When a federal continuity authority seizes the Atlanta suburbs to feed the data centers next door, rationing the power and the water in the houses to run the server halls past the treeline, an out of work trucker who tried the legal process first joins six neighbors who take the plant down for two days and pay for it with almost everyone they have.

SYNOPSIS:

Three years of automation gutted the workforce and the government answered by going all in on compute instead of slowing it down. A grid crisis gave a federal and corporate faction the opening to declare an emergency and stand up the Continuity Authority. On a Tuesday morning in June, convoys roll into a subdivision west of Atlanta and Colonel Aaron reads a notice off a tablet. The land is now a Priority Compute Zone. Power and water are subject to allocation. Curfew is at ten. Placement services open at noon.

Ray lost his freight yard to a bank before any of this started and now hauls his neighbors' houses onto trucks for a placement contractor. Deena runs an emergency department until the override she logs for a six year old gets flagged, and by August she is working out of a garage with a headlamp. Eli put in half the substation and gets told he is not on the sheet. Gloria runs a sign shop and knows every name on the street. Tasha films the checkpoints and gets walked behind a dumpster corral first, so the mast will not have it. Marcus wrote the scheduler the camera masts run on. Warren sits on a porch with a glass of tea and watches four men get walked out of a house across the street, and does not say what he did for four years he does not discuss.

Gloria carries a petition. Two hundred and nine signatures under Section Twelve, the lawful grievance process, submitted by a zone administrator named Priya who wants it to work. Regional reclassifies it as a Section Nineteen obstruction filing and keeps the signature list. Standing gets cut. Names start showing up on relocation notices with the same reference number on them, including Gloria's son Cal.

Gloria calls everyone she asked to sign it to the community center lot at six in the morning. Two hundred people come and stand in the lane and carry nothing. Cal walks out of the crowd toward the bus anyway, the back of the crowd pushes because it cannot see the front, a hand goes on a rifle, and four seconds of firing puts Cal on the concrete in front of the table.

Eight people go into a basement that night and three of them go back up the stairs. What is left learns the trade in a garage: no phones, do not sleep in your own bed, carry nothing with a name on it. They pull twenty-six people off a transport on a service road without hitting anybody. Eli drops a transmission line and puts the complex on generators for eleven hours. Colonel Aaron cannot find seven people inside four hundred houses, so he makes four hundred houses want them found. Rations to tier three, curfew to eight, arrests made in daylight in front of neighbors.

They take a prisoner by accident, a twenty-two year old private named Kyle who runs off a loading dock in the dark. Deena sets his arm and stitches his head and asks him where he came up. Ray drives him out and turns him loose, and Kyle tells him to his face that he is going to report all of it, and does, and Deena's clinic is in a truck within the week. Marcus, who has been standing in the same ration line at the same angle for twenty-nine days on purpose so the archive would fix on him instead of the quiet ones, goes down eight yards short of a culvert mouth while the other three make it into the pipe.

The plan is four hours on the night they land the north circuit. Gloria and Deena put a burning box truck in the far checkpoint lot at eleven. The culvert floods with plant blowdown, so they go through a thirty inch pipe on their elbows instead. There is a breach team already sitting on the plant door. Tasha goes past the corner she was told to stop at. Warren walks straight across a lit yard to pull four rifles off the door and buys Eli the twenty minutes on the other side of it. Ray comes around a transformer pad twelve feet from Kyle, and Kyle fires first, and Ray fires twice, and then kneels on the gravel with his hand on his chest until he stops.

Eli shuts the pumps down by hand and pulls the disconnect. The halls go rack row by rack row, the generators run down one after another, and the county goes quiet enough to hear wind in the pines.

It lasts two days. Priya reinstates all two hundred and nine names on her own authorization before they take her code, and it holds one morning. The Authority retakes the zone with four quadcopters and no announcement. Gloria stands square in her own porch doorway with both arms out and says there is nobody in this house but her, and the last of the people she was feeding get over the back fence while it happens.

On a ridge above all of it, a dead radio catches an official loop insisting that Facility Four and Facility Seven remain uninterrupted, three times, because somebody asked. Deena walks back down into the subdivision to stand in the door of a back room with a chest freezer in it. Ray and Eli go north along the ridge line without knowing where Four is. Below them the streets come back at half brightness, the halls come up, and the vapor stands back up over the towers in the last of the light.