Blackout Means Justice

The lights went out at 9:17 p.m.
Not dimmed. Not flickered. Gone.

Jack Mercer was in a bus station in Amarillo, Texas, counting the exits out of habit, when the overhead fluorescents died with a sound like a throat being cut. Conversations snapped off mid-word. The digital departure board blinked once, then turned into a dead black mirror reflecting confusion.

Someone cursed. Someone else laughed nervously.

Mercer didn’t laugh.

He felt it instead. A pressure change in the air. A silence that was too clean.

Worldwide blackouts didn’t start in bus stations. They started somewhere higher.

Outside, the city went dark block by block, like a slow-motion execution. Streetlights. Traffic signals. The gas station across the road. All dead. Cars rolled to stops, horns blaring, then choking off as batteries failed and drivers realized this wasn’t local.

Mercer stepped outside and looked up.

The stars were sharp tonight. Too sharp. No aircraft lights. No blinking satellites cutting lazy arcs across the sky.

“Not weather,” he muttered.

A man in a WindCore Energy jacket ran past him, phone held uselessly to his ear. Mercer noticed the logo immediately. Blue spiral. Corporate optimism printed on cheap fabric.

WindCore. The name stuck.

Mercer followed him.

* * * * * * * * * *

Three hours later, Mercer was hitching a ride in a cattle truck headed north, because WindCore’s biggest satellite control relay in the central U.S. sat on the edge of Kansas, hidden behind wind farms and tax breaks. The driver didn’t ask questions. Nobody was asking questions tonight. They were too busy panicking.

Radios were dead. Cell towers were dead. Backup generators worked for hospitals and military bases, but even those were running blind. No GPS. No time sync. No satellites.

The world had been shoved back fifty years in one push.

And somebody had planned it.

Mercer jumped off the truck two miles from the perimeter fence and walked the rest. The facility was a low concrete sprawl, half buried, pretending to be maintenance offices for turbines. The fence was high. The cameras were dark.

That told him everything.

Inside job.

He climbed the fence anyway. Habit again.

A guard met him on the other side with a flashlight and a trembling voice. “Hey! You can’t...”

Mercer took the flashlight, twisted the guard’s wrist, and put him to sleep with a clean punch. He dragged the man into the shadows and took his keycard.

The door opened.

Backup lights glowed red in the corridor. Emergency power. Internal systems only.

People were running now. Engineers. Executives. Security with guns and no coordination.

Mercer moved against the flow.

He found the control room on the third floor. Glass walls. Big screens. All showing the same thing: telemetry logs frozen mid-stream.

A woman in a tailored suit stood in the center, calm as a statue. Silver hair. No panic. That narrowed the list fast.

She turned when Mercer stepped in.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said.

“No,” Mercer agreed. “I’m supposed to be somewhere quieter.”

She smiled. “Then you should leave. The world is ending outside.”

“No,” he said. “It’s being edited.”

Her smile thinned. “You have no idea what you’re interfering with.”

“Try me.”

She studied him like a spreadsheet. “Dr. Evelyn Krane. WindCore Energy. This facility is private property.”

“Jack Mercer,” he said. “And you killed the lights.”

“We ran an experiment,” Krane said. “A controlled satellite realignment. Temporary orbital shadowing. An accident.”

Mercer walked closer. The screens reflected in the glass behind her. “Worldwide accidents don’t come with pre-written incident reports.”

Her eyes flicked for half a second.

That was enough.

“You blacked out the planet to erase your tracks,” Mercer said. “Data centers fried. Off-world backups blinded. No satellites to see what you dumped in the oceans or buried under deserts.”

Krane folded her arms. “Energy transitions require sacrifice.”

“Funny,” Mercer said. “It’s always other people.”

A gunshot shattered the glass wall.

Mercer dropped, rolled, came up behind a console. Security rushed in. Three men. Automatic weapons. Nervous fingers.

Mercer waited until the first one leaned too far. Then he stood, threw a chair, fired a pistol he’d taken off the guard downstairs. One down. Two more shots. Two more bodies.

Silence again.

Krane hadn’t moved.

“You think this ends here?” she asked. “The blackout is global. Governments will beg us to fix it. We’ll be heroes by morning.”

Mercer walked up to the main console. Typed commands from memory. He’d seen systems like this before. Different logos. Same arrogance.

“What are you doing?” Krane said.

“Rolling back your experiment,” he said. “And broadcasting your real logs.”

“You can’t,” she said. “The satellites are blind.”

Mercer nodded. “To each other.”

He hit Enter.

A secondary screen lit up. A low-orbit military relay WindCore hadn’t accounted for. Old. Cold War era. Shielded. Forgotten.

Krane’s face drained of colour.

“You piggybacked on it,” Mercer said. “Dumped your waste under cover of darkness. Figured no one would ever see.”

The room shook as power surged.

Lights flickered back on, not just here, but everywhere. The world gasped awake.

Krane lunged for him with a knife she’d had taped under her sleeve. Mercer caught her wrist, twisted, disarmed her, and pinned her against the console.

Sirens wailed now. Real ones. Government ones.

“You don’t understand,” she hissed. “Energy runs the world.”

Mercer leaned in. “So does daylight.”

He cuffed her and walked out.

* * * * * * * * * *

By dawn, the blackout was over.

So was WindCore.

The story broke fast. Too fast to bury. Satellite logs. Video. Environmental crimes spanning a decade. Congressional hearings scheduled before lunch.

Mercer watched it all from a diner off Route 66, drinking bad coffee and reading a newspaper printed overnight, like the old days.

The waitress asked, “You passing through?”

“Always,” he said.

Outside, the lights stayed on.

Mercer paid, stood, and walked back into the morning, leaving the world a little brighter and a lot angrier behind him.

The end