"I bet I could shut down Manhattan's communications with a microwave oven and a YouTube tutorial," Lucy Vanderbilt said, and she said it at a party she did not want to attend, to a man she did not want to meet, because boredom is its own kind of desperation and she was desperate enough to bet the apocalypse on a joke.

Charles Warren looked at her across the crowded room, taking in the designer dress, the designer attitude, the designer emptiness in her eyes that she wore like perfume. He was wearing a t-shirt under his blazer, which was either a statement or a mistake, and he had the look of a man who had been fired from a job he didn't like for a reason he probably deserved.

"A microwave oven?" he said. "With a YouTube tutorial? Lucy, I could do it with a toaster and a LinkedIn profile."

"Challenge accepted."

They made the bet over cocktails that neither of them drank. Lucy ordered a martini and nursed it for an hour while Charles ordered a soda water and drank it in three gulps. They were both pretending to be sober and neither of them was.

The bet was stupid. It was also, Charles discovered three days later, entirely feasible. He had been fired from his Silicon Valley job for building a bot that auto-replied to all corporate emails with sarcastic comments, which made him an expert in automation and an enemy of all middle management. He knew how to hack things. He also knew that New York's power grid was held together by duct tape and prayer, which made it vulnerable in ways that a properly motivated person with too much time could exploit.

"I found something," he told Lucy over video call. "The power grid could be used to generate a localized electromagnetic pulse. It's not military-grade. It's not even close. It's the kind of thing a bored programmer with too much caffeine could figure out."

"Can you build it?"

"I can build it from scavenged parts. It'll be ugly. It'll be dangerous. It'll probably not work."

"Perfect. When do we start?"

They rented a warehouse in Brooklyn, furnished it with furniture they stole from a closing office supply store, and began construction. Charles built the device from parts he ordered online under fake names and parts he scavenged from electronics stores. Lucy provided funding, which she obtained by "borrowing" money from a hedge fund client account, and moral support, which consisted mainly of ordering takeout and making sarcastic comments about the state of modern civilization.

"It's basically a really big microwave," Charles explained, holding up a copper coil that was supposed to be the core of the electromagnetic generator.

"It's basically a really big mistake," Lucy replied.

They tested it on a Tuesday. Charles pointed the device at a window facing downtown and pressed the activation button.

Nothing happened.

"Okay," Charles said. "That wasn't supposed to happen."

"Try again."

He tried again. Still nothing. He checked the connections. He adjusted the frequency. He tried a third time.

The device activated with a sound like a dying cat. A spark jumped from the copper coil to the metal frame. Smoke rose from the capacitor bank. And through the window, they watched as every LED screen in Times Square turned a perfectly uniform, slightly embarrassing shade of pink.

Not a malfunction. Not a disruption. Just pink.

They sat in the warehouse, eating cold pizza from a box on the floor, watching news reports of the Pink Times Square Incident. The internet was having a field day. Twitter was melting down. News anchors were trying to maintain their composure while clearly fighting laughter.

Lucy laughed until she cried. Charles laughed too, but there was something else in his voice, something between relief and the dawning realization that they had just tried to start a cyberwar and failed in the most ridiculous way possible.

"So," Lucy said, wiping tears from her eyes. "Want to get brunch?"

"Only if it's somewhere with no screens."

They left the device in the warehouse, unplugged and smoking slightly, a monument to their own incompetence and the absurdity of a world where two bored New Yorkers could almost, almost, bring civilization to its knees and ended up giving Times Square a sunburn.

OTMES_CODES_TO_BE_APPENDED