DISASSEMBLE - Bob’s Bad Night

Or a tale of Deflocking Philadelphia on Halloween.

Incident Report, October 31, 2026

It started at 7:30 p.m.

That was the sentence Bob would type eleven hours later because every incident report required a beginning, and 7:30 was the first time the system admitted something was wrong.

Camera PHI-1847 went offline at 19:30:42.

Bob clicked the feed.

Black.

He checked diagnostics.

Network connection lost.

Nothing unusual about that. Cameras failed. Connections dropped. Power supplies died. Somebody hit a pole with a car. Somebody backed a U-Haul into a cabinet. Squirrels remained one of civilization’s most persistent adversaries.

Bob opened a maintenance ticket.

19:32:11.

PHI-2093 went offline.

Black.

He opened another ticket.

19:34:26.

PHI-7712.

Black.

Bob stopped typing.

Three cameras in four minutes wasn’t a squirrel.

He pulled up the final thirty seconds from 7712.

South Philadelphia. Residential block. Halloween decorations. Porch lights. Children moving from house to house.

At 19:34:08, three teenagers entered the frame.

One skeleton.

One Spider-Man.

One kid wearing a bedsheet with two eyeholes cut into it.

The skeleton pointed upward.

Spider-Man looked directly into the camera.

The ghost bent over laughing.

Then they disappeared beneath the camera’s field of view.

Six seconds later:

Black.

Bob replayed it.

The ghost’s sheet had little yellow ducks printed on it.

He zoomed in.

Definitely ducks.

Bob opened a new incident ticket.

POSSIBLE VANDALISM.

At 7:41, he lost camera four.

This time, Mario and Luigi.

They ran away afterward.

Not the controlled retreat of professional saboteurs. Luigi lost a shoe.

Bob watched him hop backward into frame, retrieve it, and sprint after Mario.

Black.

At 7:48, camera five disappeared.

A vampire.

At 7:51, a six-foot inflatable chicken.

At 7:53, someone dressed as Gritty.

Bob picked up the phone.

“Steve?”

“Yeah?”

“I think we have a problem in Philadelphia.”

By eight o’clock, Bob had seventeen dead cameras.

His supervisor was standing behind him.

They had begun building a map.

Red dots appeared across Philadelphia.

South Philly.

West Philly.

North Philly.

Center City.

The Greater Northeast. 

Different neighborhoods.

Different cameras.

Different people.

There was no obvious geographic progression.

That bothered Bob more than a progression would have.

A progression meant movement.

Movement meant a group.

A group meant connections.

Connections could be mapped.

Instead, the cameras were simply disappearing.

One.

Then another.

Then another.

The operations software kept trying to find relationships between the events.

Bob watched the correlation engine work.

Shared vehicles: none.

Repeated individuals: none identified.

Common travel patterns: none.

Known organizational affiliation: none.

The system suggested widening the temporal window.

Bob widened it.

Nothing.

Steve leaned over his shoulder.

“Antifa?”

Bob looked at camera 18’s final recording.

A middle-aged man wearing a Flyers jersey and a rubber Richard Nixon mask was standing beneath the camera.

He raised both hands and gave it two middle fingers.

Black.

“I don’t know.”

At 8:07, someone finally found the post.

It wasn’t a manifesto.

It wasn’t even particularly well written.

A screenshot had apparently bounced between neighborhood groups, private messages, X, Threads, Facebook, TikTok and whatever else people were using.

Nobody could identify the original account.

The text said:

PHILLY HALLOWEEN DEFLOCK DAY

Underneath:

Costumes encouraged.

That was it.

Steve stared at it.

“Who’s organizing it?”

Bob searched.

Nobody.

There were jokes.

Memes.

Arguments about surveillance.

Arguments about crime.

Arguments about whether the cameras worked.

People calling one another fascists.

People calling one another idiots.

Someone had posted a picture of Johnny 5 tearing a sign that said:

NO | DISASSEMBLE

Bob didn’t understand that one.

He was forty-three.

He made a note to Google it later.

Camera 23 changed the working theory.

Until then, Bob had assumed they were dealing with young people.

Camera 23 showed a woman who had to be in her fifties.

Maybe sixties.

No costume.

Black leather jacket.

Gray hair.

She walked underneath the camera, stopped, and looked up at it for several seconds.

There was no excitement in her face.

No friends filming.

No laughter.

Just irritation.

Then she stepped out of view.

Black.

Camera 24 was a twenty-something couple dressed as Barbie and Oppenheimer.

Camera 25 was two teenage girls.

Camera 26 was a man walking a pit bull dressed as a bumblebee.

Camera 27 was another teenager.

Camera 28 was somebody’s mother.

The correlation engine kept searching.

Bob kept widening parameters.

Nothing.

Camera 31 lasted long enough for audio.

That was the one Bob remembered afterward.

An older couple walked down the sidewalk with two children.

The little girl was dressed as a witch.

Her brother appeared to be a Minecraft block.

Grandma carried an orange plastic pumpkin because the witch’s pumpkin was already full.

