Marcus rubbed his eyes and glanced at the screen. A single dialog box hovered over his remote desktop connection to the Hill Valley Power Grid’s auxiliary server.
The notification pinged softly, a polite green chime against the grey static of the late shift.
Re-routing load capacity. Estimated time to critical failure: 00:04:12 touchup.exe download
"Shut down the servers!" he yelled. "Pull the network cables!"
Then the backup systems blinked to life, one by one. The grid map reappeared, fragile and fragmented. Power was returning to the hospitals. The water plant was back online. Substation 7 was a dead zone on the map—its readouts gone, its lines cold. Marcus rubbed his eyes and glanced at the screen
He stood up, knocking over his cold coffee. Through the glass wall of his office, he could see the main control room. The other three night operators were all staring at their own screens, faces pale in the cyan glow. Their phones were dead too.
For ten seconds, there was nothing but darkness and the smell of ozone. Re-routing load capacity
He clicked .
A new dialog box appeared on every screen in the room.
The progress bar filled smoothly. 10%... 40%... 100%. A second box appeared:
Marcus hesitated. Protocol said to verify with a human on-site. But it was 2:00 AM. The on-site engineer, Old Pete, was probably asleep in the breakroom again, snoring under a threadbare blanket.