Cell

My flight was about to land in London when the captain made the announcement. Not the usual weather report, time, and enjoy your stay announcement. It sounded like a logistical nightmare.

We circled Heathrow for what felt like an eternity while they figured out the landing order using some patched-up backup system. By the time we taxied to the gate, silent dismay, panic, and even abject terror showed on every passenger’s face. Apparently the entire nation’s cell system was down. Not just the cell service itself, but every phone was dead. It seemed we were cut off. We deplaned soberly, without the usual excited bustle.

Luckily, I thought to scoop up a little GBP before leaving the States, since the rate was in my favor. My cards are all loaded onto my phone except one low-balance piece of plastic I keep in my wallet for emergencies. Another plus was that the hotel greeter was already there holding a white card emblazoned with the hotel logo, my name handwritten on it in black marker when I made it through the apologetic customs queue. By then, it was determined that only cellular devices were affected.

There were traffic snarls all along the route to the hotel, what seemed like upset tourists pleading with perplexed bobbies and general mayhem, but I leaned back in my seat, thinking it was an unknown cyberattack that would get sorted out in an hour or two, or some crazy overload that caused the failure as happens occasionally. That last wouldn’t explain a black screen on every cell.

In my opinion it was a cyberattack, and I idly wondered which nation or brilliant teenager with too much time on their hands figured it out and what method they used. I say idly, I am the head systems analyst for one of the bigger UK banks with operations in New York City, so this particular problem wasn’t served on my plate, hallelujah.

Once in the hotel room, I showered and slept for a couple of hours since I had no meetings until the following day. When I woke up, groggy, it was already late afternoon, and the winter sun was heading to its bed in the west for the day. I heard what turned out to be a phantom ringtone on my device, picked it up, then turned on the television to quell the disappointment. My phone screen was still a shiny black mirror.

Word had been trickling in by email while I slept that every nation was experiencing the same problem. Armies were beginning to collect and mobilize forces, aiming to neutralize an attack from the most likely country depending on their point of view, with no idea whether they would need to fend off a physical attack. Envoys of tech specialists were arriving in the UK from a few European nations and further afield, gathering in London to sort out the problem together. Few old copper landlines still exist in the UK, and those are scheduled to be converted to digital in a few months. The old direct line at Downing Street to the Oval Office was always off the grid, so to speak. It’s an expensive phone bill, that one, but it shows some good planning by someone in the past. They haven’t yet found a foolproof way to escape the analogue.

I opened the email on my laptop; it was still working, and I found a long string of worried messages from my wife. I opened the latest one and started typing out an apology. Sleeping didn’t seem like a good enough excuse, so I left out the why and focused on the general chaos. A few minutes after pressing send, I got a relieved response. School was cancelled until the problem was resolved, and most people were working from home if they could. Neighbors navigated unexpected issues with kindness, as they always do in New York during serious emergencies that are compounded by city living. Great, I typed back. Sorry, I need some sleep now.

But I didn’t go back to sleep right away. I started thinking about 911, the electrical blackout of the entire Eastern US, the Israelis programming phones to explode in Palestinian hands. That last thought saw me gingerly pick up my phone by the corner, carry it to the bathroom, and lay it down on the shower tiles for the night. I sent one last email home, counseling my wife to do the same as a precaution. Then I answered one from the office. See you tomorrow.

And I wondered who was behind this and what they stood to gain. They had the whole world in their hands.

Then I went to sleep.

By the next morning, after walking the few blocks to headquarters, I found out this problem was indeed becoming my problem. The bank had been inundated with people whose only connection to their money was through a phone app, with the passwords saved on their phones. If they did receive any paper notices, no account number was listed, a result of an uptick in mail fraud. Anyone younger than 35, and quite a few older ones too, had never used paper checks or had given up on them in favor of online bill pay apps. Some didn’t even have a physical card anymore, so they needed one to ride the Tube. These usually take a few days, but I had the bank executives agree to expedite delivery within 24 hours worldwide to anyone who applied for a card.

It wasn’t apparent how long this problem would last. I told them, treat this more seriously, or we will lose customers. Look, dedicate one or two tellers at each branch, depending on the size, to help people access their accounts. Get the word out on the tele if you can get any airtime, and send emailed procedural instructions to all the branches. Let ordinary people have access to their cash.

International wire transfers were not in trouble, but were happening at a slower pace than usual, probably because governments were checking each one thoroughly before its completion. It did put a damper on stock trading; possibly for the first time in history, every market was shuttered for an entire week.

We started working on the project I had come for originally, explaining and installing background security updates my team had been working on.

After a few days with no phones in sight, people started greeting each other less absently, shaking hands while making longer eye contact. More conversation happened vocally instead of notes passed between devices under the table. People began to focus their undivided attention during meetings. More and less connection, if you know what I mean. More connection to the present moment and less to things outside our view.

By the end of the week, I finished my work and headed to the airport. Checking in was a bit more manual than usual, with more staff worn out after a long week. Finally, in the lounge with a pint, I pulled out my phone. Black. But as I was storing it, the screen was no longer the opaque black object I had come to expect. A huge yellow smiley face with a pirate patch over one eye appeared against the black ground and it spoke the text written beneath it in a threatening loop. Just a reminder: you are human, not a god. See you again soon and have a low-tech day.

After three minutes of this message, people whose sound was turned on dug their devices out and silenced them, and people who were wondering what was happening pulled theirs out as well- this has been a test rang out, and all the phones returned to normal.

A cheer erupted across the entire airport, preceding a buzz of excited conversation. I joined in at first. Then I checked all the apps on my phone, went through each and changed all the passwords. Everything seemed ok. But I still wondered: what was the point of the exercise?

On the flight home, I thought about a group of creative tech kids in college who wanted to rule the world. They started with an easy way to exchange money for low rates and pay for merchandise. Then they branched out and started social media platforms and bought messaging accounts, created data storage systems, and dabbled in rare earths. Surely, by this time, they had discovered a back door into every cell phone ever made.

They are running into resistance in every country against resource-draining data centers, and average citizens aren’t connecting the storage of their personal data, social media data, websites, online searches, photos, corporate data, and government data to those centers. Years of it, and multiplying exponentially.

Maybe, just maybe, it was a lesson in what cutting back our digital footprint might mean; maybe it’s gotten out of hand, and maybe it’s time we each looked at how we are contributing to this problem.

Some have said that the presence of humans and their use of the Earth has no effect on the world or on each other; it’s too vast, but I think about the Great Smog of London, the Dust Bowl of the 1940s, the tear in the Earth’s Ozone layer, the near extinction of the Bald Eagle from DDT, all caused by humans, and the latter three repaired by humans. I think of the smog over Los Angeles and the death of the Hudson River in the 1970s. I think of entire species of birds we’ve obliterated, animals hunted to extinction, or put on the red data list. I think of the tar we have smeared over every route and every driveway. I see the mountains we have removed and burned up or rebuilt in our cities. I think about pesticides and herbicides, genetically modified ingredients in foods, about lab-created egg products in baked goods, lab-grown meat and fish, and our addiction to our phones, and I wonder, what are we doing to ourselves? Are we creating a world we can’t sustain or repair?