Adapting

When it came to it, Emmie played a game of Sudoku. She had to slow down over placing the fives and then speed up again to make sure she would get the last eight in place in time. Her heart, she noticed, had started to race with thirty seconds to go, as if the anticipated agony of a puzzle left floating forever in nearly-but-not-quite-complete limbo was a physical threat to her safety. And then it was done. An eight neatly placed in the last little box, a flashing “Genius Level!” message, and then, where there seemed so much life, nothing. Blackness. A void.

She had chosen the café across the street from the library for the event. By the time she had realised that “shut down gatherings” had become popular enough that they needed pre-booking, the library’s “Full Circle” event had been, well, full. She had scrolled through the comments below the post though, and found a number of people saying that the café still had bookable spaces and promising better refreshments to boot, and so she had booked a single seat at a shared table for six.

Introductions had been cursory, and Emmie was surprised, given the amount of chatter on the forums over the past three months, that no one shared how they would be using their final moments with their smart phones, as if to do so would be to disrespect the intimacy of a tender goodbye. Instead, they had made polite conversations about parking and the serendipity of having a rainy day, and which cakes were good, until gradually, people had started to pull away and pick up their phones, and one had followed the other. For the past hour conversations had died away, as each head had bowed, each pair of hands had clasped each small, glowing microcosm, and each mind had detached from the room, and joined with humanity across the globe.

Now, as every screen in the room turned irrevocably dark, a stillness lay across the room, a pause at the bottom of a breath, that moment of starvation, a heartbeat, and then the inhale. New air rushing in, and people beginning to move in their chairs, to drop phones into bags, to pick up cold coffee and smile at a neighbour as if to say “well, we went through something there, didn’t we?”

“So, that’s that” said a woman to Emmie’s left, and though there was no question, Emmie felt compelled to add weight to the point.

“Over and out” she said, and the two women raised their eyebrows as if in mingled surprise and curiosity about their own survival.

She didn’t stay long. She wasn’t sure what she had expected. She had imagined something primal, a collective re-grounding, nothing outlandish, no foot-stomping or ululation or anything, just a feeling, like a shared sunrise or the sudden community of getting into cold water. And she couldn’t exactly say there had been none of that, but by the time she had finished her latte the moment had passed. People who had come in groups had closed their circles and were talking as if this was any Sunday morning, and those at shared tables were remembering their strangeness to one another, and muttering their excuses. At the table by the window, two people already had their laptops open, and on her way out of the door, Emmie, saw a young couple fitting a new sim card into narrow handset with twelve soft buttons and a screen one digit deep.

The first few months went reasonably well. No one had expected that turning off the smart phones would be a panacea, but it was hard to deny a net benefit. Data was collected, of course. A psychologist went on TV and spoke about measurable increases in self-efficacy and how it was all down to having to read maps. An economist talked about sustainable consumer spending and the rebirth of the high street. A pop star sang the praises of a resurgence in CD sales. On the fringes, though, a spokesperson for “Differently Able” spoke about loss of independence amongst blind people and a representative of a neurodiversity think tank reminded a breakfast television audience that inclusion might mean using technology to promote equity rather than blanket removals under the banner of equality.

Emmie was able to acknowledge all of this. In her own life, there had been good things and bad. For starters, her RSI was beginning to heal, and she had started to imagine herself joining a club – tennis, or squash perhaps – in the summertime. Without the onslaught of innovative health solutions for pathologies she had previously considered normal human functioning, she had begun to feel less faulty, and less like a failure for not fixing everything too. At the same time, once the noise of a dozen new recipes a day had quieted, she had remembered that she quite liked cooking, and was eating better than she had in years. On the other hand, she had imagined she would see her friends more, but after a brief cluster of coffee shops, weekend walks and a dinner in a mid-range restaurant, she found not only was she not seeing them, but that she was communicating with them more infrequently. Those little moments of remembering one another, communicated there and then with a picture or a few words, turned out to have been maintaining relationships that might otherwise have stagnated and dried up through neglect. And then there was the itch. The constant sense of something untethered, an unnerving absence. They said that was not uncommon, these days. That it would fade, if people gave it time, and took up painting, or writing, or growing cress in window boxes.

