The city went dark without a single siren. No storm. No explosion.

Just silence — and then nothing worked. St. Paul’s digital heart stopped beating,

and almost nobody outside Minnesota even noticed. No national outcry. No wall-to-wall coverage. J

For a few hours, St. Paul became a terrifying preview of America’s most fragile secret:

our cities don’t run on roads and wires anymore — they run on code. When that code dies, everything else follows.

The Wi-Fi goes first, but then it’s payroll systems, emergency communications,

public records, utilities, even the basic trust that tomorrow will look like yesterday.

A governor signing an emergency order for cyber troops would have sounded like science fiction ten years ago. Today, it’s a quiet press release.

What should terrify us isn’t just that someone may have reached into a U.S. city and switched it off.

It’s that it happened in near silence.

No prime-time hearings, no national debate, only a few officials carefully

choosing their words while a foreign adversary may be studying our reaction — or our lack of one — and planning what to do next.