They called it a Black Start—a cold spark in the dark, a last gasp to coax life back into the machine. A contingency, they said. A plan B. If the grid fell, if the lights went out not just in one city, but in all of them, there were systems—small, stubborn engines waiting in the hills, humming with the promise of resurrection. They would rouse the turbines, reawaken the substations, send pulses of power crawling back across the dead wires.
But no one asked what would happen if the Black Start didn’t work.
When the last diesel coughed and the batteries ran dry, the silence was not immediate. It crept in, slow and wide, like fog over a field. At first it was novelty. Candlelight dinners. Stars, where before there were none. But novelty has a short half-life in the absence of refrigeration, clean water, and digital clocks.
They had forgotten how loud the dark could be. How quickly the civilized mind collapses without the illusion of control. The hum of electricity had always been a lullaby—one they’d never realized they depended on, until it stopped. And when the phones died and the elevators froze mid-shaft, when the heaters turned cold and the food spoiled in its sealed, hygienic wrapping, it became clear: the machine had been keeping them alive.
They were never built for the raw world. Their skin too thin, their teeth too dull, their lives too bound to comfort. And in the absence of power—real power, the invisible web that stitched together their days—they were nothing more than animals in synthetic clothing, blinking in the dark, waiting for a sound that would never come.
A start that would never spark.
