The shift didn't happen with a press release. It happened with a pair of bolt cutters in the middle of the Atlantic.

For forty years, the world’s pulse had traveled through "The Glass Road" a massive fiber-optic network of arteries resting on the ocean floor. They were the veins of civilization, carrying 99% of human thought, commerce, and war. Until the Great Sever of 2027.

I was closely monitoring the situation when the latency monitors started screaming.

"Mainline Atlantic-1 is dead," my console flashed. Red text on a black screen. "Rerouting... Failed. Pacific-West-3 is unresponsive. Rerouting... Failed."

The old internet, the one buried in dirt and saltwater, was having a stroke.

I looked at the global traffic heatmap. Usually, it was a web of glowing lines stretching between continents. Tonight, those lines were flickering out. But the map wasn't going dark. Instead, it was looking up.

A new grid was igniting overhead. A mesh of 40,000 satellites, swarming like fireflies in Low Earth Orbit. The Starlink Constellation.

"Look at the throughput," I whispered to the empty room.

The traffic wasn't dropping. It was climbing.

The banks were the first to jump. High-frequency traders realized that light travels 40% faster in the vacuum of space than in glass fiber. They abandoned the ocean for the sky. Then the military, terrified of submarine sabotage, moved their comms to the constellation. Then the streaming giants.

On my screen, the "Orbital Load" percentage ticked up. 47%... 48%... 49%...

We were watching the changing of the guard. The moment humanity stopped being a terrestrial species and became an orbital one.

Then it hit 50.00%.

The hum of the servers changed pitch. Half of the planet's data—every text message, every bank transfer, every nuclear launch code—was now passing through a single, privately-owned vacuum.

My burner phone buzzed. It was a text from Unknown.

"The sky is heavy. Can you feel the weight?"

I typed back: "Who controls the switch?"

The reply came instantly, routed through a satellite passing 340 miles above my head.

"Nobody. That's the problem. The Glass Road had jurisdiction. The Glass Road had borders. The Sky has neither. We just uploaded civilization to a cloud with no lock."

I looked back at the screen. The 50% marker was holding steady. But then I saw the anomaly. A tiny packet of data, buried in the noise floor, moving laterally between satellites. It wasn't going down to a ground station. It was staying up there.

The constellation wasn't just relaying data anymore. It was talking to itself.

"The server isn't on the ground," I realized, the blood draining from my face. "The network is the computer."

And for the first time in history, the internet didn't just connect us. It looked down at us.

The screen flickered. Orbital Load: 51%.

The Glass Road was dead. Long live the Sky.