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out.
    Or I could do what I'd wished a thousand times I'd had the guts to do before Jessie left: overcome my own inertia, face my fears, and embrace an uncertain future that might be better than the known present. . . .
    No. If I did that, I'd just be falling victim to the biggest social engineering attack in history. Believing what I wanted to believe.
    I called Thuy. "We're all in the cafeteria," she said.

    Everyone had gotten text messages from home. Friends, relatives, lovers, all with the same story. Join us, they said. Join us in a new world, a world of love and fellowship. A world without war or hunger.
    "How can the result of uniting humanity be better than humanity itself?" I said. I was the only one standing. "You know as well as I do how many assholes there are down there. If you connected them all together, it'd be a sinkhole, not a paradise."
    Thuy shook her head. "I said the same thing to my father. He said it's the connection that makes the difference. No one can hurt anyone else without hurting themselves."
    "But it could all be a lie." I wasn't even sure what I believed anymore, but I felt I still owed them the security administrator's perspective. "They control our communication channels. For all we know, they could be limited to just a few key network nodes." I reminded Thuy what she'd said about opening the firewall to a rogue AI with a clever story.
    "I can't believe some rogue AI could simulate my father so well. Or my friend Paul. Or any of the hundreds of other people who've sent us messages." She stood up and walked to where I stood at the front of the room. "Please, Jeff. We took a vote while you were coming down here." She took my hands in hers. They were so much tinier than mine, but strong and warm.
    "And the result was?"
    "We want you to open the firewall."

    Jessie's face regarded me calmly from the clipboard's screen as I opened the door. She didn't speak. I didn't either.
    I called up Network's visual control panel. I didn't trust my shaking voice enough to work through a sub. The internal lockdown was still in effect, but one touch on the Restore button would open the firewalls, unite the subnets . . . and let the future in.
    My finger trembled over the button . . . and drew back.
    "I can't do it, Jessie. Even if they want me to. How can I be sure what we've been told is true? You control every bit of information that reaches us."
    "Not every bit. Take a look outside. I'll give you a little wink." I blinked at her. "Little winks" had been a habit of ours when we were first married—tiny expressions of love over the video link, when we were both on duty and any form of nonofficial communication was prohibited. I'd almost forgotten about it.
    "I'm serious, Jeff. Go look at the Earth through the telescope. I'll give you a wink at fourteen ten exactly." I looked at my phone. It was 14:05:32.
    "Go. Look. Now. I'll be here when you get back."

    The observation room was at the top of the core, two flights up. The Earth's slim crescent floated centered in the oval window in the ceiling, as it always did—it neither rose nor set, a phenomenon I'd had some trouble understanding when I'd first arrived.
    I stepped up to the telescope in the center of the room, put my eye to the eyepiece, adjusted the focus. A tiny sliver of sunlit cloud cupped a black disk glistening with the lights of cities. I checked my phone—14:09:47. I looked back at the Earth, counted down the seconds.
    Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.
    Nothing.
    But then a slow majestic ripple of darkness passed through the twinkling lights, smoothly flickering from north to south and then south to north. It was over in a second.
    I sat down hard, leaning against the cool metal of the telescope's base, and wept.

    "How could you do that?" I said. "How could you send a rolling blackout across the whole planet just for me?"
    "We already control most of the infrastructure, Jeff. And we didn't have to black out everything, just the lights visible