They stopped beneath the camera.

The little girl looked up.

“What’s that?”

Grandma followed her finger.

“A camera.”

“Why?”

“It reads cars.”

“Why?”

Grandpa laughed.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

The girl continued staring upward.

“Does it see us?”

“Probably.”

“Who watches it?”

Grandma hesitated.

Bob found himself leaning toward the speaker.

“I don’t know.”

The girl thought about that.

Then Grandma crouched beside her.

“That’s why you should always ask questions when somebody puts a camera somewhere.”

“Why?”

“Because when you’re little, things are already here when you arrive. That doesn’t mean they have to stay that way.”

The boy said something Bob couldn’t hear.

Grandpa laughed.

Grandma handed the witch her pumpkin.

Then all four walked underneath the camera.

Bob watched the empty sidewalk.

Seven seconds.

Black.

Nobody in the operations room said anything.

Bob opened the incident classification.

POSSIBLE COORDINATED ACTION.

He stared at it.

Then changed it.

POSSIBLE WIDESPREAD PUBLIC HOSTILITY TOWARD SYSTEM.

He stared again.

Deleted one word.

WIDESPREAD PUBLIC HOSTILITY TOWARD SYSTEM.

Save.

By 8:45, there were forty-three black squares.

Management was on a conference call.

Legal had joined.

Security had joined.

Someone from communications had joined and immediately asked whether anyone had contacted the media.

Nobody had.

“Good.”

Someone wanted to know whether this qualified as domestic extremism.

Nobody answered.

Bob looked at the monitors.

Camera 44:

A seventeen-year-old werewolf.

Black.

Camera 45:

Two women dressed as the twins from The Shining.

Black.

Camera 46:

A man in sweatpants wearing cat ears.

Black.

Camera 47:

A family dressed as the Addams Family.

Black.

Camera 48:

A guy wearing a SEPTA bus costume.

Bob laughed despite himself.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Black.

Steve looked at the wall.

Forty-eight dead feeds.

“There’s got to be coordination.”

Bob shook his head.

“Why?”

“Fifty cameras?”

“Forty-eight.”

“You know what I mean.”

Bob did.

The software knew too.

It desperately wanted there to be an organization.

Organizations had leaders.

Leaders communicated.

Communications created networks.

Networks could be analyzed.

But Philadelphia had apparently discovered something considerably harder to model.

An idea didn’t need a leader once enough people thought it was funny.

Some people hated surveillance.

Some hated corporations.

Some hated cops.

Some hated AI.

Some were worried about civil liberties.

Some remembered the Patriot Act.

Some had read the city contract.

Some had not read anything.

Some were fifteen years old and thought knocking out a camera while dressed as SpongeBob was the funniest possible way to spend Halloween.

Different reasons.

Same behavior.

Bob looked at the network graph.

Nothing connected them.

Except the cameras.

Camera 49 remained.

The feed showed South Street.

At 9:02, something rolled into frame.

Bob frowned.

“What the hell?”

A small robot.

Tank treads.

Striped shirt.

Black knit cap.

Huge mechanical eyes.

Someone had put serious work into the costume.

It stopped beneath the camera.

Raised a long cardboard sign.

NO DISASSEMBLE

Then two mechanical hands grabbed it between the words.

Rrrrrrip.

NO

DISASSEMBLE

The robot looked up.

Black.

Steve sighed.

“Forty-nine.”

Only Camera 50 remained.

Everyone watched it.

Legal.

Security.

Management.

Communications.

Bob.

Steve.

An empty Philadelphia intersection filled the screen.

Children passed.

Nothing happened.

A pirate.

Nothing.

Three Minions.

Nothing.

For almost ten minutes, Camera 50 simply worked.

Someone behind Bob said, “Maybe that’s it.”

Bob didn’t answer.

At 9:14, a figure entered the frame.

At first Bob couldn’t understand the costume.

White rectangular body.

Black pole.

Little solar panel.

Then he recognized it.

Someone had dressed as a Flock camera.

Steve whispered:

“No fucking way.”

The fake camera walked directly beneath the real camera.

Stopped.

Turned.

Its fake lens slowly tilted upward.

The operations room became completely silent.

For four seconds, the camera costume stared into the camera.

Camera looking at camera.

Observer looking at observer.

Bob actually smiled.

Then a little nozzle emerged from beneath the costume.

“Pssssssssssssssssssssssssss.”

The image disappeared.

Black.

Fifty monitors.

Fifty black squares.

Nobody spoke.

Bob looked at the network map.

There was nothing left to map.

No organization.

No command structure.

No leader.

No conspiracy.

Just teenagers, parents, grandparents, punks, office workers, weirdos, children, and one magnificent asshole dressed as surveillance infrastructure.

Steve finally broke the silence.

“Bob?”

Bob leaned back in his chair.

Outside, somewhere hundreds of miles away, Philadelphia was still handing out candy.

He opened the incident report.

Placed his hands on the keyboard.

And typed:

It started at approximately 7:30 p.m.