David went back to his book. He was ignoring the news broadcast on the television behind him, as he'd done all morning. They had all ignored the news since mid-day yesterday. The reporter was making a good effort at it, though.
The news itself was non-existent. Nothing had happened. It had been a day and a half, and the only interesting development was the discovery of the reporting flub the night before. Nothing that could even remotely be construed as a world-ending event had shown up. At the same time, nothing less would be worth commenting on right now. The waiting had long since lost its excitement. Even still, by the way the reporter was talking, you'd think that his audience was on the edge of their seats. Nothing had happened yet. But something might happen any moment now, and you shouldn't change the channel, just in case. You wouldn't want to miss it.
Half an hour later, something actually did happen. David hadn't been paying attention, so he missed the start of the announcement.
> "...lost contact with the lunar reconnaissance orbiter just over five minutes ago, and all three lunar rovers around ninety seconds after that. Estimates from the telecommunications industry indicate that the first of their satellites should enter the boundary of the anomaly sometime within the next five--"
And the broadcast ended. No noise, no warning, just a black screen with a "no signal" message. David walked over to the television to see if something had come unplugged. He poked and prodded; he wiggled the cables and turned it all off and on again. After a minute of fiddling, he found another channel that was still broadcasting. It lasted half a minute and then it, too, went black. David fiddled some more looking for anyone still transmitting, but then the whole receiver stopped working entirely. It showed some sort of technical error, summarized at the bottom by telling him to "please wait." There was nothing left to try.
David stood back up and frowned. He hadn't particularly cared about the news all day, but then when things finally got interesting, all of the broadcasts dropped. For weeks, the networks had bragged about all the preparations they'd made. Redundant data paths, shielded network equipment, hardened technology stacks. They had lit up all the newest and oldest systems side-by-side, from fiber optics to telegraphs, with the assumption that no matter what changes the apocalypse would bring, at least one of their systems would surely be immune.
What a disappointment.
David stared dispassionately past the useless television, out the window, gazing off into the huge cedar trees that surrounded the cabin. He imagined the thousands of corporate nobodies scrambling like mad in their corporate offices, trying to figure out what had knocked out every last one of their communications systems in one go. "No thank you," he thought. That sounded like torture. He'd much rather be right here, reading in the woods.
Still, if this was it, if this was the full extent of the fated global apocalypse, well this wasn't so bad, right? Sure, a global communications blackout was nothing to sneeze at, but people would survive. This was going to make a mess for sure, and he wasn't about to pretend things would be fine. Everyone was going to become a lot more isolated, global commerce would be left in tatters, and a lot of disgustingly wealthy people were about to become a lot less disgustingly wealthy. But at least nobody was going to starve.
David couldn't help but feel relieved. Most of the scenarios he had been concerned about, and most of the preparations he and Gary had made, were based on the assumption that they were going to have to survive for a long time without--
Click.
The power went out.
David held his breath and listened for several seconds as the power outage left the room in sudden, complete silence. Then he let it out again in a slow sigh. It was hard to imagine that this could be a sign that good things were on their way.
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The grocery store was surprisingly busy given the predicted end of all things, and all that. Apparently a lot of people felt the same way Evelyn did: if you're gonna go anyway, you might as well go with chocolate.
The candy aisle looked as though the world had in fact already ended. It looked perhaps as though a zombie horde had torn through, except one where the zombies relentlessly consumed sugar instead of brains. It was a similar story in the cereal aisle. Shelves were largely cleared out, with the majority of the remaining merchandise on the floor. These particular zombies apparently would wither in the presence of healthy produce, though. Not a single carrot or apple had been disturbed.
Another important difference in the look of the store was the lack of employees. There was exactly one, a distinctly uncomfortable teenager, and he was busy running the self-checkout station. The sheer lack of support went a long way toward explaining the state of the place. The customers were running the asylum, so to speak.
Evelyn found what she was looking for. Or rather, she found an acceptable substitute for what she was looking for. The best snacks were already gone, but she'd make do with what was left. She made her way to the self checkout, scanned her treats, and hit the "pay now" button. The screen went black. For a moment she assumed she'd done something wrong, until she noticed that everything else had turned off too.
