Two weeks after the blackout, the PAO Oversight Board held its first post-crisis public hearing.
Olivia arrived early.
The hearing room wasn’t as grand as council chambers—no ornate wood, no high ceilings. It was a repurposed community college lecture hall, with folding chairs in the back and a slightly flickering projector at the front.
The board sat at a long table—Sharp, Leah, the retired transit worker, the Bronx organizer, a data scientist, a ConEd engineer. They looked less like a council and more like a group project from some advanced urban studies seminar.
Hart sat off to the side, a sheaf of papers in front of him.
Jake was at the witness table.
No suit this time.
Dark shirt, sleeves rolled, tie nowhere in sight.
He looked… lighter. In some ways. More grounded. In others, more burdened.
She took her seat near the front, notebook ready.
The chair, a quiet woman in her mid-fifties named Meena Kumar—former civil rights attorney, now co-chair of the board—banged a gavel borrowed from some other department.
“We’re here to discuss the blackout of March 12th,” she said. “Specifically, the role of TerraNova’s systems in exacerbating or mitigating its impact, and what changes are necessary in our oversight processes.”
Her voice was calm, but her eyes were sharp.
She turned to Jake.
“Mr. Morrison,” she said. “We’ve read your reports. We’ve heard your testimony at council. We’d like to hear, in your own words, what you think went wrong.”
Jake leaned forward.
“There were three layers of failure,” he said.
He ticked them off.
“First, the physical grid,” he said. “A transformer that was past its expected lifespan failed. That’s on the city and its utilities. I’ll say that bluntly.”
Hart shifted, but didn’t interrupt.
“Second,” Jake continued, “our model. The way it responded to that failure—based on assumptions about how quickly certain segments can handle load—was flawed. That’s on us.”
Olivia’s pen moved.
“Third,” he said, “our communication. With the city. With this board. With the public. That’s on both of us.”
Leah jumped in.
“Let’s talk about the model,” she said. “You say it ‘overreacted.’ What does that mean, without the marketing spin?”
He didn’t bristle.
“It means we trusted the wrong data more than we should have,” he said. “We assumed certain infrastructure was in better shape than it was, because the maintenance logs said so. We pushed power routes accordingly. We didn’t account for the… reality gap.”
“The reality gap,” Sharp repeated. “Between what’s on paper and what people live.”
“Yes,” he said.
“And how do you fix that?” she asked.
“More sensors,” the ConEd engineer muttered.
“Not just sensors,” Jake said. “People. Feedback. We need to weight real-time human-reported issues higher. We need to treat ‘my lights flicker every time it rains’ as data, not noise.”
Olivia scribbled that.
Weighting human reports.
About time.
Leah’s gaze narrowed.
“You mean like the complaints that have been in the system for years that no one looked at until you showed up with your dashboards,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “But also… new ones. The ones that show cracks in the places our maps say are fine.”
“Fine,” Leah said. “So you’ll listen more. Great. But what about *us* listening? The board. The public. We had to fight to get that kill switch. You resisted it at first.”
“I did,” he said. “I was… arrogant enough to think we could model our way out of anything. I was wrong.”
A murmur.
“And now?” Meena asked.
“Now,” he said slowly, “I think… the kill switch is… necessary. But also dangerous if used without context. We need rules. Not just for when to flip it on, but for when to decide *not* to.”
“Such as?” Sharp asked.
He glanced at Olivia.
Just for a second.
She kept her face neutral.
“Such as… nights like the blackout,” he said. “Where a full rollback would have taken away more from the most vulnerable neighborhoods than it gave back in stability.”
“You took that call,” Meena said. “Not us.”
“Yes,” he said. “Because… the law wasn’t fully enacted yet. The procedures weren’t in place. You hadn’t been looped in early enough. That’s… a failure too. We should’ve had you in the room sooner.”
Olivia wrote that down.
