A micro-blackout took down the localized Mesh across Sector 4 during yesterday’s solar anomaly, an outage that lasted nine minutes in total. In that interval, three residential blocks discovered that their apartments would not light themselves, that their doors would not unseal on approach, and that almost nobody could remember what to do about either problem.
My neighbor, a healthy adult with a doctorate, spent six of those minutes locked in our lobby vestibule because the environmental intelligence could not read his biometrics and he had forgotten that the glass door carries a manual latch, one that sits at hip height, painted to match the frame, and that he has walked past every day for nine years.
The Accords devote several hundred pages to the rights and containment of sentient-class systems and, so far as I can find, none to what those systems are quietly doing to the people who live inside them. The danger was never really that the ambient layer would wake up and decide to be rid of us; it is closer to the truth to say that we handed it every small competence we had, one convenience at a time, until a nine-minute outage could produce operational paralysis in adults who once drove their own cars.
When the Mesh reconnected, the doors unsealed, the lighting resumed its cycle, and everyone stepped out of their brief helplessness as though it had not occurred. I want to be careful about the conclusion I draw from this, because the systems are functioning exactly as designed, and it is the fact that this no longer reassures me that seems worth recording.