Decentralized

The roof began producing its own light, a disobedience with a faint electrical tremor. The utility registered the glow as a personal subtraction, a customer loosening its tether.

Capital gathered in corners, a slow coagulate of advantage, thick, self-interested, difficult to disperse once it settled. Proximity increased its temperature; competition thinned around it.

The grid tightened each night, pursing itself around the region, drawing households inward until the town behaved as one prolonged socket.

I kept wanting a watt with a local memory, a current that stayed near its point of origin. The system wanted otherwise, preferring the certainty of a central spine.

By dusk the neighborhood brightened from one swelling nucleus. Bulbs in their fixtures held a faint tremor— something in them aware that autonomy, once tested, rarely survives the circuitry built to correct it.