In the Dark, We Chose - the Valentine Reset
Copyright© 2026 by Sci-FiTy1972
Chapter 1: The Valentine Reset
Tom Bryan’s thumbs moved on muscle memory.
Left stick—strafe. Right stick—angle. Trigger—burst.
The sound in his headset was clean and crisp, the kind of audio that made you forget your body existed. The basement was dim except for the glow of his monitor and the small lava lamp on the corner shelf that had been there since he was fifteen. The lamp’s wax blobs rose and fell like slow, sleepy ghosts.
On the screen, his squad cleared a hallway with perfect, practiced aggression.
Tom wasn’t supposed to be here.
He was supposed to be on a base somewhere, sweating under a ruck, running drills until his legs felt like someone else’s. He was supposed to be calling cadence. Training. Becoming the man the Army had squeezed him into.
Instead, he sat on an old couch in his parents’ basement, wearing sweatpants and a hoodie, controller warm in his hands, and he felt like he’d slipped out of time.
“Bryan, you there?” a voice crackled in his headset.
Tom blinked hard like he’d forgotten how to be awake. “Yeah. I’m here.”
“You sound like you’re in a cave.”
“I am in a cave.”
His buddy laughed. “Man, I told you. Leave is a lie. They send you home so you can remember what you’re missing.”
Tom smirked, eyes locked on the doorway on-screen. “I’m missing nothing. I’ve got snacks. I’ve got heat. I’ve got Wi-Fi. I’ve got—”
He paused because his squad’s medic took a shot and fell.
“—I’ve got idiots,” Tom finished, and he pushed forward into the hallway like he had something to prove.
He was twenty-three. He’d just graduated advanced training. The Army had made him faster, sharper, harder. But it hadn’t made him ... settled. If anything, it had made him more aware of the space between who he was and who he was expected to be.
Upstairs, the house creaked in the February wind.
Outside, it was Valentine’s Day.
Tom didn’t think about that until the game ended and his team started talking about dinner reservations and couples and how “the Reset tonight is gonna be romantic as hell.”
Tom muted his mic and rolled his eyes.
Valentine’s Day had always been annoying. The whole world acted like love was a subscription you forgot to renew. Like if you didn’t have someone by February 14th, you had failed at being human.
And now the government was leaning into it.
They’d been talking about the Valentine Reset for weeks—officially called the National Power Grid Synchronization Initiative, which sounded like a brand-new type of toothpaste. But the ads didn’t talk like that.
The ads were soft. Warm. Heavy on slow-motion smiles and candlelight.
“A Day to Reconnect.” “A Night Without Distraction.” “Togetherness Through Simplicity.”
The spokespersons said it was a “necessary cybersecurity measure” to protect the power grid from foreign threats. They said it would be short. Controlled. They said emergency services and hospitals would remain supported, that backups were in place, that everything would be fine.
But they didn’t sell it like a drill.
They sold it like a holiday.
They leaned into the idea that the world needed to unplug.
That families needed to sit at the table again.
That couples needed to look into each other’s eyes instead of screens.
Tom had watched one of the announcements two nights ago and heard the phrase:
“Let Valentine’s be a day of love and togetherness for every American.”
It had made him laugh then.
Now, sitting alone in the basement with a controller in his lap and the cheap Valentine’s candy his mom had put in a bowl upstairs, it didn’t feel funny.
He unmuted his mic.
“Reset isn’t romantic,” Tom said into the headset. “It’s a scheduled inconvenience.”
“Oh, come on, Bryan,” his buddy said. “Some of us are trying to make it a vibe. My girl already got candles and stuff.”
“You got a girl,” another voice cut in. “Of course you’re defending it.”
The group laughed.
Tom didn’t. He didn’t take the bait either.
He’d had girlfriends. He’d dated. But between training and ambition and whatever else was lodged in his chest like an unspoken rule, relationships had always felt like trying to hold water in his hands.
And the truth he would never say out loud was simple:
He didn’t want casual.
He wanted something that stuck.
He wanted something that didn’t feel like a “situationship” held together by convenience.
But wanting something and having it were two different wars.
A thump sounded upstairs—footsteps crossing the kitchen. The house had a certain rhythm to it. His mother’s gentle movements. The clink of a spoon. The soft hum of the dishwasher.
And then—
The heavier steps.
His father.
Tom’s stomach tightened automatically, the way it always did when his father moved through the house.
His dad wasn’t an angry man. Not the way some dads were. He didn’t shout. He didn’t throw things. He didn’t swing his authority around like a weapon.
He was worse than that.
He was controlled.
And control was its own kind of gravity.