A sudden, eerie silence enveloped the supermarket as dozens, perhaps hundreds of whirring fans and other mechanical components all at once spun down to a halt. All the sounds you otherwise never previously noticed just... stopped. The early afternoon sunlight filtered in through the skylights and oversized windows, but otherwise the store had gone dark.
Everyone was silent for a second, and then multiple people all cursed at once. Everyone was half-expecting this, but nobody was expecting it right now. The timing was terrifically inconvenient.
Evelyn pulled out her phone and sent a quick text to David and her dad:
"At store. Power out. Going home now."
Part of the plan was that at the first sign that things were wrong, everyone would drop what they were doing and head for the house. If she didn't get home soon enough, they'd come looking for her. As important as her shopping might be, it was more important to make sure everyone was safe. Waiting might not cause any trouble, or it might instead be the difference between making it out versus getting trapped. David had explained by saying, "It's better to be on the ground wishing you were up in the sky than up in the sky wishing you were on the ground." Evelyn had never flown a plane, but she thought she understood what he meant.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
She checked the store clerk's name tag. "Excuse me, Jeremy?"
Jeremy came over. "Yes, ma'am? Can I help you?" he said.
"Hi, can you please ring me out real quick? I really need to run." She put on her best damsel-in-distress act. The charm was a long shot, but every little bit helped.
"I'm sorry, there's no way to process transactions until the power comes back on," he said. "It probably shouldn't be very long," he added, with unrealistic optimism.
"Oh," she acknowledged. "Are you stuck here for very long?" she asked, as if to change the subject.
"Ugh," Jeremy groaned. He seemed like he had been just waiting for someone to ask, "I'm here till seven tonight. It's like six more hours or something. And I've got to run this whole store by myself until then. Melinda and Devin completely no-showed. They didn't even call out. And I'm not even getting hazard pay for this."
"Maybe we can help each other out," she grinned. "This stuff comes to a total of about fifteen dollars. You'll be here when the power comes back. Here's twenty dollars, when the power comes back you can pay for these for me and keep the change!"
She had no illusion that he'd agree to it. But she wasn't about to start shoplifting, so she didn't wait around for him to refuse. She closed his hand around the money, and before he understood what was going on she was out the door. By then, half a dozen other customers were making him similar offers. She didn't look back.
From the moment the power died, it had taken her less than sixty seconds to get out of the store. Not bad, by her estimation. Evelyn paused to take out a small notecard and wrote:
"Power out. Leaving for home, no delay, normal route. No injuries or problems. 1:30pm. Evelyn."
She hid the notecard in a predetermined location near the store entrance. Another part of the plan from yesterday was all about communication. If something happened and David or Gary came here looking for her, they would check to see if she left one of her notecards under a rock to the left of the entrance, which would tell them her status and intentions. Until she got home, her job was to make herself easy to find, just in case.
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Gary stood in his study glaring at his computers. He hated having a productive work session interrupted. It always left him feeling oddly confused and grumpy. He wasn't quite sure what to do next. Luckily, David showed up to distract him from his prior distraction.
"So... how's work going? Any progress?" David asked.
Gary was in every sense a modern day wizard. To some degree he even looked the part. Visibly, his age was practically indeterminate; he could be young and wise or old and spry, it seemed impossible to tell. His hair might possibly be going gray, especially in his scruffy beard, or perhaps it was just really light blonde. But one striking feature was undisputable: he had deep gray-blue eyes that sparkled with curiosity and energy and knowledge. Gary practically exuded both experience and drive. After mastering the world of information and technology and having made his fortune twice over, he had then switched fields and was now pushing the boundaries of neuroscience.
"What? Oh, yes indeed, David, plenty." Gary responded, "Why, we've made quite a lot of progress on the connectivity matrix. The neural implants are long-term biocompatible now, and we've mapped all of the higher-order sensing functions. Now we can read and synthesize any sensory input. But that's old news. More recently we've been working on a problem we previously didn't even know existed."
If Gary had been born in a different universe, he would have been flinging lightning bolts at the gods while exploring the secrets of the arcane. Here in this world, Gary The Wizard was exploring an entirely different set of mysteries. His inventions allowed people to communicate with computers through thoughts alone; it was high-tech telepathy, plain and simple.
"So we don't even have a common term for the problems we're working on," he continued, oblivious to the fact that he'd lost David all the way back at "connectivity matrix" and was now talking to a blank stare. "I believe we should call it something like 'memetic integration' but I'd appreciate your input."
"I... well... what?" David stammered.
"The problem," he continued, undeterred, "is the mechanism of thought itself. When you think of an apple, there's a part of your mind that knows what an apple is. Not the word 'apple' but the concept of the fruit itself. Interacting with words was easy, but language is too imprecise and often inaccurate. We needed to work directly with the concepts."
"So you're saying," David ventured, "that your machine needs to understand what an apple is, not just the word. Right?"
"It's not actually about apples," Gary corrected, "The implant needs to understand not only what you say, but also what you mean. This initially seemed impossible, but it turned out that we could use the same techniques as with mapping language. We just needed to map out the patterns of neural connections so we could see how each concept is represented. Each person has a different map of course, but we're getting really good at building the picture as we go. We can then just follow the connection from what you say to what you mean. Plus, once we understand what you mean, then you don't actually have to say anything!"
"So, then, you're doing cool stuff?" David suggested. He barely understood what Gary was trying to explain, but he was pretty sure it was impressive.
"Very much so!" Gary grinned like a kid. "Our latest prototypes do precisely what you want them to do. They can practically read your mind. It feels like science fiction but it's actually quite straightforward once you know where to look. This is a truly exciting time to be alive." Gary absolutely beamed while talking about his work.
"And this? You seemed upset about something," David said, trying to bring things back to the here and now. He waved vaguely at the computers that hummed away along the wall. Gary had entire racks of computers and supplemental equipment, half of which he had probably invented himself. Despite the power outage, everything was running just fine.
"Ah, yes," said Gary. "The battery backups are still active, but the network connections dropped long before the power went out. It was most curious. My colleagues disappeared one at a time, mostly east-to-west, over the course of about three minutes. I'm still trying to work out what happened."
"Gary," David nudged, "we were expecting something like this to happen, right?"
"Were we?" Gary looked dumbfounded.
"That's why we came here to the cabin. It's why the world has been just sitting around doing nothing for the past two days."
"Oh, yes. Right, that confounded calamity. Yes. I'd forgotten about that." It said something about Gary that he could simply forget that the world was ending. "I suppose this means the whole mess is finally upon us then?"
"I guess?" David shrugged, "The news pundits had been predicting communication problems, so that's not a surprise. But I don't know if the power outage is related or just a coincidence."
"Yes, well, we'll take what we can get," said Gary with a sigh. He sat back down in his giant office chair and looked out the window, a pensive frown on his face. Warm and peaceful, it didn't look like a global apocalypse. There was no rain of fire, no plague of locusts, no earthquakes or pestilence; it was just a comfortable autumn afternoon.
Still, when Gary thought about it, there was a nagging sense of transformative presence that felt both unusual and yet vaguely familiar. It felt weighty and powerful, but yet light as a breeze and formless as mist. He thought he should be able to place it, but the feeling slipped through his senses like smoke between his fingers.
The strange uncertainty of it all was extremely disquieting, and his first thought was for his family.
"How's Evie?" he asked, "Where is she?"
"I got a text from her right after the power went out. I think she should be home in about twenty minutes." David replied. "Should I go fire up the generator in the meantime?"
"Hold on, I feel like..." Gary trailed off. This thing at the edge of his attention kept vying for his notice, like the vague memory of something critically important. He drummed his fingers on his desk trying to focus, trying to identify that prickling in the back of his mind.
Gary stared intently at nothing in particular, eyes unfocused, lost in trying to remember, lost in trying to find what he had missed. Meanwhile, a luminescent blue vapor like faint smoke wafted gently off his skin. It moved and danced with the air currents, muted in the sunlight but still glowing faintly with otherworldly energy.
The true cause of this apocalypse was beginning to show its form.