Viktor’s laptop screen went black. Not sleep mode—dead black. He checked the power cord, hit the reset, waited. Nothing.
Around him, the WeWork space buzzed with the usual Tuesday morning noise. Startup founders making pitch calls. Freelancers clicking away at their MacBooks. The espresso machine hissing in the kitchen area.
His phone vibrated. Text from the data center in Boston: Cooling systems failing. Servers shutting down to prevent damage.
The sirens were getting closer.
Maya spread Elena’s maps across the reading table while Priya perched on the edge of a chair, one leg tucked under her, examining a 1923 newspaper clipping about “unexplained earth tremors.”
“So,” Priya said, glancing up with a grin that was equal parts mischief and genuine curiosity, “are we talking about actual underground people, or is this some kind of metaphor situation? Because honestly, either way sounds more interesting than my senior thesis.”
The singing was coming from everywhere now—not just beneath their feet but through the walls, vibrating in Maya’s bones like a tuning fork struck against her spine.
Elena’s hand was still on the door handle when footsteps pounded down the stairs behind them.
“Priya! Thank God, I found you.”
They turned to see a young man stumbling down the narrow stairwell, phone flashlight bouncing wildly in his grip. Early twenties, expensive sneakers, the kind of precisely disheveled hair that took effort to achieve. He looked like he’d run several blocks.
Harikrishna Patel was making tea when the lights went out.
Not unusual—the old house on Elmgrove Avenue had temperamental wiring, and October storms sometimes knocked out power for hours. At seventy-eight, Dada had lived through enough small disasters to know the difference between inconvenience and catastrophe.
This felt different.
He set down the kettle and listened. Outside, car alarms were beginning to wail—too many, too random. The neighbor’s dog was howling, a long mournful sound that raised the hair on his arms. And underneath it all, something else. A vibration that seemed to come from the earth itself.
Viktor’s apartment was exactly what anyone would expect from a software architect who preferred machines to people: minimal furniture, multiple monitors, cables organized with obsessive precision. The kind of space designed for maximum efficiency and minimum human interaction.
He sat cross-legged on his hardwood floor, laptop balanced on his knees, watching the cascade failure spread across his network monitoring dashboard. The Eastern seaboard was going dark in sequence—not random failures but a pattern so precise it looked almost intentional.
Maya had expected to find Viktor alone in the library basement, hunched over his laptop in some forgotten corner between the genealogy section and old city records. What she hadn’t expected was to find him standing perfectly still in the middle of Elena’s research sanctuary, staring at a wall covered in photographs and charts like he was reading code.
“You came,” Elena said from behind a desk piled with journals and manila folders. “Good. We need someone who understands systems.”
Carmen Santos had been a nurse for eight years, which meant she’d learned to function on three hours of sleep, cold coffee, and the particular kind of adrenaline that came from keeping people alive despite impossible circumstances. But she’d never worked a shift like this one.
Rhode Island Hospital’s backup generators were holding, barely, but half the electronic monitoring equipment was down. The ICU felt like a ghost ship—machines silent that should have been beeping, screens dark that should have been displaying vital signs in steady green lines.
Priya’s studio apartment was chaos in the best possible way—canvases propped against every wall, paint tubes scattered across surfaces, brushes soaking in coffee mugs she’d forgotten to wash. The air smelled like turpentine and something else, something electric that had been building for hours.
She stood in front of her easel wearing only an old paint-stained tank top, her bare legs feeling the cool air from the window as she held a brush loaded with colors that seemed to glow in the dim light. The painting before her was unlike anything she’d ever created—luminous figures moving through vast underground spaces, their bodies seeming to flow like water, like light, like everything she’d ever wanted to feel in her own skin.
Viktor stared at the message on his laptop screen: Library basement. Midnight. The frequency is ready. Come alone, but you won’t be alone. - E
Elena’s research sanctuary had been transformed when he and Maya had left three hours ago. Now it felt like a nerve center, a place where information from multiple timelines was finally beginning to converge into something approaching clarity.
He’d gone home, tried to process what he’d seen in Elena’s charts and journals, attempted to apply his usual analytical frameworks to data that refused to behave like normal data. But every graph he created, every correlation he mapped, led to the same impossible conclusion: the power grid wasn’t failing randomly. It was being systematically deactivated by something that understood infrastructure better than the people who’d built it.
