The devices had been useless for so long with only error messages to greet every effort to connect, so many days and week and months – was it years already? – that everyone had finally come to the realization that the web wasn’t coming back to life.
Some said it was a conspiracy, that evil men and women had fed our dependency and then cruelly took it away to make us despair. Others said we just ran out of fossil fuel to feed the power plants and we owed it to the Earth to silence the things that drained the power. Others said we didn’t pass on the knowledge of how to fix the machines and thus we lost the ability to make repairs.
And then there were the ones they called The Realists, who asked whether it really matters what happened and shouldn’t we just get on with living without electronic connections. My dad and mom were Realists.
They talked about the day their last electronic toy had stopped working. Dad was frantic, but Mom had it figured out.
“But it wasn’t harming me,” he protested.
He blinked and stared at the sun as if seeking information there. No phone? No contact with the outside world? No answers to questions? How would he live?
The look on her face made him laugh, and he wanted to take a picture of it. But the camera had been in the device. He longed for it, and he had a notion in the back of his mind that the longing was the reason he needed to be rid of it. The back of his mind – he realized it had been some time since he had used the front, middle, back or any part of his mind.
And so they started accumulating relics of the times before the digital electronics had taken over, relieved to find they still worked pretty well. They found an old machine that played music that somehow was stored on round slabs and reproduced the sound by spinning the slabs and setting a needle on them. They had another machine that applied ink to paper to make copies of written things – news, stories, poems, essays even photos – although not the videos that the web had had.
Mom and Dad said if we’re going to still have civilization, we need to spread the words somehow.
He pulled an old-fashioned book out of his pocket, worn and yellow with a leather cover: The Mechanism of the Linotype by John S. Thompson.
He turned the crank on the press and a printed piece of paper rolled out.
The apocalypse had been happening all these years, and they had been too spellbound to realize it – but now the fog was lifting, and he saw that post-apocalyptic life would not be brutal and chaotic, as people had feared for years, but alive and well. The devices had been the agents of the fear they had all felt.
I admit it, I was anxious – chalk it up to fear of the unknown – but something in my parents’ words assured me that everything was going to be all right.