Arthur’s hands grew cold on the keyboard. This was not a breach of the city's network. The city's network was the breach. Every smart bulb, every traffic camera, every smartphone microphone, and every digital footprint in the city was being compiled into this single, massive archive.
The download completed at 3:14 AM. The file sat on the desktop, a simple WinRAR icon labeled . Arthur, a night-shift systems administrator for the city's municipal archive, clicked extract. FOLDER LOGS.rar
: Titled Main_St_Traffic_Light_Audio . It held transcribed conversations of pedestrians waiting for the crosswalk signal downtown. Arthur’s hands grew cold on the keyboard