he replied.
Her chest warmed.
> Fix your shit, she sent. > Then we’ll split a bench blanket.
> Deal, he wrote.
She closed her eyes briefly.
Listened.
Somewhere, a generator coughed to life.
Somewhere else, someone cheered as their lights came back.
The city’s heartbeat, irregular but stubborn.
Like hers.
Like his.
Fault lines shifted.
Held.
At least for now.
She opened her eyes.
And wrote.
The story wasn’t over.
Not for the grid.
Not for the city.
Not for them.
But as long as the lights—literal and metaphorical—flickered in the dark, she’d be there.
Pen in hand.
Heart open.
Watching.
And, slowly, letting herself be seen too.