The Progression Switch (9 page)

Around the campfire that night, rather than speaking words aloud, Arthur and Tupaia communicated through an entirely different means.

Tupaia projected all kinds of data into the air around Arthur, from images and camera footage, to other types of videos, diagrams, and information. He moved things around like the balls addressing them one right after another; determining the next steps forward.

There wasn’t time for everything. However, within the span of the next twenty hours without sleep, Arthur got down and dirty and accomplished more than you or I could in about a year’s worth of hardcore studying.

With each thing he did, Tupaia’s signal grew stronger and stronger until the time came for Arthur to decide if he would stay or go wandering. The choice wasn’t hard.

***

Back in the world that Stacy, Greg, and the kids inhabited, their food ran out quickly, and things got pretty desperate. Yet, with each new day more people started showing up back at the apartment complex. Some were driving, while many others returned on foot, and with them they brought what supplies they had left.

There had been some murders, and things got a bit out of hand, but Greg and Stacy stayed shut in tight, only leaving when it became absolutely necessary to find something for the kids to eat.

Sometimes, out of necessity or hunger-induced irrationality the adults took off together at night and went looking in dumpsters, through stores, for whatever they could find. Once a fair amount of people had come back home, people began working together and taking care of one another.

From sharing food and blankets, to toiletries and just being together, people figured out a way to keep order and survive. They had no authorities to depend on, and at the end of the day those with the guns happened to not be so bad after all.

The problem was that their bodies never got sufficient amounts of food, and they were slowly dwindling away. The children began to starve and were suffering in quiet desperation. Then, one morning, things began to change.

Everyone was asleep in their usual places. Hazel with Stacy in the main bedroom, Chad in Hazel’s room, Greg on the couch in the living room.

Some commotion happened to wake Hazel up so she crept out of bed, tiptoed into the living room, and made it out onto the porch. Something was definitely going on but she had no idea what. After a minute or so she gave up and decided to go crawl back into bed with her mother where it was nice and warm under the blankets because of body heat.

While retracing her steps through the living room she noticed the computer was turned back on and there was a new icon on the desktop. Despite the fact she stopped checking days earlier.

Well, it did. Hazel went over, grabbed the mouse, and clicked on what she understood as the internet icon. The page opened up, and there was Google. It had no impressive artwork or symbols, but their internet connection had been restored.

Hazel ran toward her mother, almost tripping on Chad, who was sleeping on the floor and just woke up, rubbing his eyes.

“Mommy, come look, come look!” Hazel said as she began to shake her mother’s boney shoulders.

“What is it, Hazel?” Stacy asked without opening her eyes.

“Come look at ‘puter,” Hazel insisted.

The last two syllables awoke Stacy instantly. She was out of bed and in front of the screen in seconds. Chad joined her, and then called out to Greg. While he was getting up, Stacy ran into the bedroom and took her phone out of her purse. There was a signal!

While Stacy started to dial her mother’s number, Hazel went in search of the television remote. All she knew was that it looked plausible that movie time had returned. They were exactly where Greg left them a week ago. She pushed the red button on the top right, and the TV turned on, but it wasn’t the cable box controller.

Chad walked over and turned on the cable, which was where Stacy left it, on the local news channel that had been blank last time she checked.

Commercials didn’t exist for the time being, and it looked like the news reporter himself hadn’t enjoyed a good night’s sleep or a decent meal in weeks, either.

“If you’re just joining us, then you’re probably wondering what happened. Well, it’s hard to explain, and as many things are only now coming back online, the reports are still coming in. The picture is anything but certain. Here is what we do know.”

He situated a few pieces of paper and began.

“Along with a return of the internet and mobile technologies, it seems that every media outlet in the world has been sent extended amounts of files concerning just about everything. All the skeletons are now out of the closet. This same mass of data has been emailed far and wide, so there won’t be any hiding it.”

“Now, that may not sound like much to a lot of people out there, so try this one on for size. If you’ve checked your bank accounts lately, then you’ve probably noticed that all your money is gone. Well, the good news is no one else has any money, either. In fact, not only is all known money gone, but any debt has vanished as well.”

“Someone in the heart of China unleashed what can only be described as a prolific computer virus of unparalleled power, and then programmed this thing to reboot exactly 57 days later. The big difference is we lost a lot in the process.”

“We’ve received reports that claim all intelligence agencies across the globe have lost everything they had, along with defense departments, contractors, corporations far and wide…”

Hazel turned back to her toys as Stacy came bolting around the corner to, “Mommy, can we watch a movie?”

“Not now, Honey. Guess what?” Stacy asked full of excitement.

“What?”

“I just talked to Grandma, and she said she has an internet connection as well… oh, the cable is back on.”

“Yeah, I just got off the phone with my brother. Seems things are returning to normal, somewhat,” Greg stated from the background.

Stacy wasn’t paying attention to the TV until she saw the look on Chad’s face.

“What is it? What’s he saying?” and then she became silent.

