How ironic, thought
Thorogood, the economy's collapse coming forty days and forty nights
after the Internet crashed. A quiet agnostic, he guessed this
coincidence likely nothing more than that, although he kept the
thought to himself. Were he able to Tweet Jane, she would have
appreciated the coincidence as well. She might in fact have
thought it herself, as the Collapse coincided to the day, so far as
most anyone could know, two-score days following the abrupt
termination of all digital communication on the planet, so far as
most anyone could know.
Now, alone on the road,
Thorogood struggled to marshal his warring emotions, foremost among
them a mood of dread, a faceless stubborn swell of various dire
possibilities that periodically pushed up from his intestines and
through his chest into his head, occasionally with no apparent
invitation from slack or reactive reasoning. Vying with these surges
of black mood to compromise a reliable grip on the fragile optimism
he believed kept him going was his grief and anger over the loss of
his son and daughter to this apocalyptic turn of events. His teenage
son, Jethro, as with most of his generation, had been unable for the
first several days to disabuse himself of hope his smart phone would
somehow return to life. By the thousands youngsters swarmed into the
streets shuffling aimlessly, many mumbling to themselves, heads bowed
as their eyes stared fixedly at the plastic devices in their hands.
Some used both hands – one holding the device while a couple of
fingers of the other tapped desperately on the tiny blank screens.
Jethro was one of these.
“He's trying to text,”
his sister, Esther, told her father. “I tried at first, too. I
thought maybe it was just the screen, you know? The light or
whatever? I finally gave up.”