The instigators, of course, sang the praises of the project. “…achieved exactly what we set out to…”, “…evidence of what can be done when there is global co-operation…”, “…historic decision in favour of humanity…” The detractors, naturally, critiqued every bump in the road. “…policy of undermining progress to maintain the systems that benefit…”, “…network of power which removes choice from….”, “…woeful, nay wilful, failure to consider those who…” But off the airwaves, people got on with their lives. And people, ordinary people, are born problem solvers.

Emmie held out with her laptop for five months. It was an old model, so underused that she had not thought it worth upgrading, but after five months of daily use, she conceded that she needed something more capable. And tougher. The machine wasn’t poorly made. It was just made for a different era. It just wouldn’t do what she wanted it to do anymore.

Of course, some laptops had been able to connect to the cellular networks for while. And machines robust enough to smack an assailant on the head with and then push on with that episode you were watching on your commute home were available. But suddenly, these things were affordable. It wasn’t a gradual thing, a slow lowering of prices. One day they were specialist items most people couldn’t justify paying for, the next, adverts were everywhere and the prices were broadly akin to a mid-range smart phone four years earlier. Emmie scoffed a little when, before the end of the first week after Shut Down, she boarded her train to find five people with brand new laptops perched on their knees. "So desperate they'll hand over hard earned money for a fix," Emmie thought. "It just shows we were right to do it now."

Over the next five months, “They’re mugs, paying out for something no-one needs” wore thinner and thinner until even Emmie could see “I wish I had one” lurking underneath, and then, just as her resistance was giving way, the “Smartop 2” was announced. 20% smaller, a battery life up to 18% longer, and with an added feature enabling the user to snap selfies using the inbuilt camera, the Smartop 2 was, astonishingly, the exact same price the Smartop had been when it was released five months earlier!

Emmie felt a pang of embarrassment when she took out her Smartop 2 the day after their release. She wondered, fleetingly, if she should have gone with the black casing instead of the pale greys on silver Strawberry Thief motif, but then she let her finger tips drift down the smooth, cool spine of a thrush and thanked herself for making the premium choice. Sitting on the platform, waiting for her train, she snapped a picture of herself against the red brick wall behind her, and with a one-click fast-key, loaded it into Instagram. “Back in Business”, she typed, clicked “Post Now,” and as the machine made a small “whish” sound, she breathed out a tension she had not realised she was holding, like a traveller arriving home, relief and sadness and gladness mingling on the doormat.

Like that same traveller, who turns to the pile of letters at her feet to find atop the bills and demands of life, a brochure for journeys to as yet unseen lands, the feeling didn’t last long. Emmie opened her weather app to check – again – the forecast for the day, and there, on a banner at the top of the page, was an advertisement for the new LapLife 3 – “30% smaller than LapLife 2, with smart-assist, forward facing camera, and the first internet-free laptop to laptop calling system, the LapLife 3 is the smartest laptop yet.”

It didn’t take long. Take the cards from a gambler's hand and watch him turn to the horses. Within a few years, everyone had one, in one model or another. Some people held out, of course, despite the logistical challenges that came with resistance. But not Emmie. Realistically, she told herself, she would never have joined a tennis club. And she still COULD cook something fancy. If she wanted to. That taste of life without the barrage had been sweet, and there were things she would, of course, reinstate from it. When she was ready. She could make that choice any time she wanted. But for now, Emmie stood, waiting while a young barista prepared her coffee. From her handbag, a new one, just a little larger than the ones she used to use, she pulled her Smartop 5 and with a familiar drag of pain, used her finger to open a new game of Sudoku.