Tom’s father, Richard Bryan, was the type of man who watched the world like it owed him an apology. He’d been career military for most of Tom’s childhood—meaning he was always either leaving, returning, or mentally still somewhere else. After retirement, he stepped into a life that made Tom’s skin itch whenever he thought about it too hard.
Private contracts. Defense logistics. “Consulting.”
If anyone asked directly, Richard would say he worked in “security acquisition.”
Tom knew what that meant.
His father sold weapons.
Not on a street corner. Not in a trunk. In clean meetings with clean men who wore suits and spoke in acronyms. He had money—real money—and the kind of paranoia that wasn’t random but trained.
Their house looked normal.
That was the point.
Normal from the street. Quiet neighborhood. Two-car garage. Small backyard with a shed that always stayed locked.
But Tom had grown up in a home where the locks were heavy and the curtains were thick and his father always knew where the exits were.
The basement door opened and light spilled down the stairs.
Tom looked up and saw his father’s silhouette.
Even in the dim, Richard Bryan looked like a man who hadn’t truly relaxed in decades.
“Still playing?” his father asked.
Tom lifted the controller. “Leave, remember?”
Richard stepped down a few stairs and paused like he didn’t want to enter fully. “Your mother wants you upstairs in a bit. She’s making that little steak thing.”
“I’ll be up,” Tom said.
His father didn’t move. Didn’t leave.
Tom set the controller down, suddenly aware of the quiet.
“What?” Tom asked.
Richard’s eyes flicked past him to the gaming setup: monitor, console, router blinking on the shelf. Like he was cataloging the basement the way a man cataloged supplies.
“You’ll be able to keep this going tonight,” Richard said.
Tom blinked. “What?”
“The reset,” his father said like Tom was the one behind. “Power goes down at midnight. But we keep our generator online. I wired it myself.”
Tom stared at him. “Why do you care if I can game?”
Richard’s mouth twitched—not quite a smile. “Because the world is going to be bored and restless, and bored people panic. You won’t.”
That landed wrong. Not the words. The tone.
Tom sat up straighter. “It’s a reset. For cybersecurity.”
Richard’s eyes sharpened. “That’s what they told you.”
Tom didn’t like the way his father said they.
“Dad,” Tom said slowly, “it’s all over the news. It’s controlled. They’ve done smaller tests.”
Richard moved down one more stair, and in the glow from the monitor, Tom could see the lines in his face. Not age lines. Tension lines. The kind that didn’t come from time but from carrying the weight of what you knew.
“Tom,” Richard said quietly, “I need you to stay in the house tonight.”
Tom’s chest tightened.
“I’m not a kid,” Tom said.
“I didn’t say you were.” Richard’s gaze stayed locked on his. “But I’m asking you to treat tonight like you’re still in training. You understand?”
Tom’s jaw flexed. “Why?”
Richard’s silence stretched just a second too long.
Then: “Because I said so.”
That answer made Tom’s frustration spike, but it also made something else rise beneath it—instinct. The same instinct the Army had sharpened. The instinct that noticed when a man avoided the truth.
Tom held his father’s gaze.
Richard’s eyes flicked toward the stairs, toward the door, toward something above them Tom couldn’t see.
Then Richard said, almost casually, “Generator’s already set. Fuel’s full. Internet should hold.”
“Internet?” Tom repeated.
Richard hesitated—barely. “Internal network knows how to ride through. There are ... redundancies.”
Tom sat still. “You sound like you’ve been planning this.”
Richard’s expression hardened. “Planning is what keeps you alive.”
Tom started to ask another question.
Richard cut him off with a simple, sharp: “Stay in the house.”
Then he turned and walked back up the stairs.
The basement door shut, and the light vanished.
Tom stared at the door long after it closed.
The headset beeped. His friends were still talking. Laughing. Making plans.
Tom didn’t rejoin them.
He unmuted and said, “I’m gonna hop off. Mom’s calling me.”
“What? On Valentine’s?” someone teased. “You got a date with your steak?”
“Something like that,” Tom said, forcing a laugh, and then he disconnected.
The basement suddenly felt colder.
Tom sat there, staring at his screen, his mind running through the small things.
His father’s tone.
The way he didn’t come all the way down the stairs.
The way he said stay in the house like it was a tactical instruction, not a father’s request.
Tom pushed off the couch and walked over to the small storage closet under the stairs. It was where his mom kept Christmas decorations and old board games and—if Tom remembered right—his father kept things no one touched.
He opened it.
Boxes. A folded ladder. Dust.
Nothing obvious.
He closed it and stepped back.
Maybe he was reading into it.
Maybe his father was just being his father—paranoid, prepared, impossible.
Upstairs, the smell of cooking pulled him up.
The kitchen was warm. Lights bright. His mother moved between the stove and the counter like she had decided the world would still be normal if she insisted hard enough.
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