by Evan Brown
(image c/o engineeringdotfbdotcom)
Right-wing and left-wing podcasters warned the revolution would start in big cities like New York, San Francisco, or L.A. What the world learned from their daily hot takes and nightly news broadcasts was just how out of touch the opinion-makers really were. They were wrong—about where and when and who, and most importantly, why.
It started just outside a decrepit strip mall in Jackson, Tennessee. Back in the 1970s, my dad told me it was a great place to shop and eat. I can still see him listing off all the places that disappeared, one for each gnarled arthritic finger: a Walden’s Bookstore, a K-Mart, a shoe store, and at the center, Robert Morris Cafeteria. He went there every Friday, ordering either liver and onions or trout amandine.
It was also next to the People’s Protective Building—the name of a regional insurance company before they all got swallowed up. Dad raged about everything being swallowed up. He no longer wanted to live in a place where technocrats and kleptocrats pushed global over local and sold his memories back to him as Boomer nostalgia bait on Facebook. He resented his past being warped, the erosion of simple traditions, and the feeling of being forced to live in a world he no longer recognized.
He wasn’t the only one who felt this way.
When he found out his old folks’ home was being bought out by a developer planning to turn it into an AI data center, Dad’s anger reached its apex. I suspected something was wrong when he called me late one evening. Instead of ranting, he spoke deliberately, almost obliquely.
“Your mom tried to raise you right. Did the best she could.”
“Best you guys did was tell the latchkey kid to be home when the lights came on.”
He chuckled. “True. But only because we trusted you to do the right thing. You didn’t need your hand held.”
“That sounds like a justification, but I won’t argue the point.”
“Appreciate that,” he said. “But I have to tell you something more important. And you’re not going to understand it now.”
“Is everything okay?”
“It hasn’t been okay for years.” I could hear him slow his breathing. “But it will be. Because you will be the one to fix it.”
“Me?”
“You and your generation.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence, Dad, but it’s getting late. Why don’t you tell me more about this tomorrow?”
“Oh. I forgot. The senior center has an outing planned. A day trip to Graceland. Come by Wednesday.”
The next morning, around eleven, I got a call from the police.
Fed up with being shunted aside and now forced to move, the residents decided the best course of action was a quiet protest in the form of a mass suicide. Dad was the lead organizer, handing out pills raided from the on-site pharmacy.
When it was his turn, he turned a gun on himself. He didn’t leave a note, but he didn’t need to.
The developers murmured condolences and continued with their plans. That final straw is what led me to start The People’s Protective, a name known only to a select few.
It began with a quiet conversation in an overwhelmed funeral home. A woman my age, who shared a similar experience with her mother. A cryptic, urgent phone call the night before.
“We need to do something,” she told me.
I nodded and put a finger to my lips. Too many people. Too many phones.
We met later in a park I’d scoped out earlier as having no cameras. I brought an extra baseball cap to hide her face, but she came prepared and brought her brother as well.
We met every weekend after that, our numbers growing steadily. If anyone noticed, it would have looked like a group of Gen Xers having cookouts under a pavilion or tossing around a football. But no one noticed us.
The first real test came when we recruited a burly man from Mississippi. He owned sixty acres of pine and red clay, already dotted with seven rough cabins he’d built for hunting weekends that never came. We drove down one humid Saturday, avoiding names, phones left at home. He listened in silence as we explained about the data center, the grid strain, and the way our parents’ world was being paved over for servers no one wanted.
He nodded once and handed me a key to the gate. “I always figured something like this was coming. Might as well have a place to ride it out.”
From there, word spread quietly—through nods at funerals, glances in hardware stores, a single burner-phone call at a time. We were four hundred strong by June. We never used names, social media, or encrypted chats. Just skills: hackers who could map the grid’s weak points, lock pickers for quiet entry, truckers who knew back roads, electricians like me who understood how power flows and how it can be made to stop.
The compound gained a hidden arsenal, ATVs, and a half dozen RVs. Fencing went up under the guise of hog-hunting improvements. I wired the perimeter with motion lights that could be flipped to dark in seconds.
We discussed writing a Unabomber-style manifesto but didn’t see the point. Once we did what we did, the right people would understand. Besides, someone would just ask an LLM to summarize it without reading, because reading is hard now.
I normally wear a blue jumpsuit with a lightning bug on it at work. But on that Wednesday—our zero hour—I stole a safety vest, hard hat, and gloves from a construction site and stood outside a substation transformer feeding the new data center. No one saw me. People never look up from their screens, not even while driving.
The unit was one of those old oil-filled beasts—high voltage in, stepped down for local lines. I knew exactly where the radiator fins were thinnest. A few quick cuts with insulated shears, a puncture at the base to start the leak, then a timed incendiary pack pressed against the casing. Nothing explosive. Just enough heat to ignite the oil once pressure built.
I was back in the truck in under fifteen minutes. I ditched it outside Harbor Freight, where my dad’s cafeteria used to be, and hopped into a car without plates.
Nothing happened right away. We wanted the data center fully online first—full load, no margin for error. When the transformer finally failed, cascading overloads would ripple outward, taking backups with it.
On July 2nd, I was fishing early at Bay Springs Lake when half the grid went down. No electricity. No air traffic. No internet. No AI.
The screams and panic didn’t faze me. I kept casting and reeling in bass until I had two dozen. There was no law that said you had to make amandine with trout.
Besides, we were used to being left to our own devices.
Evan Brown is a writer, musician and creative director. He is the author of several books including two novels and a dystopian cookbook. He publishes flash fiction at Match Fiction and releases music under the name Fault Tolerant. Follow him on X @faulttolerant.