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Episode 8

Dark City

On the second night of a three-continent blackout, Saigon courier-app founder Bao Tran keeps the city running on his mesh network Chạy. A gold-paid job from Gideon Ashe's man Lâm has him smuggling a crate to the Cần Giờ mangroves; inside are forty-eight new Lumen Silicon GC-7 grid controller grid controllers, the part whose failure caused the blackout, packed a week before it began. Bao hides a tracker in the crate.

Synopsis

Thirty-six hours into Seven-Day Dark, which has darkened cities on three continents, on 4 November 2032 Bao Tran rides through flooded District 8 of Ho Chi Minh City during the November king tides, carrying four hundred vials of insulin. He navigates by Chạy, the mesh app he wrote at twenty-six that passes maps phone to phone without cell towers. Bao has made it free for the crisis, set up free charging at clinics and pagodas, and linked the city to the outside world through six rooftop satellite dishes on car batteries. Hanoi, Manila, Busan and half of Europe are dark; in America votes are counted by torchlight.

He delivers the insulin to a generator-lit clinic, refuses payment, and pockets the tracker he tapes to every load to check his riders' honesty. The radio blames a solar storm, but engineers talking on Chạy say transformers and lines are fine: the grey controller box in every substation failed worldwide in the same minute, and opened units have blank memories. One notes that Saigon is ten degrees from the equator.

At midnight a job arrives through Chạy at ten times the rate, in gold: Cát Lái. Warehouse 9. Ask for Lâm. In flashback to March 2030, Gideon Ashe, an Australian ex-fund man, hired Bao to move thirty crates of chips from Cát Lái to a boat at Cần Giờ at night without paperwork. Afterwards rider Hiếu asked too loudly what was in them and lost his licence, bike and room within a month; Gideon sent his mother flowers. Bao's tracker in the thirtieth crate went via Singapore and woke for six minutes in May 2030 in Velle, Korvane, before going silent.

At the warehouse, Lâm, the former customs officer who waved those crates through, passes on Gideon's regards and asks him to take one crate of "relay hardware" to the same Cần Giờ jetty for a boat at slack water. Bao demands all the gold up front and gets it. Unwilling to carry another load blind, he rides fifty kilometres through water and mangrove, crossing by fishing boat and dodging police patrols.

Alone at the jetty, he prises open the lid: forty-eight sealed LUMEN SILICON · GC-7 GRID CONTROLLER units, the part engineers across the world are desperate for, with a packing slip dated 2032-10-25, before the blackout. Bao pushes his tracker deep into the foam and presses the nails back. A boat comes up the channel without running lights.

Timeline events

  • March 2030 — Bao Tran smuggles thirty crates of chips for Gideon Ashe from Cát Lái to Cần Giờ.
  • May 2030 — Bao's tracker wakes for six minutes in Velle, Korvane.
  • 25 October 2032 — A crate of forty-eight GC-7 grid controller controllers is packed.
  • 4 November 2032 (dark, day 2) — Bao delivers insulin by Chạy and smuggles the GC-7 crate to Cần Giờ, hiding a tracker in it.

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