Deprivation

She’d been alone for 2,191 days, and most probably was going to die alone. How many days did she have left? She didn’t have a clue. She wasn’t physically afraid of an intruder, even though she lived in a rural wooded area. She knew she had the lord on her side, and a shotgun on the other. She would have no problem burying a few bullets into someone’s chest if their intent was to hurt her. Why would she? Would you? I don’t want to hear your reasons if you answered ‘yes’. This was no longer the time of soft thoughts. Hell, empathy had disappeared almost a decade ago, and just because she wasn’t completely out, she wouldn’t waste the remnants on a stranger busting in. 

Humanity was still around by default, certainly not en vogue. We hadn’t evolved out of sentiency. During the spiritual war, it was a battle of extremes, all the feelings vs none of the feelings. I’d love to tell you it was a good vs evil war of empathy vs apathy, because if that had been the case it wouldn’t be what it was currently. 

It was a bleak landscape when no one looked at anyone’s face, just at what they might be carrying. Covetousness replaced courteousness. If you possessed something worth anything, don’t tell anyone was the rule. The massive culling had hit the largest cities, killing the barnacle humans that clung to government, state and society for life. Most were social media influencers, making a measly 1k per month giving makeup tutorials or bigger bucks on only fans. It began on Friday April 19, 2028. All social media was gone. Vanished into a blank screen with a refresh circle tirelessly spinning. The rednecks did well, living in vast communities where everyone knew everyone and they all worked with their hands. It was the gated communities that thought they’d be ok, boy, were they mistaken. They hated their neighbors that they had never got to know. This one knew that one got a new pool service, that one knew when the house across the street was fitted with a new bathroom. Then, they rushed to their banks to find zero balances. 

Credit cards were worthless, as online banks were no more. No one knew anyone’s telephone number, but few still had landlines. Everything digital was just wiped away. When the gated communities knocked on neighbors doors, curtains were moved slightly, then fell back into place while the doors remained locked and unanswered. Many succumbed to madness when they lost their online presence. Their self identity was gone in a blink of an eye, the likes and comments and PMs were gone. So, they were gone, too. In real life, they were nothing and had no friends. They were existing as an avatar. A still. They weren’t real. Who they really were laid on the cutting room floor of their recently deleted photos and videos. That was who they didn’t share with the social media world. The real who they were. The nobody. With hundreds of friends, and thousands of followers, without the internet they were alone. Most sat in or stared at their home ‘casting’ area, often a wall or a set comprised of a bookshelf or desk, which all depended on their desired perception.

On SM, when another influencer was funnier, wittier, had better thighs, had better set lighting, was more exaggerated, audiences would stray. Always in flux. Some core followers showed their loyalty, but most were fickle, becoming easily bored and always on the hunt for more entertaining time wasting content. Their viewership gave influencers monetization options. It was all about the clicks, until there was nothing left to click. In the time it took 5G to load a page of SE results, it had completely vanished. 

Like the masses, she had SM accounts and a couple website, hell, she even earned some money on one of them as an influencer. 

With banks gone, most people paid with their cellphones and credit cards. Rarely did people use paper money. Crypto cash apps and Venmo ceased to be. Gas stations became jammed with automobiles on empty and cashiers were met with angry or hysterical wannabe customers begging for their card to be swiped. Major routes were narrowed by empty cars unceremoniously abandoned on the sides of the road. Mass panic hit when livestreams and texts abruptly ended. 

She was home, of course, when everything vanished. Right in the middle of texting her uncle, then when she hit send, nothing happened. She stared at the frozen screen, its tiny digital icons mocking her with their lifelessness. Her fingers trembled slightly, hovering over the touchpad, waiting for a response that would never come. Nothing happened. She tried sending the text again, and again, but there was only that unyielding refresh circle, its ceaseless spinning somehow emblematic of the wider chaos she could sense unfolding. She put down the phone with a defeated sigh, then wandered to the window.

The view outside was like an indifferent postcard: the dense woodland behind her house, the dirt road winding down to the main highway where no cars had passed for days. Her nearest neighbor was almost two miles away, and she hadn’t seen a sign of him since last week. She wasn’t surprised. These days, people kept to themselves more than ever, not out of privacy or politeness, but out of some atavistic sense of self-preservation. You didn’t want to know who your neighbors were anymore. The moment you saw a face or exchanged words, they became real, and real people meant real problems. She wasn’t going to let anyone’s problems bleed into her little haven, her lonely bastion of isolation.

