Cascading Resonance

The Network Collapse did not announce itself.

At 14:00 on a Wednesday in the year 2147, three hundred and twelve data towers on six continents simultaneously suffered what the news called 'cascading resonance failures'. By 14:07, the Global Medical Infrastructure was offline. By 14:15, every autonomous transit system on the planet had stopped.

By Thursday morning, the casualty estimates started at eight hundred million and kept climbing.

Dax Morrow was in a server room in the Kobe Free Port when it happened, trying to extract a client's illegally backed-up memories from a corporate mainframe. He had a four-minute window before the security sweep.

The sweep never came.

He pulled the memory chip, stared at the dead screens around him, and understood with the particular clarity of someone who had spent fifteen years breaking systems: this was not an accident.

Accidents had fingerprints. They left noise.

This was clean.