“But, all that stuff isn’t what most people want to hear right now. What they want to know is, when will my life get back to normal again? At this point there really is no way to tell, but it will most likely take months to get things moving again. What about getting food, when will there be food in the grocery stores again? When will we be able to go down to the corner store and fill up our cars with gas?”

“How long will it be before we all get to go back to work, check our emails, no one knows. It’s impossible because we still don’t know what things are going to look like when this is all said and done.”

He sighed, completely out of character from what Stacy and Greg were used to.

“In the last few weeks our cultures have inflicted a fair amount of damage. One look outside this very building is enough to shock anyone in the suburbs or more rural areas. It’s going to take months to figure this stuff out, and rebuild. We’re looking at a fresh economic start, with the world’s war empires severely crippled.”

“I think it’s clearer now than it’s ever been, just how dangerously connected we all are to technology. How bad would things have gotten in another three weeks to a month? Why, we already told you about the Asian invasions and the chaos of the Middle East over the last two weeks alone. Those fires will be burning for months.”

“We seem to be coming back online now, and we’re all going to have to look around and take stock of the mayhem which started ensuing literally hours after the earth went dark.”

Click. Greg nabbed the controls and turned it off, because as far as he was concerned all they needed to know is that life was slowly going to get back on track again. Technology was returning to the 21st century.

“I think we’ll have plenty of time to listen to all that soon enough, guys, how about you?” Stacy wanted to seem supportive, and understood his state of mind. It was a little good news drenched in a bath of bad.

Greg decided not to endure any more of the talking head’s dismal rant. They had enough problems of their own.

“How long do you think it will take for them to get some food around here?” Stacy asked.

Greg laid back down on the couch, in no hurry, and seemingly not impressed.

“It could take months, who knows. No one has any money, it sounds like. Not the stores, the people, the gas stations, the people that make the stuff, or the truckers who haul it.”

“Months?”

“Could be much more than that, Stacy. It could be a year for all we know. Everyone has to get back to work, deal with what’s left, and go from there. Right now, there’s too much confusion still, and no one really knows what’s left.”

“I wonder how much information was lost altogether,” Chad asked before his father’s voice could get any livelier. Once he got going, the kid knew it was hard to stop his rocket powered motor mouth.

“We could watch the news? I wouldn’t mind listening to it,” Stacy said, and then looked at Chad for back up.

“Yeah, Dad, I wouldn’t mind either, it’s better than sitting here in silence. We’ve been doing that for weeks now.”

The kid was right, so Greg turned the TV back on, and since everyone else was awake, he rolled over and pretended not to be listening.

A bartering system emerged, and they survived. Eventually the internet started hopping again, ecommerce picked up where it left off for the most part, but many things changed forever.

For example, disillusionment with debt was solidified and it was harder to distribute, no one wanted the stuff. Prices plummeted, and the world’s carbon footprint almost disappeared for a bit, giving the environment a breather.

No one was in a hurry to return to how life had been before The Progression Switch. What was the point? The world enjoyed relative peace and quiet for a while as militaries backed off into their respective corners and had a hard time dealing with zero intelligence.

The strangest thing of all was the complete disappearance of TupaiaDRD4. It was gone and no one could find it. Was it really out of the picture, or laying in wait, to strike again at some other time in the future, should things get out of control again? Protection protocols were enacted, but without any hard data on Tupaia to work with, no one knew how to stop it from returning.

Somewhere, there’s a Progression Switch,
and human beings don’t seem to control it.

“The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.”
Thomas Sowell

Click…

###

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Social Media Holocaust

By

Brian Krogstad and Damien Darby

What you are about to read will disturb you; make no mistake. By the end of the first page you’ll be confronted with a troubling fictional story revolving around two things that are deeply rooted in modern society: the fear of death and the obsession with social media. In fact, it will challenge comforting and preconceived notions of the social order at large. Tragedy rains down upon these pages, tinged with shadow, and making slippery all that we take for granted through this dark tale.

From the prison industry to Anonymous, from a second American revolution to wide-spread mass murder, it’s meant solely to entertain but raise a few eyebrows along the way. The journey ahead is wrought with things that will leave uneasy impressions for the remaining days of your life; a sincere warning.

For what if one day people began receiving friend requests, and then within 24 hours, either they or someone on their friends list gets hacked-up nasty style? Photos, memes, and short moving picture clips of their murders begin showing up on their timelines. It starts small, but then spreads across the globe like an apocalyptic wave of the sun’s energy crawling across every inch of bare and exposed land.

Let’s face it, western society is already tiptoeing along the brink of all out civil upheaval. What if someone with a master plan used organized murder, social media, and a chaotic moment in history to pull off the most unimaginably large heist of all time that ended up remolding the entire face of humanity?

Sounds menacing doesn’t it. The more disturbing question is, what if that’s all just the modern propensity to lean towards conspiratorial explanations of the seemingly irrational? Either way, what lay in store is a wild ride that will take you through many edgy, controversial, and perturbing experiences. Social media becomes the vehicle for a 21st century holocaust.

You’re invited to enjoy at your own ris
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Social Media Holocaust
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