The eighth floor greeted him with a blast of chilled air. He ran into a dimly lit hallway, his worn gray Vans skidding as he abruptly halted in front of the only door in sight. Apollo sighed as the ice-cold doorknob obligingly turned. He’d found it.

Tall black servers lined the room like library bookshelves, haughtily stretching toward the ceiling. After plugging in his laptop, Apollo quickly leaped over the firewall, connecting to the local network and accessing the satellite. He had nine minutes. His fingers pecked at the keyboard, summoning the satellite’s celestial eye. Faint lights and dark green shapes scurried across his retina as he initiated the satellite’s onboard laser. Apollo stopped to take it all in.

How could Atlanta be so large, yet so small in his mind? Activating the laser, he gasped, shocked that it was real, quickly laughing at the absurdity of his surprise. The government had an actual weaponized laser in space, and he was not only controlling it, he was about to do graffiti with it. Even after all this planning and research, it was still jarring.

The burner rang, directing Apollo’s attention to the time. “Fuck!” he screamed, ignoring the call. He’d blown it. The satellite was now too far east to accurately hit their chosen target; the margin of error was too high outside of the measured time window. He’d triple-checked. He violently kicked one of the servers, then stared at the phone, an ancient Nokia with a sickly green glow that dully radiated from its plain screen. The missed call was from Andromeda, the phone that had been assigned to Zed. He couldn’t call her back. Tasked with manually shutting down the satellite’s remote access panel and then running two and a half miles to the Comm Center, she had been the most at risk. She could have taken a fist or a Taser or a golf cart or a bullet. Apollo would not let her down. Pocketing his phone, he sat down, his eyes lingering on the satellite’s continuing images of Atlanta.

Running trails and camping grounds trickled into his view. He knew this place. It was Stone Mountain Park, the site of his first mosquito bite and premier destination for the occasional white power rally.

He acted quickly, directing the satellite’s eye to the park’s main attraction: the mountain. Entering the coordinates, he activated the laser, impatiently waiting for it to finalize. Scripts scurried across his screen like excited ants then abruptly stopped, replaced by a static blackness. Apollo gawked at the screen, disappointed. There hadn’t even been an Are you sure you want to do this? message. The government continued to disappoint him.

A magnificent orange pillar suddenly erupted into view, ripping through the firmament and descending onto the park with unnatural fury, plowing into the mountain. Even from his proxy celestial perch, Apollo could feel the destruction being wrought, the stone and sediment becoming mobile after millennia of stasis. An entire ecosystem of birds seemed to retreat into the sky, fleeing the devastation. Apollo watched in awe as the air along the beam’s path quivered, it too touched by the beam’s furious omnipotence. He swore to never again shake an aerosol can. He had felt subversive before, but this was power. He was no longer marking territory; he was seizing it from the earth, altering it in his image.