A newborn universe was not unlike a newly completed high-rise apartment complex.
The concrete foundation had cured, the structural steel was tied together, and the walls were framed and plumb. But until the master electrician stepped up to the main service entrance, inspected the transformers, and threw the master disconnect switch, the building was cold, dark, and dead.
High above the Perseus-Sagittarius expansion corridor, Mobile Substation Zero-One drifted through a magnificent ocean of newly ignited starlight.
The Big Bounce had pushed the galactic spiral arms forty thousand light-years outward in an orderly, laminar wave. Nebulae glowed with warm, gentle pastel hues—clean hydrogen-alpha pinks and oxygen-three cyans—without the violent, ionizing radiation spikes of the old, unshielded cosmos.
Inside the substation’s high-voltage switchyard, Austin stood on the observation gantry holding a heavy-duty industrial phase-rotation meter and a synchronized digital strobe tachometer.
His level ninety-nine core hummed with five hundred zettawatts of rock-solid, monolithic power at five hundred gigakelvins. Beneath his boots, the steel deck remained dead-level, anchored by nineteen hundred pounds of certified lead ballast.
Beside him, Tie Kuang stood at the controls of the primary high-voltage bus synchronizer, his massive calloused hands hovering over two black bakelite rotary switches.
"Tie Kuang," Austin said, his voice cutting through the gentle sixty-hertz electromagnetic hum that filled the room. "What’s our bus frequency across the Perseus feeder line?"
"Perseus feeder frequency is reading fifty-nine point nine eight hertz, Master!" Tie Kuang reported, leaning over the twin vibrating-reed frequency meters. "Sagittarius main trunk line is sitting at sixty point zero two hertz! Generator speed on the central core is locked at three thousand six hundred RPM!"
"Phase angle difference?"
Xuan Ming stepped up to the second console, adjusting the brass vernier dial of a massive, illuminated mechanical synchroscope.
"Phase angle difference is drifting through seven degrees, Master Contractor!" Xuan Ming called out, his eyes wide with religious reverence. "The needle on the synchroscope is rotating clockwise! The two heavenly sectors are approaching harmonic convergence!"
In the high-voltage electrical trade, there was no operation more sacred, and none more dangerous, than synchronizing two independent electrical grids.
If two massive power systems were tied together while out of phase—even by a handful of degrees—the instantaneous phase-to-phase short circuit would unleash trillions of amperes of raw fault current. Generator shafts thick as oak trees would shear clean in two, transformers would vaporize into fireballs of boiling oil, and switchgear cabinets would detonate like heavy artillery shells.
On a universal scale, closing the master cosmic tie-breaker out of phase would not merely trip a substation breaker. The resulting electromagnetic back-EMF would rip five hundred thousand star systems out of their orbits, turning the newly expanded cosmos into a tangled, smoking knot of short-circuited spacetime.
"Explain it again to the apprentices, Master," Tie Kuang requested, glancing back toward the staging deck.
Standing twenty paces back behind the high-voltage safety barrier were former Supreme Inquisitors Yuan Shi and Gu Ming. Both men were wearing their white hard hats, eight-calorie arc-flash face shields, and heavy rubber lineman's gloves rated for one hundred thousand volts. They were trembling, staring at the revolving synchroscope needle as if watching the cosmic wheel of karma itself.
Austin turned toward the two ancient judges, resting his five-foot pipe wrench against his hip.
"Listen up, apprentices," Austin said, his tone dry and pedagogical. "You see that synchroscope dial? It's got two marks: *FAST* on the right, *SLOW* on the left, and a single black tick mark at twelve o'clock. That needle represents the phase relationship between our mobile substation and the newly expanded galactic grid."
Yuan Shi nodded vigorously, his face shield fogging with nervous breath. "Yes, Master Contractor! The needle turns like the hand of fate!"
"It's not fate, it's alternating current," Austin corrected flatly. "When the needle is spinning fast, it means one grid is outrunning the other. If you throw the breaker when the needle is pointing at six o'clock, the voltages are one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase. That means peak positive voltage on one side meets peak negative voltage on the other. That is a dead short of two million volts. The resulting arc flash will vaporize your hard hats, your boots, and your immortal souls before the light even hits your retinas."
Gu Ming swallowed audibly, pressing his rubber-gloved hands tightly against his chest. "And when the needle reaches twelve o'clock?"
"Twelve o'clock means zero phase difference," Austin explained. "The sine waves are perfectly superimposed. Peak matches peak. Trough matches trough. Zero potential difference across the breaker contacts. When the needle drifts slowly across twelve o'clock, you close the breaker. The two grids lock into magnetic synchronization, sharing the load like two draft horses pulling the same wagon."
Austin turned back to Tie Kuang.
"Trim the governor on the Sagittarius turbine. Slow the rotation down. I want that needle moving clockwise at one revolution every twenty seconds. Slow and steady. Don't rush it."
Tie Kuang delicately nudged the digital governor potentiometer. "Governor adjusted by point-zero-two percent! Synchroscope speed dropping! One revolution every eighteen... nineteen... twenty-one seconds!"
The massive needle on the circular brass instrument slowed its graceful sweep across the glass face.
*Tick... tick... tick...*
From the slow side, the needle climbed smoothly toward eleven o'clock.