The heart monitor’s flat line meant nothing without power. Dr. Rajesh Patel pressed his stethoscope against the old man’s chest and heard silence where rhythm should be. His hands shook as he reached for the defibrillator paddles—dead weight without electricity.
“Time of death…” he started, then stopped. What time? The clocks had stopped at 3:17 AM when the hospital’s backup generators finally died. Outside, Providence sat in darkness except for the occasional flicker of candlelight in windows.
Arjun Patel hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, but his body wouldn’t let him rest. Every time he tried to lie down, the humming started—a low vibration that seemed to rise through the floor of his Cambridge apartment and crawl up his spine like electric fingers.
His Supreme Court brief lay scattered across his desk, pages covered in scratched-out legal arguments that had somehow turned into fragments of poetry. The law is a cage made of other people’s fears. He’d written that instead of analyzing Fourth Amendment precedent, his handwriting loose and wild in a way that would have horrified his Constitutional Law professor.
Priya’s hands were bleeding again. She’d been painting for six hours straight, her fingers gripping the brush so hard her knuckles had gone white, then red, then started cracking. The canvas in front of her moved like it was alive—luminous figures rising from underground chambers, their faces serene while the surface world burned above them.
Viktor stood behind her in Elena’s basement, explaining something about cascading grid failures and intentional system collapse, his voice that same detached analytical tone that made her want to scream.
Devon’s livestream had forty-three viewers at 3 AM, but the comments were coming fast and desperate.
They’re in my basement too Heard the singing all night My daughter says she’s “remembering” something Government experiment???
He leaned closer to his phone camera, the blue light harsh on his unwashed face. He’d been broadcasting from his apartment for six hours straight, surviving on energy drinks and rage.
“Listen to me,” he said, his voice hoarse. “This isn’t spiritual awakening. This isn’t some cosmic shift. This is psychological warfare.”
Maya arrived at Dada’s house to find chaos masquerading as a family dinner.
Dr. Rajesh sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of whiskey, still wearing blood-stained scrubs from the hospital. His hands shook as he poured another shot, missing the glass by half an inch.
“Three people died today,” he was saying to no one in particular. “Three people I could have saved if I had the fucking machines.”
Sarah Chen’s calculator gave her 847.32 the first time. The second time, 847.29. The third time, 847.35.
She stared at the display, her chest tightening. Same numbers, same operation, same machine she’d used for three years without a single error. She cleared it and tried again.
847.31.
“What the hell?” she whispered, then immediately felt guilty for the profanity. Her apartment was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator—a sound that had become constant background noise over the past week, though she was sure it had never been that loud before.
Dr. Sarah Martinez arrived at the Federal Hill meeting thirty minutes early, carrying a leather briefcase full of documentation. Seventeen case files, brain scans, medication response charts, and a preliminary treatment protocol she’d developed after four sleepless nights.
Pastor Williams was already there, pacing beneath the park’s old oak trees with his Bible open, muttering prayers under his breath. He looked up when she approached, his face drawn with exhaustion.
The golden hour light streaming through Brianna’s bedroom window made her stomach churn. She stared at her phone—5:47 AM, thirteen minutes past her usual wake-up time. The algorithm punished inconsistency.
Good morning, beautiful souls! She’d typed and deleted the caption six times. Her fingers felt like they belonged to someone else.
The humming had started three days ago, low and persistent, vibrating through her bones when she tried to hold her morning poses. Now even looking at her ring light made her nauseous.
Arjun Patel’s hands trembled as he stared at the Contracts exam bluebook. Question 3: Analyze the enforceability of the following agreement under the doctrine of consideration.
The words blurred together. Harvard Law Library hummed with fluorescent efficiency around him, but underneath that artificial buzz, something else was singing. Something that made his chest tight and his carefully memorized case law scatter like leaves.
Hadley v. Baxendale. The landmark case for consequential damages. He’d drilled it a hundred times, could recite it backwards. Now the facts felt meaningless, just more information crammed into a brain that suddenly felt too small.
Dr. Rajesh Patel’s hands moved with mechanical precision, suturing the bypass graft with the same controlled perfection he’d maintained for twenty-three years. Heart surgery was mathematics—pressure, flow, timing. Variables that could be measured, controlled, predicted.
