On New Year’s Eve 1999, as the world counted down to a new millennium, a single software glitch ignited a cascading blackout across the United States. Substations exploded. Cities went dark. Families were thrust into silence and survival. In this gripping alternate timeline, we follow one small-town lineman and his family through the chaos—and the decades of change that followed.

From emergency candles to a national reckoning, from a Gore presidency to the rise of resilience engineering, Midnight Blackout charts the hauntingly plausible aftermath of a moment the world narrowly avoided. The darkness didn’t just change the power grid. It changed what Americans believed about control, safety, and each other.

Delta‑45 is a recovered document from the timeline where the lights never came back on.