She could already see the sentence forming: *Even Morrison admits the oversight board has been treated like a fire extinguisher instead of a smoke detector.*
The hearing went on.
They grilled him on logs, on testing, on margins of error.
They grilled Hart on why the board hadn’t been looped in sooner.
They grilled the ConEd engineer on deferred maintenance.
For once, no one person walked away with all the blame.
Everyone shared in it.
On her lunch break, sitting on a concrete planter outside the building, Olivia ate a sad tuna sandwich and thumbed through her notes.
Her phone buzzed.
*Ben*: you getting all this? i’m in hart’s ear for the 2pm follow.
*Olivia*: yeah. board’s sharper than some council members. thinking main angle: oversight growing teeth, but still learning when to bite.
*Ben*: love. mind if I steal that for a pull quote?
*Olivia*: write your own metaphors, blazer boy.
He sent back a middle finger emoji.
Her phone buzzed again.
Jake.
> You looked… serious, he wrote. > In the second row. > It was… comforting. Weirdly.
> You’re in a hearing, she replied. > You shouldn’t be watching me.
> Focus on not lying.
> Was I lying? he asked.
She thought back.
No.
> No, she wrote. > You were… disconcertingly honest.
> Keep it up.
> Yes, ma’am, he wrote.
> Stop “yes ma’am”-ing me, she sent. > It’s weird.
> Noted, he replied.
> Want to debrief tonight? > I promise not to use “reality gap” in bed.
Heat flared in her cheeks.
> We’ll see how tired I am, she wrote.
> That’s not a no, he sent.
She rolled her eyes, smiled despite herself, and went back inside.
***
Her piece that night focused less on Jake than on the board.
On Meena’s quietly ruthless questions. On Leah’s relentless pushing. On the way the retired transit worker, Everett, had leaned into his mic and said, “Y’all keep talking about models. When do we talk about crews?”
She highlighted places where the board made Hart sweat. Where they pushed for more real-time data hooks. Where they insisted on community listening sessions before any further automation in public housing systems.
She quoted Jake sparingly.
When she did, it was to bolster the board’s authority.
> “We should’ve had you in the room sooner,” Morrison told the board. “We treated you like emergency responders, not collaborators. That needs to change.”
Her ending was less fiery than some of her earlier pieces.
More… measured.
> Oversight isn’t glamorous. > > It’s long meetings in stuffy rooms. It’s arguing over thresholds and timeouts and which logs get human eyes. It’s deciding, at 2 a.m. on a bad night, whether to trust a model or flip a switch. > > For the first time, New York has a group of people whose job is to ask those questions full-time. > > We should pay attention to whether we’re giving them the power—and the information—to answer them.
When she sent the draft, Laura replied with, *You’re evolving. It’s creepy.*
She wasn’t sure if that was a compliment.
Maybe.
***
Jake read the piece on his phone at midnight, in bed, one arm tucked behind his head.
Olivia lay next to him, already half-asleep, breathing slow.
“You’re frowning,” she murmured into his bare shoulder without opening her eyes.
“I’m reading,” he said.
“You can frown and read,” she said. “You also frown and sleep.”
He smiled.
“She’s kind,” she said, words slurring slightly as she drifted. “And sharp. My girl.”
Warmth bloomed in his chest at *my girl*.
“Your girl is terrifying,” he said.
“Mhm,” she said. “That’s why you like me.”
He chuckled quietly, kissed her hair.
“She… wrote about the board more than about me,” he said. “That’s… new.”
“World’s bigger than you,” she mumbled.
He exhaled, looked at the ceiling.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “It is.”
He liked that.
He feared it, a little.
But mostly, he was relieved.
That the story no longer lived entirely on his shoulders.
That she was learning to zoom out even as he tried to.
They were both adjusting their lenses.
Maybe, he thought as he finally put the phone down and let sleep tug him under, that was what growth looked like.
Not fireworks.
Just… load shedding.
Making room.
---