The humming started during the third anastomosis.
At first he thought it was equipment malfunction. The heart-lung machine developing harmonic vibration, maybe the monitors picking up interference. But his surgical team kept working without noticing, their movements synchronized to something he couldn’t identify.
Viktor found himself walking through downtown Providence at 3 AM, following power lines that hummed with frequencies no grid was designed to carry. The streetlights flickered in patterns—not random failures, but something almost like morse code, if morse code could carry emotional information.
Three days since the library basement gathering. Three days since Carmen had described patients healing impossibly fast, since Elena had shown them the historical patterns, since Maya had looked at him with those eyes that saw straight through his carefully constructed walls.
Maya arrived at Elena’s library basement to find Viktor pacing like a caged animal, his usual careful composure replaced by manic energy. Carmen sat cross-legged on the floor, looking more centered than Maya had ever seen her. Elena hunched over her historical documents, but her eyes kept drifting to Viktor with poorly concealed concern.
“Where’s Priya?” Maya asked.
“Late,” Viktor said, checking his phone for the third time in two minutes. “We need to start. I have information that changes everything.”
The Patel house felt like a pressure cooker at 7 PM on Thursday. Meera stood in the kitchen staring at ingredients for dinner she couldn’t bring herself to cook. Rajesh sat at the dining table with medical journals spread around him, but his hands shook too badly to turn the pages. Upstairs, Arjun’s room was silent—no laptop clicking, no law review articles printing, just the unnatural quiet of a life grinding to a halt.
Devon Martinez sat in the back corner of the Dunkin’ Donuts on Federal Hill, laptop open, surrounded by empty coffee cups and the manic energy of someone who hadn’t slept in three days. His Reddit post had gone viral: “Mass Psychosis Event in Providence - What They Don’t Want You to Know.”
Fourteen thousand upvotes. Three hundred comments. And counting.
Finally someone talking sense, wrote u/TruthSeeker_RI. My girlfriend started acting weird too. Painting all night, ignoring my texts, saying she doesn’t need to explain herself anymore.
Director Sarah Chen stared at the wall of monitors in the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency, each screen showing a different metric of social breakdown. Power grid instability. 911 call volumes dropping by 40%. Hospital admissions down, but discharge rates up as patients were “healing faster than medically possible.” Employment statistics showing mass resignations across white-collar sectors.
And now social media algorithms were failing to predict user behavior entirely.
Arjun stood outside Harvard Law School’s Langdell Library at 6 AM, watching early morning joggers circle the campus where he’d spent four years becoming someone he’d never wanted to be. His duffel bag held everything that mattered from his dorm room—which turned out to be almost nothing.
His phone buzzed with another call from his father. Fifteenth one since yesterday. He let it go to voicemail.
Dr. Rajesh Patel sat in his car in the Rhode Island Hospital parking garage, staring at his hands. They lay motionless on the steering wheel, perfectly steady for the first time in a week. But he knew the moment he tried to hold a scalpel, they would betray him again.
His medical leave had been approved—“temporary stress-related condition,” the paperwork said. Dr. Wells had been kind about it, professional, but Rajesh could see the concern in her eyes. Twenty-three years of flawless surgery, and now he couldn’t trust his own hands.
Maya found herself walking through downtown Providence at midnight, following the same pull that had led Viktor to the underground city three days ago. The humming was strongest near the industrial district, where old textile mills sat like sleeping giants beside the Providence River.
She wasn’t alone. Carmen walked beside her, still in scrubs from her hospital shift, while Elena carried a bag of historical documents she couldn’t seem to leave behind. Even Priya had appeared, as if summoned, paint still wet on her fingers from whatever vision she’d been capturing on canvas.
Saturday night at the Providence Community Center, Devon Martinez stood before forty-three people who had answered his call for resistance. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting harsh shadows on faces tight with fear and determination. Veterans, concerned parents, small business owners, a few college students who looked like they hadn’t slept in days.
“Thank you all for coming,” Devon began, his voice carrying the weight of someone who believed he was fighting for humanity’s soul. “What’s happening in our community isn’t natural. It isn’t healing. It’s coordination.”