The Day the Internet Disappeared

As the scent of coffee filled the air she pressed the on button on her computer and waited for the internet to come up. Twenty minutes later the screen still did not hold her Yahoo home page which she found quite odd. She flipped the TV on and found out the world was abuzz that the internet had suddenly disappeared over night. It seems the TSA had shut the whole shebang down and what was once a daily ritual of information was going to resume in a few weeks as solely an interactive propaganda and information mining run by a Chinese filtering machine. It was no surprise as in the last few weeks the net gates had gotten a little rickety and Google and Facebook went the way of MySpace.

Myrna had no landline,  her smartphone was as useless as a coaster, and now as obsolete as a door stop. The androids that were run by Samsung with all their Google tidbits wired in had already died a slow death a month ago. Techies had said the bottlenecks were getting narrower and the thirteen main facilities that controlled the internet had their clusters of root servers taken down. Even the tier 1 providers like AT&T and Canle and Wireless no longer controlled a thing and now Twitter was something the birds did.

She quickly got dressed and decided to go out and buy a newspaper. Immediately she found out the world had changed over night. The porn filmmaker Vivid was now going public and their stock was skyrocketing already as there was no more competition and soon they would re-open up 100's of shuttered video stores.

As she slowly scanned the newspaper she noticed words were spelled wrong as writers had to remember how to spell again without the benefit of red squiggly lines informing them of misspelled words. Those that had been addicted to the internet had suddenly become illiterate. Classified ads were three times their size due to the loss of Craigslist and Nigerians were placing ads informing of many long lost relatives that had left millions of dollars to be claimed.  Ebay had been replaced by upcoming fleamarkets and Keyboard Cat tribute shows were now all the rage.

As she slowly sipped her coffee there was a knock at the door. It was a door-to-door salesmen selling hard bound volumes of "WIKIPEDIA: 2013 EDITION"  and magazines were being delivered from her once favourite online shopping haunts. Tower Records was now going to re-open their stores with a door crasher of all CDS for $99.99 each. Myrna wished she could have gotten all the music she could have before they had pulled the plug, as now the human race was back in the stone age soon to wipe each other out.

Eighth story from a series called:

"Linda's Dreadful Dark Tales"