longer.blue

Echoes in the Dark The world ended on a Tuesday, not with a bang but with a flicker. At 3:17 a.m., the lights across the Eastern Interconnection went out. New York City, Washington, D.C., and 36 states plunged into darkness. Subways stalled, trapping thousands underground. Hospitals scrambled for generators that sputtered and failed. The internet vanished, servers silenced by a cascading failure no one saw coming. It began with a deepfake. A video call, convincing enough to fool a grid operator in Virginia, featured a deepfaked CEO of a major utility company. The AI-generated face, stitched from stolen social media photos and a five-second voice clip, ordered a critical substation offline for "maintenance." The operator complied, unaware they were handing the keys to Volt Typhoon, a Chinese hacking group that had spent years burrowing into America’s decentralized power grid. By dawn, a Trojan virus had infected 50 generators, triggering the domino effect Lloyd’s of London had warned about a decade earlier. The Eastern grid collapsed, and 93 million people were left in the dark. Simultaneously, GPS signals went haywire. Spoofing attacks, orchestrated by a Russian military unit known as Sandworm, made planes appear to be flying in circles, ships materialize inland, and navigation systems scream warnings of impossible altitudes. The U.S.’s 31 GPS satellites, unbacked by the robust terrestrial systems China had built for BeiDou, were overwhelmed by electronic warfare. Air traffic halted, stranding thousands mid-flight. Financial markets, dependent on GPS timing, lost billions in hours. Cell networks crumbled, leaving only silence. In the chaos, vibe hackers—amateurs armed with jailbroken AI models like FraudGPT—unleashed a torrent of polymorphic malware. Script kiddies, emboldened by point-and-click AI tools, flooded corporate and government systems with zero-day exploits. A single hacker, operating from a basement in Ohio, deployed 20 simultaneous attacks, each rewriting its code to evade detection. Banks froze, supply chains stalled, and water systems shut down, as FEMA’s worst fears came true: triage became impossible when nothing worked. Desperate voices crackled over Meshtastic radios, the only communication left. In Arkansas, Ben Meadors, a developer who’d joined the open-source project after a tornado, relayed messages to stranded survivors. In Chicago, Eric Kristoff’s Mars Society team used T-Echo radios to coordinate rescue efforts, their tiny devices hopping encrypted texts across miles. But Meshtastic’s limitations—line-of-sight signals, narrow bandwidth—meant it couldn’t scale to meet the need. In cities, buildings blocked signals; in rural areas, nodes were too few. Messages dropped, and hope faded. By week two, the world was unrecognizable. Deepfake scams proliferated, with AI-generated influencers peddling fake cryptocurrencies to desperate survivors. A retiree in New Zealand, already burned by a deepfake of his prime minister, lost everything to a new scam promising food deliveries that never came. In Europe, mayors were duped by deepfaked diplomats, sowing geopolitical mistrust. Human detection, once a bulwark against fakes, faltered as exhaustion and despair set in. Even Matt Groh’s advice to “take a few extra seconds” felt futile when every face on a screen could be a lie. The grid stayed dark. Lloyd’s $1 trillion estimate proved optimistic as food rotted, hospitals failed, and riots erupted. An information campaign, seeded by hackers, fueled unrest with deepfaked videos of leaders inciting violence. Water systems, as Craig Fugate had warned, were among the first to go, leaving millions without clean water. In Texas, the independent ERCOT grid held out briefly but fell to a targeted AI-driven attack, its vulnerabilities exposed by a 2022 study. High above, the GPS constellation blinked out, hit by anti-satellite weapons. Dana Goward’s warnings about America’s lack of resilient PNT systems echoed in the chaos below. Planes grounded, ships drifted, and global trade seized up. The U.S., lagging behind China’s fiber-optic backups, had no fallback. Caitlin Durkovich’s call for a layered PNT architecture was a distant memory, drowned out by the screams of a world unmoored. By month’s end, society had fractured. Meshtastic networks, once a beacon, were overwhelmed by panicked traffic, crashing like they had at Hamvention. Cities burned, looters roamed, and governments faltered. The savvy blackhat hacker, armed with AI, had won. The world, built on fragile digital threads, lay in ruins, its people left to whisper pleas for help into the dark, hoping someone, somewhere, was still listening.