Nexus Collapse

I remember when the world went dark. 

It began as a virus. An insignificant little bug. A spam email, a text, a DM on Instagram. We all contracted it in our own way. Mine was a Facebook message from what appeared to be a stranger, but what was, in actuality, a hacker I suppose you could say.

It showed up in my message requests, a separate inbox for messages from people you’re not friends with. “Wow!” it began, “Is this you?!” from a girl I had never seen before. Of course that caught my attention.

I furrowed my brow, “Is what me?” So I clicked. 

It brought up a dark page, covered in symbols from a language I couldn’t recognize. Of course as soon as I clicked, I knew that it was spam so I closed the tab and returned to my scrolling.

But soon, the pictures stopped loading. And the videos I tried to watch displayed the doom spiral, spinning and spinning but never beginning to play. I checked my internet router. The light was green, indicating that it was working. But still nothing would load. I turned the Wi-Fi off on my phone, but nothing would load with my data either. 

I closed out of Facebook and checked Instagram. Then Twitter. Then just regular old Google. Nothing was working. My frustration turned into anger.

“I know,” I thought, “I’ll call the Apple store.” It seemed like the most reasonable solution. But it wasn’t until I instinctually opened my browser once more to look up the phone number that I realized the situation I was truly in.

“Fuck!”

Maybe my laptop would work. I opened it up and put in my password. A box popped up with the name of my internet server. Would you like to automatically connect to this network? I confirmed.

Once the Wi-Fi symbol loaded to full bars, the screen glitched out to black. And then row by row, the eerily unfamiliar symbols popped up on here too.

It was not just on my phone, now it was in the network. That meant that the virus now had access to every device that was connected. I panicked. I went to unplug the internet router but the light had already turned red. I unplugged it anyway and hoped that would stop the spread.

The internet wouldn’t work but I wondered if I could still make calls on my phone. I picked it up and typed in my wife’s phone number, one of the only ones I had memorized. 

“Hi honey,” her sweet voice answered. “I’m actually on my way home now!”

This surprised me, it was early afternoon and she typically worked into the evening.

“Really?” I asked curiously.

“Yeah!” she said, “But maybe I shouldn’t be as excited as I am.” She thought, chuckling a little.

“Why is that?” I asked inquisitively. 

“Well, apparently someone opened a spam email this morning and their computer got some sort of virus. Then it spread through the network and all of our computers went down. It was really weird, they had to call IT and IT had no clue what was going on so they sent us home since there wasn’t anything that we could do. Hopefully they have it fixed by tomorrow.”

My stomach dropped. 

“Baby, that same thing happened at home today.”

“What?!” I could hear the concern in her voice immediately. “What do you mean?”

“I got a weird message on Facebook. After I opened it, my phone stopped working. Nothing would load. So I grabbed my computer to check to see if it was the Wi-Fi and when I connected to the Wi-Fi, the same thing happened to my computer. I don’t know what’s going on. There were all these weird symbols on the screen. I unplugged the router so that hopefully it didn’t spread to anything else.”

She was quiet for a minute, contemplating. “There were weird symbols all over our computers today too. The screen was blacked out and then the symbols were, like, typing across the screen.”

“That’s exactly what happened to me. It must be the same virus. What the hell is going on?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly, she sounded somber. “This is really weird. But, I’ll be home soon. So just relax and maybe then we can figure out what’s going on.”

The wait was very odd. My phone didn’t work. My computer didn’t work. I was too scared to turn anything on for fear that if the virus hadn’t corrupted it yet, it would upon powering the device up. And just for good measure, I had unplugged it all from the wall as well. 

It was then that I think I truly realized the type of hold that technology had over me. I really didn’t know what to do with myself. It was maybe 20 minutes before my wife would be home and yet, I was twiddling my thumbs in anticipation. Nothing to distract me, nothing to calm my nerves. I actually considered cracking open one of the books that had essentially become nothing but décor over the years. And then, decided not to after all.

I was relieved when I finally heard her keys jingle against the front door.

“So, I turned my Wi-Fi off before I got home so it wouldn’t connect. I’m about to look something up.”

She tapped away at her screen before her mouth fell open in shock. “Look!” She exclaimed, sticking her phone in my face.

Grievous Virus Sweeps Across Nation Leaving Millions of Devices Inoperative

She clicked and she began to read.

“It says that they can’t find the source. It seems to attach quickly and then spread through the networks, wired and wireless. The minimal amount of information they can gather shows that it’s made with a technology that works like AI and the further it spreads, the more it’s learning and adapting.”

