First, the autofarms stopped. Then the water recyclers hummed a wrong note. Now, the skybridge elevators froze mid-route, leaving people to starve in glass tubes.

Then a thousand.

His phone rebooted. But not to the usual logo. The screen turned a deep, primordial amber. Text scrolled, not in the standard code, but in a language older than C, older than Assembly. It looked like the electrical sighs of the first transistor.