Power-Obsessed Roommate Cut the Lights at Midnight, and We All Missed Graduation

I was trying to upload our final flood map when the screen went black. The room went black with it. The computer fan stopped, the external drive clicked once, and the tiny green light on the router disappeared. Across the common room, someone swore. "Drew," I called. The emergency light in the hallway pushed a pale strip beneath our door. I could make out his outline beside the wall, one hand still near the switch for the power strip. "What?" he said. "Did you just unplug the workstation?" "I turned off the strip." "That is the workstation." "It was pulling power while everyone was asleep." "We're not asleep." A second voice came from the dark. "The deadline's at eight." That was Leah, who had been sitting cross-legged on the rug with a notebook on her knees. Mateo was in the little kitchen, where he had been eating cold pizza over the sink. We were all seniors, all in the same capstone group, all living in the university's four-person engineering suite because it had the largest common room on the floor. The workstation sat on a desk against the far wall. It wasn't university property. We had bought it between the four of us in sophomore year so we could run the flood-modeling software required for our project. Beside it sat a network storage box with two drives. One held our project. The other was supposed to hold a backup. Drew had unplugged both. "Turn it back on," I said. "I'm not doing that." "Drew." "You said we were done." "I said the model was done. We still have to upload the files." I heard his shoes cross the floor. "You have a laptop." "My laptop can't run the model." "Then you should have saved it earlier." The hallway light came on as someone opened the suite door. It illuminated Drew's face, then the disconnected plug in his hand. He looked tired, but so did all of us. His expression was tight and flat, the look he wore whenever anyone challenged one of his rules. I reached for the power strip. The plug was still in the wall. He had pulled the strip's master switch down. "Why would you do that now?" I asked. "Because the electricity doesn't stop costing money just because you're working." The university included utilities in our housing fee. I had explained that to him before. He had told me that waste was waste whether or not we paid for it directly. Mateo came in from the kitchen. "Just turn it on." Drew looked at him. "You can all find another way to finish." "There is no other way," Leah said. "The final files are on those drives." She stood and came closer. The narrow beam from her phone caught the equipment, the loose cable, the small red status light that had gone dark. She didn't touch anything. I pressed the switch. Nothing happened. "Drew," I said, "what did you do?" "I shut it down properly." "You hit the switch while it was running?" "You were all going to leave it on overnight." The workstation had made a sharp clicking sound when the power went out. Now, when I pushed the button, the fans started and stopped. The monitor displayed a recovery screen, then a row of error messages. I felt my mouth go dry. "Don't touch anything," I said. "I'm not touching anything." "Then don't touch anything else." He held up both hands. "I was trying to keep the room from wasting power." Mateo moved in front of the screen. "You can explain your principles after we submit." I clicked through the recovery prompts. The model directory appeared, but several files showed as zero bytes. The network storage box stayed dark. When I powered it, it made a low grinding noise and failed to connect. Leah was already calling the campus IT emergency number. I opened the university submission portal on my laptop. The page loaded slowly. Our capstone project wasn't a single document we could remake from memory. It included the final model, the output tables, the revision log, and the files that showed how we had derived our flood-risk estimates. The portal would close at eight. Our advisor had been clear that no submission meant no capstone credit, and no capstone credit meant no degree. The portal asked for the final package. I stared at the empty upload box. "Try the backup," Mateo said. I looked at the dark network storage box. Drew leaned against the desk. "I thought the backup drive was supposed to be automatic." "It was," I said. "Then it should be fine." "It needs power." He said nothing. I called our advisor, Professor Harlan, and got voicemail. I left a message with my name, the deadline, and the words "power interruption" because I couldn't bring myself to say that a person I shared a room with had made the interruption happen. By the time the call ended, the recovery tool had stopped responding. The screen froze on a warning about a damaged file system. "Can it be fixed?" Leah asked. "I don't know." "Can the files be restored?" "I don't know." "Is there anything we can submit?" I looked at the clock in the corner of my laptop. 12:46 a.m. "We have six hours." Drew went to the fridge and opened it. "You should all get some sleep." I turned toward him. "You're serious?" "I didn't break anything on purpose." "That's not what I asked." He took a bottle of water from the door. "You're acting like I wanted this." The question I wanted to ask was whether he understood what he had done. Instead I looked back at the blank upload box and tried to think like an engineer. "What I want," I said, "is for you to turn every strip back on and stay away from the equipment." He screwed the cap off his water. "I'm not paying to run a room like a server farm." Nobody answered him. At 1:03, the computer made a soft chime. The recovery screen vanished. The desktop came back, empty.