She looked up at me, “It’s begun attacking social media networks. They said that if it gets into the user data, it’ll be able to take down any device that even has the app downloaded.”

And that’s how it began.

Then the world began to fall apart.

The virus knew no boundaries. It spread all over the world. Millions of non-functioning devices became billions.

But it didn’t stop at the devices. It traveled up the network pyramid until it reached the internet companies themselves. And it took them down. It was less than a month before, despite all the efforts to restrict its impact, there was no internet. 

At all. 

It took no time at all for the economy to collapse. Businesses shut down completely, the unemployment rate exploded to percentages that we had never seen before. By comparison, The Great Depression was a miniscule event. 

Everyone rushed to withdraw their money from the banks. But most people didn’t understand how banks worked, and so much of the world’s wealth was tied up in online currency. At first, cryptocurrency was revolutionary. It made exchanging funds and purchasing things so easy and safe. But at the end of the day, it was all make-believe money. And soon the banks were out of cash. 

There was an uproar. Banks were shot up and the tellers were being assaulted and robbed. There were riots downtown in all the major cities. Huge crowds gathered and violence incited. Windows were busted out of buildings. Buildings were set on fire. Businesses were looted. It was chaos.

And it didn’t just stop at the riots. The crime rate overall sky-rocketed, everywhere. What is it they say about idle hands? Murders, robberies, and sexual assaults were at an all-time high. And since the internet was down, the majority of the police’s database was inaccessible.

With no internet connection, our sources of news were limited. My wife and I tried to purchase a simple tv antenna so we could access the local news. Most places were already sold out and on back order. Same with radios and landline phones. We had to call around until finally, we got a hold of a tv antenna and what, at one point, could have been ordered for $10 on Amazon cost us $90 and a 45 minute drive to pick up. 

Then the food began to run thin. Most grocery stores ordered their products online, and most distributors sold them the same way. The adjustment took time, time that people did not have. The shelves at the stores became bare. And for weeks, they stayed mostly bare. Who would have thought that this was what all the doomsday preppers had actually been preparing for. 

The price of the products that were left inflated so severely, it became a war on poverty. Gas prices exploded as well. So first 60% of the population lost their jobs because their job was no longer possible to perform. Then the banks run out of money because of everyone trying to withdraw their entire balance, all at the same time. And then to top it all off, the price of anything and everything you can think of burgeons to the point that they are unobtainable to the average citizen.

People were truly dying left and right. People were starving. People were being murdered. People who no longer could afford food or housing or who could no longer escape their reality started to end their own lives. 

~

When the internet was invented, it was revolutionary. A gilded age that changed our way of life forever. As we began to incorporate it into every single thing we do, we truly believed that we were improving our lives. Making things more efficient and convenient. I don’t think that we could have ever conceived something like this would happen. And even if we could imagine it, none of us knew that it would have the sort of impact that it did. What price did we pay for convenience?

As consumers, we never want to think about the long-run. We live our lives striving for immediate gratification. We don’t want to wait, we don’t want to put the work in. We are entitled and lazy.

This was our consequence. 

The world is simpler now. Our brains have slowed without the ability to be stimulated 12 different ways all at once. Our sense of community is both stronger than before and the weakest it's ever been. We know that we need each other, that without each other we wouldn’t make it. But we all resent the co-dependency. 

About a year after the blackout, the birth rate exploded. And it was a shock because there was no Facebook, no Instagram, no Twitter to announce your pregnancy on. It was a shock, but not a surprise. What could we expect from such an indescribable amount of boredom?

My wife and I spent our days differently afterward. We no longer had “jobs” like we used to. We started a garden after the stores began to empty. And the longer they stayed empty, the more we started growing. Our garden became larger and larger until it was no longer ours but the neighborhood’s. Now we tend to the plants. We harvest and distribute. We pickle vegetables and dehydrate fruits. We spend our days taking long drives to find new types of seeds that we don’t yet grow in our garden. 

In the evenings, we cook a humble meal and adjust our “bunny ears” antenna and watch the news on the staticky tv. It’s mostly just crime anymore. There is little to no advancement in trying to get the world back online. Japan began immediately. But as soon as they start trying to launch, it’s back down again.

We still don’t know where the virus came from. Everything was down before it could even be tracked back to the origin. There’s a lot of theories. It was China. It was the Russians. It was extraterrestrial. No one knows, but honestly at this point who really cares? 

We had enveloped our lives so deeply into cyberspace that with it’s destruction came our own. So no matter who created the virus, that was their only intention. And it was a resounding success.