Ten paces away, Pug trotted up to the master breaker pedestal. Wearing his yellow safety vest, miniature hard hat, and four dielectric rubber booties on his paws, the little bulldog stood on his hind legs, resting his front paws on the red emergency trip-lock lever.
His dark eyes were fixed on the synchroscope. Pug understood electrical safety better than most journeymen. He had watched Austin sync generators across nine realms.
Pug's ears perked forward. The needle touched eleven-thirty.
*Tick... tick...*
Eleven-forty-five.
The needle glided toward twelve o'clock.
"Watch the lamps," Austin commanded softly.
Above the synchroscope, three heavy industrial filament lamps—wired in the classic "two dark, one bright" synchronization circuit—shifted in illumination. The two outer lamps dimmed down to a faint orange filament glow, while the center lamp burned with blinding, brilliant white light.
Phase rotation confirmed: A-B-C.
The needle drifted across eleven-fifty-nine.
Right as the needle touched the black vertical line at twelve o'clock, Pug let out a sharp, ear-splitting bark:
*"WOOF!"*
"CLOSE IT!" Austin roared.
Tie Kuang slapped the heavy black pistol-grip control switch to *CLOSE*.
*THUMP-CLACK!*
The master magnetic air-blast circuit breaker slammed shut inside its vacuum bottle with the concussive, deafening crack of a lightning bolt hitting an iron anvil.
For a millisecond, the copper busbars bowed outward under the immense magnetic attraction of the incoming current. Then, with a smooth, velvety sigh of electromagnetic equilibrium, the hum dropped into a flawless, perfectly quiet sixty-hertz harmonic.
The needle of the synchroscope froze dead-center at twelve o'clock, held fast by the magnetic locking torque of fifty billion synchronized stellar cores.
Across the vast communications console, the universal grid readouts snapped into brilliant, emerald-green clarity.
"Look at the Total Harmonic Distortion!" Xuan Ming shouted, dancing in circles on the deck, throwing his clipboard into the air. "Zero point zero four percent! It is a pure, unblemished sine wave! The celestial qi of the universe is no longer turbulent, jagged, or tainted by demonic distortion! It is pure, clean, filtered alternating current!"
"Neutral-to-ground potential is zero!" Yuan Shi wept, falling to his knees and hugging Tie Kuang's steel-toed boots. "The neutral line is grounded! The ancient curse of the floating voltage is broken! Never again shall an immortal be struck by static discharge when entering a meditation chamber!"
Across all twenty-four expanding galactic corridors, the effect was instantaneous and breathtaking.
In millions of cultivator sects, mortal kingdoms, and stellar colonies across three hundred thousand light-years, the erratic, violent spiritual storms that had plagued cultivation for ten million years simply vanished.
Cultivators sitting in deep meditation felt their spiritual meridians flood not with jagged, chaotic lightning, but with a smooth, steady, balanced surge of pure, sixty-hertz spiritual current. Golden cores that had been wobbling out of balance stabilized instantly. Tribulation lightning, once feared as the wrath of the heavens, transformed into orderly, metered twenty-amp branch circuits protected by Class-A ground-fault circuit interrupters.
In mortal villages, the newly installed copper streetlamps flickered once and bloomed into warm, steady, golden illumination. Water pumps hummed without sputtering. Grain mills turned with effortless, continuous torque.
The entire universe was officially on the grid.
Austin stood on the observation catwalk, leaning his arms against the steel handrail, looking out over the synchronized sea of stars.
Beside him, Pug trotted over, sat down against his right boot, and leaned his sturdy little weight against Austin’s leg with a soft, contented sigh.
Austin reached down with his gloved hand and scratched Pug right at the sweet spot behind his left ear. Pug’s rear leg began to thump against the deck in ecstatic, rhythmic gratitude: *thump-thump-thump.*
"Good timing on the call, Pug," Austin murmured, smiling faintly. "Closed right on the money. If we’d been half a cycle late, we would’ve tripped the whole Perseus feeder on overcurrent."
Tie Kuang walked over, his massive face beaming with unbridled joy. He held two chilled bottles of pale ale, popping the caps off against the edge of the catwalk railing with a crisp *psssh*. He handed one to Austin.
"To the grid, Master," Tie Kuang said, clinking his bottle against Austin’s. "Clean power from the center of creation all the way to the galactic rim. We’ve delivered five hundred zettawatts without blowing a single fuse."
Austin took a long, cold pull from the bottle, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Good brew," Austin said, exhaling slowly. "The power is on. The expansion is stable. But there's one last thing we have to nail down before we call this job complete."
Tie Kuang tilted his head. "What’s that, Master?"
Austin pointed with the neck of his beer bottle toward the vast, glittering expanse of the cosmos.
"Zoning and building codes," Austin stated plainly. "We just gave these people a brand-new, code-compliant universe. If we don’t post the safety regulations, write the inspection standards, and enforce OSHA across all three realms, some reckless idiot is going to string bare wire across an asteroid belt, overload a transformer, and burn the whole place down again."
Austin set his beer bottle down on the tool crate, pulling his five-foot pipe wrench and his aluminum clipboard from his belt.
"Let’s draft the Universal Safety Code."