In the years that had passed since April 19, 2028, the house had become a fortress of sorts. Not fortified with high walls or electrified fences, but with time. Years of accumulated survival instinct had made it more impenetrable than any barbed wire or steel could. Inside, the rooms were crowded with supplies, enough to last another year or two, but not forever. Not that she needed forever. She’d never really expected to get this far, much less last over two thousand days. Each one was a miracle she had come to resent.

When the power first went out, she had relied on candles, a generator she kept for emergencies, and a wood stove she hadn’t used in years. She still kept a few solar batteries charged for small things…a dim LED lantern, an ancient transistor radio that she turned on once a week just to hear the static crackle back at her, confirming that the airwaves were still as dead as her old social media feed. There was nothing out there, no voices, no music, not even a whisper of the life that once buzzed through the circuits. If there were still other survivors, they were as silent as she was.

She often wondered if there was a point to all her preparation. Sometimes it felt like she was just rehearsing the end over and over, rehearsing until she could get it right, until there was no fear left to feel. Then again, maybe that was the point. In a world where death loomed over every horizon, the only goal was to strip it of its terror. She had come close to that, she thought, but the truth was, death had never frightened her much. It was the waiting, the days stretching like an infinite wasteland, barren of anything worth hoping for.

The worst part was not knowing how many others had disappeared along with the internet. It wasn’t just the celebrities and influencers who vanished from her consciousness like ghosts flickering out of frame. It was family, friends, all the people who had made up the backdrop of her life. A flicker of guilt surfaced when she thought of her uncle, of the half-written message she had tried to send just before everything shut down. It was so mundane, that final exchange…I’ll see you next week. She wondered if he had read it, if he had even had a chance to wonder why she never replied.

She had learned to bury those thoughts like she would bury a body…deep, so deep they could not rise again to haunt her. On the rare occasion she did think of someone she used to know, it was like recalling a character from a novel she had read a long time ago. The details had grown fuzzy, the emotions muted. They were memories she had abandoned just as the world had abandoned its inhabitants, and if there was some small sliver of her humanity that rebelled against that, she pushed it aside. Humanity wasn’t useful anymore.

The sun was setting, a red smear on the horizon like a wound slowly healing itself into night. It would be dark soon. She picked up the shotgun from the kitchen table and went through the nightly routine of checking the doors and windows. She doubted anyone would come, but old habits die hard, especially when they were born of necessity. Her pulse remained steady as she tested the locks, as familiar with the heft of the gun in her hands as she was with the beat of her own heart. It was just another ritual, one of many that filled the emptiness with some semblance of purpose.

She had heard once, long before the collapse, that solitary confinement could drive a person mad in a matter of days. That without human contact, without the exchange of words and emotions, the mind would deteriorate, unravel. But she didn’t feel like she was going mad. If anything, she felt like she was finally becoming what she was meant to be, something stripped of all the triviality and weakness that had defined her old life. Her mind was sharper now, leaner. Her emotions were honed down to a narrow edge of practicality. Love, fear, grief…they were just burdens, luxuries that served no purpose. Out here, they would only slow her down, weaken her resolve.

As night closed in, she settled into the worn armchair by the wood stove, the shotgun resting across her lap. The house was still, the silence wrapping around her like a shroud. She thought about turning on the radio, just to hear that hollow static again, but decided against it. Even the sound of nothing could be too loud sometimes. It was better this way, better to let the darkness creep in and fill the empty spaces without interference.

She wondered, in the darkest hours, if there would ever be an end to this…if some distant day, humanity might reemerge from its shattered state, rebuild itself. But then she dismissed the thought. It wasn’t important. The world had already ended, and she had learned to live in its afterlife. Each day was a repetition of the last, a countdown without numbers, without an endpoint.

The stillness stretched on, and in the blackness, she felt the weight of every one of those 2,191 days settle over her. There was no point in counting anymore, no point in wondering when or how it would all be over. It was already over. All that was left was the slow, inevitable fading. She would keep going, for as long as her body allowed, and then she would stop, as simply as blowing out a candle.

For now, though, she watched the darkness outside the window and let it stare back at her. It was the only company she had left, and in its own cold, indifferent way, it was enough.