The internet died at 6:47 on a Tuesday morning, eleven minutes before Daniel Mercer's standup call, and it took him exactly four minutes to go from annoyed to furious.
He was forty-two years old, a cybersecurity analyst who worked remotely for a logistics firm out of Chicago, and his entire livelihood ran through a fiber line that came down a pole on Sycamore Lane, across his front yard, and into a gray box on the side of his house. No internet meant no VPN. No VPN meant no standup. No standup, two quarters in a row of "needs improvement" on his reliability score, meant a conversation with his manager that Daniel did not want to have.
He rebooted the router. He rebooted the ONT β the little white fiber box the installer had mounted in his laundry room three years ago, back when his wife was still alive and the house still felt full. He unplugged everything, counted to thirty the way the support forums said to, plugged it all back in, and watched the lights blink red, red, red.
"Come on," he muttered. "Come on."
His phone buzzed. A Slack message from his manager, Priya: Standup in 10. You good?
Daniel typed back with his thumbs: Internet's down. Trying to fix. Might be late.
Use your hotspot, she replied.
He stared at the message. His hotspot. Of course. He had a phone with unlimited data sitting right there in his pocket, and he'd spent four minutes doing the unplug-count-to-thirty dance like it was 2009. He thumbed the hotspot on, connected the laptop, and joined the standup eleven seconds late, apologizing to a grid of faces.
The meeting lasted twenty-two minutes. Daniel said his piece β the intrusion detection rules were updated, the false positive rate was down fourteen percent β and nobody asked about the four minutes. Afterward he sat in his home office, the converted spare bedroom with the window facing the street, and looked at the dead router with its accusing red lights.
He called the ISP. The hold music was a saxophone loop that sounded like it was being played inside a tin can. After nine minutes a representative named Kevin told him there was no outage reported in his area and offered to send a technician on Thursday.
"It's Tuesday," Daniel said.
"Thursday is the earliest available window," Kevin said.
Daniel hung up, put on his shoes, and went outside to look at the box on the side of his house. He was a cybersecurity analyst, not a network engineer, but he'd been in IT long enough to know that when the ISP says there's no outage, the problem is usually between the pole and the house. Squirrels. Storms. A branch rubbing through insulation. He'd check the junction box, and if it was something simple, he'd fix it himself rather than wait for Thursday.
The gray box was mounted at chest height beside the garage. Daniel flipped the latch and opened it.
The cables inside had been cut.
Not chewed. Not frayed. Cut β cleanly, deliberately, with what looked like a sharp blade. The fiber line, the copper phone line he didn't even use anymore, even the old coaxial cable from a previous provider, all severed about two inches from where they entered the conduit. The ends were fresh. Whoever had done it had done it recently, and they'd done it on purpose.
Daniel stood there staring at the severed cables, and a cold, specific anger settled over him. This wasn't weather. This wasn't squirrels. Someone had walked up to his house with a cutting tool and deliberately killed his connection to the outside world.
"Morning, Daniel."
He turned. Frank Delaney stood on the other side of the chain-link fence that divided their properties, holding a chipped blue coffee mug, wearing the same olive work jacket he'd worn every day for the six years Daniel had lived next door. Frank was seventy-one, retired from thirty-four years with the phone company, widowed, and β as far as Daniel was concerned β the most stubborn human being on the planet.
They were feuding. That was the word Daniel's daughter Emma used, laughing, when she called from college: "How's the feud with Mr. Delaney?" It had started over Frank's oak tree, whose roots were cracking Daniel's driveway, and escalated through a fence dispute, a disagreement about a shared drainage ditch, and an incident involving Frank's leaf blower and Daniel's car that neither of them discussed anymore. They communicated in nods. Terse nods.
"Morning," Daniel said flatly.
Frank sipped his coffee. "Box looks rough."
Daniel stared at him. "Did you see anything? Anyone around my house this morning?"
Frank looked at the severed cables. Then he looked at Daniel. "I did it."
The words landed like a slap. Daniel actually took a step back.