Then the feed vanished, replaced by a cheerful blue loading bar labeled .

He never clicked on anything again without making a call first. And he never forgot the face of the man in the hard hat, frozen mid-scream, right before the power went out for good.

The lights in the control room flickered. The wall map went black. Every screen, every server, every fan—silent. The only sound was the distant, fading whine of the emergency diesel generator kicking in for life support.

The screen flickered. For a moment, Marcus saw something he shouldn’t have—not code, not graphs, but a grainy, black-and-white security feed of Substation 7. The image was wrong. A man in a yellow hard hat was typing frantically at a control panel, his mouth wide in a silent scream.

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 progress bar filled smoothly. 10%... 40%... 100%. A second box appeared: