That night, the lights went out.
That night, thousands of people died.
That night, our civilisation came to an end.
Well, not to a complete end. We still had, you know, science and art and stuff. It’s just that most people were plugged in when the crash happened, and had their brains fried. The knowledge was still there, on hard drives and disks. We just couldn’t get to it any more.
‘They created the means of their own destruction.’ That’s what people will say about us in the future. The things we built to help us live were the things that finally killed us. For now, all we’re interested in is blame. No one remembers that they knew the risks of the implants and interfaces when they brought them. No one is considering that, if they had stood up against the ‘cyborgation’ of the human race, their friends and families might still be alive. Give it a few years.
I’m not dead. You may have noticed. I wasn’t plugged in to any sleep regulator; I wasn’t using the brand new link to the visual projection network. I know people who were, and they were probably the luckiest ones. Their minds, so immersed in the movie or documentary being streamed into their visual implant, wouldn’t have felt a thing.
I was woken by the screams of parents, spouses, children, discovering their loved ones sitting there like so much rotting cabbage. Breathing, in some cases, but brain dead. The people on sleep regulators weren’t even that.
I sat up in bed and rubbed sleep from my eyes. Looking back, I suppose I was shocked at how few screams there actually were. At the time, and in the dead silence of the night, it was deafening.
My light didn’t come on when I asked, so I got up in the dark and pulled the curtains up to let some light in. But the street lights were out, and the constant glow from satellites high above was conspicuous by its absence. I frowned, puzzled. How could all the lights be out?
The ramifications of the blackness didn’t hit me until I was outside. I had a torch – the only one on the street, and probably in the neighbourhood. It was battery powered, so old as to be an antique. I swept the puny light around, looking for anything that could tell me what was happening. A man in the house opposite me saw the light and stumbled out through the now unlocked front door. By the light of the torch, I could see a shock on his face that held back tears, and when he came closer, my nose told me he had thrown up recently. I tried to remember the man’s name.
“What’s going on?” I asked him. He looked at me as though I’d been living in a cave for a year with my eyes and ears closed, and tried to speak.
“I… They…” Horror filled his eyes, and he rushed away to be sick again in a bush.
I watched him go, then looked round again, still frowning. And so it was that, with a quiet retching noise in the background, I realised what had happened. The power was out. The power, that sustained lives and livelihoods, was out. I was one of the few people on the planet still alive.
I don’t know how many people survived the crash. I don’t think I ever will. It’s likely that even if people weren’t plugged in that night, they would have found it impossible to survive without the machines they took for granted. However, my torch shone like a beacon through a fog, and just over a dozen people gathered in its insignificant light. Three children, all between ten and thirteen, who had only survived because their parents were plugged in to set up the regulators, or to find a movie to send their baby off to sleep. They sat off to one side, rubbing their eyes and wondering what was happening. The man I saw first was joined by four others, two of whom he knew, and two he didn’t. One man brought his wife and sister-in-law, and four more women showed up soon after. After two hours, I was sure there was no one else left in the area.
No one wanted to go home and wait for first light. They couldn’t stand the sight of the dead machines and people alike. So I invited everyone to my house, which was just about large enough to give everyone a bit of floor to sleep on. I let the two youngest children have my bed, and the thirteen year old took the sofa. We spent an uncomfortable night on hard floors, sharing blankets, but everyone was glad for the company.
The dawn light hitting my eyelids woke me. I opened my eyes, and suddenly realised how cramped everyone must be. Getting up carefully, so as not to disturb the woman on my left, I tiptoed through the sleeping bodies and out into the hall.
In the kitchen, one of the men was trying to get water from the tap. There was a small dribble; barely enough to cover the bottom of a glass. He looked up at me as I walked towards him.
“There’s no water.” He told me. Despite the fact the taps weren’t working, he turned them off.
“I guess the pumps are out too.” I said.
“What are we going to do without water?”
“Don’t worry about it. I have a couple of bottles in a cupboard somewhere. We’ll be fine for a bit.”
He nodded and wandered back to the living room, where five people still slept. I wondered who he’d lost that night.
