Riley

18

The sun rose and everything fell. The news channels had been predicting the fall for some time, but now that it was here, no one knew what to do. A civilized, modern society, forced to live without an Internet connection. It was unthinkable! It was preposterous! What would they do without their online shopping carts and games of Clash of Clans? What would they do without their Netflix?
The government assured the people that the fall of the Internet was only temporary, that every possible measure was being taken to restore order. But things in the suburbs were beginning to go haywire. There was rioting in the streets, and windows of Apple stores across the country were smashed in. Lines wound for miles to get a futile turn at the library computers. One librarian commented, "More people have come to the library today than we've had in the past twenty years."
When twelve hours had passed since the last known Wi-Fi signal, everyone started to prepare for the worst. The shelves of the supermarket were scraped clean, people running out the doors with their arms full of stolen food, ready to hole up inside their houses. Homes grew dark with people turning off their lights in an attempt to save energy; they'd been advised that perhaps with enough energy, the Internet might work again.
Alex stood in the supermarket parking lot, watching people run to their cars, dropping bananas and pineapples and Kraft Easy Mac. Two plastic grocery bags dangled from his hands. As he lingered, the buzzing streetlights above him all clicked off at once, leaving the parking lot in complete darkness except for the little glowing rectangles of iPhones bobbing through the air, held up by people running aimlessly around trying to get a connection. Alex hefted his grocery bags and went home.
He entered the basement of his house, where his wife and two kids were huddled together under a lone lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. His daughter's eyes were glued to her phone screen as she endlessly tried to refresh Instagram. Her thumb swiped down, over and over, to no avail.
Alex put down the food and reached behind some books--the only books in the house--that had been down there in storage for at least ten years. He pulled out a silver rectangular box with a strange wire sticking straight out of the top of it.
"What's that?" his son asked, squinting.
Alex furrowed his brow. "I don't remember," he said. He looked on the side of the box. "The last few letters are fallen off, but I think it says. . .A.M. rad."
"An amrad," his wife murmured. She stared off into space, her eyes hollow, haunted by the withdrawal of not chatting with her Facebook friends every forty-five minutes.
Alex pressed a button on the amrad, and a burst of static sound jumped from the machine, making his wife shriek. His kids huddled, wide-eyed, with their arms around each other.
Alex turned the dial, hearing nothing but static, until suddenly they heard a tiny blip of a voice.
"It's--"
"Go back!" shouted his son. Alex turned the dial back to where they had heard the voice, and they listened.
"Surely this is the greatest challenge our nation has had to face since the television shortage of 2044," the deep, sonorous voice said. "All are advised to--" There was a pause. Then the voice returned. "This just in," it said, gravely. "I have a new leak from Washington's technologists.
"We have no indication of when the Internet will be coming back," the voice said, with a hint of panic trembling in its bass rumble, "and there is no sustainable evidence that it will be coming back at all. Please--"
Alex shut off the amrad as his kids burst into tears and shouts, and his wife wailed wordlessly. It was later reported that enough tears were shed at that moment in basements across the country that the salt in them could have kept all the streets of New York, in blizzard conditions, dry for twenty-seven hours.
"Shut up!" Alex yelled, and the wailing diminished to a whimper. "Shut the hell up, all of you."
"But, Alex," his wife protested, "what if the Internet never comes back? How will I get anywhere without Google Maps? How will I cook anything without goodrecipes.com? What will . . . "
Alex stood up. "That's it," he declared. "I can't take it anymore. I'm going outside."
"No!" his wife cried hysterically. She got up and placed a trembling hand on his arm. "It's too dangerous . . . "
He shrugged her away. "I'm going." He started up the basement stairs, his steps growing slower and slower as he neared the top.
He stood in the dark stairwell for a moment, listening to his own breathing.
Alex stared at the door handle and slowly turned the knob.