From the tallest of skyscrapers to the smallest of shopfronts and kiosks, every light in Rome blinked its way into simultaneous oblivion. The bright technicolour hue of evening vanished, and save for the headlights of cars, unaffected, which in their lengthy bonnet-to-boot queues suddenly became like luminous snakes, slithering along the paved corridors of the city, a blackness overtook all else.
There was a pause, the whole city momentarily shocked, unable to absorb the sudden change. So much had happened during the daylight; the population’s nerves had not yet recovered. But then sirens began to sound, first from one quarter then another, overlapping into an auditory cacophony. The purity of surprise led swiftly to confusion. Confusion not at one neighbourhood or quadrant of the city going dark, but the whole of Rome, from one edge to the other – black like the night itself.
No one understood. But with visceral swiftness, they remembered.
The strange prophecy that had circulated on the Internet since the river had run red in the morning churned through the memory of the city. As did the words of the small group of charismatic believers in the east of the city.
And the face of a young man, speaking into a camera after the first plague had come and gone.
‘The next shall be like it in power, as the bright places become dark in a city filled with light.’
The first plague they had experienced today had been, it appeared, predicted. Now, a whole population stood in the midst of the second.
With a deepening unease, sceptics and believers alike recalled that they’d been told there would be more.
Near the peak of one of the fabled ‘Seven Hills’ of Rome, Bartolomeo drove away from the insertion point with as much satisfaction as he had ever felt in his work and as much power as he had ever sensed in his person.
The choice of insertion point had been, by some measures, arbitrary. Once the work of hacking into the city’s power grid had been accomplished, it was possible to initiate the necessary protocols from almost any point in the city. Bartolomeo had chosen the small hub atop the Esquiline Hill for personal reasons. The view from the call box, which was normally wired to affect the connections of only a few local streets but which had been toggled by Vico and his team to affect the entire grid, allowed him to look down over Rome from a superlative height, affording him what he knew would be a direct and unrepeatable view once the switch had been flipped.
His expectation had been amply rewarded.
He’d plugged his computer into the weather-reinforced ethernet port in the small hub, and with a few keystrokes Vico’s boys had pre-recorded into a scripted macro, the system-wide shutdown had been initiated. There was just enough lag time between his initiating the script and its dramatic coming into effect for Bartolomeo to reflect on the magnitude of the work he was undertaking, and to revel in the artfulness of what he’d done.
Evidence of the machinations behind the shutdown of the city’s power grid was being, even as the thought passed through his mind, eliminated from the data recording systems that normally monitored all grid activity. The usual observational protocols that allowed for the tracking of a problem’s source, so that technicians could be sent and repairs could be made, had all been disabled by Emil’s tech boys. It was masterful work. Artistic and, as near as Bartolomeo could tell, technically flawless.
When the power grid was switched back on – and the work they had undertaken together would ensure that switch was just as sudden as its going off – there would be no way to trace the problem’s source. No single point within the city that could be isolated as its origin. Instead it would simply be the case, to all eyes and all observers, that inexplicably, unpredictably, indefensibly, Rome had gone wholly dark.
Just as they’d all been told it would.
He looked out over the city as the next millisecond ticked over on the clock, and watched with intense satisfaction as the second plague descended and took hold.