I found the water and collected all my glasses together. There weren’t enough for all fifteen of us. Thankfully, not everyone woke at the same time. Breakfast was a disjointed affair, filled with tears and awkward silences. Together, we used up most of my bread, butter, milk, and cereal. There were no hot meals that morning.
Eventually, once the house was awake, we sat down to talk. Nobody mentioned the dead. Instead, we talked about what we should do.
“The other houses are all unlocked.” One man told us. Although we had introduced ourselves, I was still having trouble with a few names. “There’ll be food and clothes – enough to keep us going a good long while.”
“So you want to stay here?” Max, the man I had spoken to that morning, asked.
“Where else should we go? There are bound to be people out there working to restore power, or even looking for survivors. Our best chance is to stay put and wait for help.”
“What if there’s no one left?” A woman, Isabel, asked.
“We’re left, aren’t we? It’s pretty unlikely we’re the only ones.”
“Why did the power turn off?” Trey asked. It was the first thing the thirteen year old boy had said all morning, so we gave more thought to the question than we might have done otherwise.
“I guess there was a problem with the generators.” Max told him.
“All of them?” Michelle asked incredulously. “At the same time?”
“Sounds like sabotage.” The married man declared. His wife, Susan, rolled her eyes.
“Everything is a conspiracy with you, Don. There are computers linked up to every system, and they’re all networked to the Overseer’s office. A fault in any of those computers could spread through the entire system. Not everything is the result of rebel activity.”
Almost as though I had second sight, I could see where this conversation was headed. I sat in my corner, and tried to look inconspicuous.
“I’m just saying, there’ve been a lot of people threatening this kind of thing. The news yesterday said the Humanists were trying to make people give up their machines for a day. And the Empaths – they’ve always said that electricity was the worst thing to happen to mankind. Just because they can’t use any of it themselves.”
“Don, this isn’t what we need to discus.” The man I had met first last night interrupted. I think his name might have been Timothy. To me, he was a miracle maker. Don looked around and conceded the point. Timothy stood up to speak.
“We can’t rely on anyone coming to get us, Matt.” He said, looking over at the first man to speak. “Even if there are enough people to mount a rescue, they have no transport, and they’d be looking to their own survival first. That’s what we should do. But we can’t stay here. What would happen when the food runs out? Where would we get water from? We’ll need to find a river or lake or something, and soon. The water will be the first thing to go.” He sat down. The room was silent.
“There’s a pond in the town centre.” Michelle pointed out.
“A pond isn’t good enough. The water will be stagnant, and even if it wasn’t, it’d run out pretty quickly. It has to be running water.”
“There isn’t any, though.” Don said. “The council rerouted the last river to the hydro-plant just last month. The only bits of it still visible are filled with oil and muck.”
“So we’ll have to leave the county. I know there are rivers left somewhere – Greenpeace wouldn’t have let them ruin all of them.” Tim looked at me. “Do you have a map, Natasha?”
I think I ought to give you a bit of an explanation. There are, or were, two main factions against technologically enhancing people’s lives – the Humanists and the Empaths. The Humanists believed we shouldn’t contaminate the ‘pure human form’, while the Empaths, on the whole, wanted to contaminate for all they were worth, but couldn’t.
There is a condition, very rare, called ERS, or electronic rejection syndrome. Empaths have this disease, and the stigma surrounding it is extremely similar to HIV, and even homosexuality back in the twentieth century. But it’s not as though Empaths can’t have any implants. Some bright spark in the government came up with the idea of an empath chip, which is connected to the part of the brain that deciphers emotion in other people. It hurts less than other implants, but it’s not completely painless. Most Empaths would rather live with the pain, which is fairly small, than go without that small bit of technology. However, for some, it isn’t enough. There are ERS sufferers who feel that if they can’t have the technology of modern civilization, then no one should. Unfortunately, the majority of people believe all Empaths feel that way.
I don’t.
Words could not express how grateful I was to Timothy when he stood up and diverted Don’s train of thought. The last thing I needed just then was for someone to notice the lack of interfaces throughout my house. The last thing I needed was for someone to accuse me of the deaths of millions of people.
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