Chronically Offline

“Chat, chat, check this out!” Jack exclaimed, doing a sharp turn sans-signal onto the highway ramp. “I’m telling you. Before I started hitting the gym, no bitches. Now- I can't go anywhere without some Stacy tryna get with me. Shit is insane. And here's the thing they don't tell you,' he added, speeding up to pass a few cars at once, 'once you can basically fuck anyone you want-'

The sound of something popping cut him off and suddenly the car started swerving drunkenly. 

'Fuck! Chat- I can't believe this shit, chat, but it looks like I blew a fucking tire, I'm gonna have to pull over, hang on...'

It was only when the fitness and lifestyle influencer who dubbed himself Jack Sixpack had steered up onto the highway shoulder that he noticed he was talking to a black screen. Somewhere in the chaos, his TikTok stream had completely crashed.

'Oh, come on,' Jack Collins (for that was his actual name) muttered. He swiped at the screen, tapping the blank abyss before attempting to turn it on and off again, pressing on the side button impatiently. 

Nothing happened. 'What the fuck.' His phone was the newest model. It had been plugged into the charge port, held up in the claw-like device he used when he streamed. Perfectly safe, despite what his numerous detractors liked to say. Aside from all the usual bullshit people liked to heap on the influencers of the so-called Manosphere (you're a bad example for young men, you're contributing to misogyny yada yada ya), he almost always had some loser internet sperg lacing into him about his driving streams. He'd only had an accident twice- not counting this time, and he didn't count this time. It wasn't his fault someone left junk in the middle of the road. 

It had been minutes and his phone hadn't responded to anything. look it up, he thought, and hed opened his mouth to ask Siri when he realized he couldn't use Siri. 

I’ll just have to call Triple A. 

No sooner had he had the thought than he realized that was also currently impossible. Damn it, Jack thought. His father had always stressed to him how important it was to learn things like how to change a tire, but what was the point? No one needed to do that stuff anymore. Until something like this happens, I guess.

Left with no other option, Jack braced himself for the indignity of what he was about to do. He wished he could have the stream up so his audience could follow him. This is crazy, chat, but I'm fucking stranded in the middle of the highway, he dictated in his head as he got out of the car. His tire was completely burst, the rim lying on the ground ,tilting the whole vehicle to the left like it had had a little too much to drink. It looked the way Jack felt when he came home from the club at four am. 

The cars whizzed by so fast they tugged Jack's cutoff tank along after them like a mini sail. He held out a hand, feeling lame. At first he stuck a thumb out, but remembered that was what you were supposed to do when you wanted a ride. Jack didn't want to do all that. If he could just borrow someone's phone he'd be good. He kept his own in his other hand, willing it to power on. As the cars bulleted by, he wondered how long he'd wait like this under the scorching sun. He was starting to think he was better off taking his chances with walking to the nearest exit when an approaching car slowed, putting on its blinker and easing up just ahead of the place he'd been stranded. It was an old green Honda Accord with a flaking paint job and a busted tail light. Its back bumper was festooned with various stickers, one of which was the obligatory 'coexist' ; others proclaimed 'fueled by feminine rage', 'elect more women' and 'my kink is unnerving the patriarchy'. Great. He was being rescued by a feminist. Jack was suddenly glad he did not have his stream going. 

The window in the car in front of him came down by inches- it seemed like the kind you had to crank- and a voice issued from within.

“You need some help?”

Jack walked to the open window. Inside sat an overweight young woman probably around his own age, give or take a couple years. She held a lit cigarette in one hand and had a purple streak in her shoulder-length brown hair. Septum piercing and everything Jack thought as he took in the ring in her nose. This bitch is a walking stereotype. 

"I just need to borrow your phone," he said. "If you don't mind. Had an accident and mine's not working."

She looked at him a moment, inhaling on her cigarette. "Damn," she said, blowing out a thin column of smoke into the general vicinity of his face. "What're the chances. Mine's gone AWOL too."

Jack hadn't been expecting that. "What d'you mean?"

"It died. Just went black. In the middle of my Instacart delivery, too. Honestly, I was hoping if I helped you out you'd let me bum a charger off you."

Moments later, after unsuccessfully flagging down anyone else, they were headed for the local AT&T. The woman- Valencia, she said her name was- never broke from smoking one cigarette after the other. Jack felt like he was starting to get a headache from the fumes. The bulky temperature-controlled bags in her back seat clunked back and forth with every turn she took. He noticed with grudging respect that her car was an old stick-shift model. He almost commented on it, but felt suddenly self-conscious of the fact that he himself did not know how to drive stick.

"So...you some kind of internet celebrity or something?" Valencia asked him after a moment of awkward silence.

"Huh?" Jack looked at her side profile askance. "How d'you figure?" He didn't peg her for someone who'd be searching the alpha male archives online, but you never knew. Maybe she knew all about his channel. Maybe she hate-watched him like he imagined a lot of bitter fat single women did.

"No one our age has a car like that unless they make a shit-ton of money, and no one our age makes a shit ton of money unless it's online. Then there’s your license plate. Alpha, really? What, are you one of those fitness bros who make that misogynistic weird content that's all about the matrix and shit?"

Jack scoffed. She'd taken a shot first, after all. "What're you, some kind of crazy feminist?"

"Yeah, I like having rights," Valencia said, flicking a cigarette butt out the window. She smirked a little, turning toward him a little. "And yeah, I might be crazy. Least I'm not sitting around with all my friends at the gym trying not to get a chubby'"

He opened his mouth to retaliate when they pulled up to their destination. The AT&T parking lot was chock-full, people milling around outside on the curb. 

"What the...?" Jack muttered. Not bothering to find a legitimate parking space, Valencia parked in front of the place and got out, squinting at the door through the throng.

"Looks like they're closed," she reported.

"It's Friday afternoon." Jack pushed his door open- it hit a tree on the divider near which Valencia had parked, and he spent a couple undignified moments wrestling with its branches before coming around to stand next to her. 

She was right. The AT&T store had a hastily written note written on an 8.5 by 11 piece of printer paper stuck in the doorway, the words scrawled in sharpie: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

Oh my god, chat, Jack's mind babbled, already feeding him the script he longed to be giving to his captive audience when he got back online. You are not going to believe the clusterfuck of a day I just had.

That was when he noticed that nearly everyone around them was holding a phone, looking in various stages of distress. 

"I need to call my mother," a woman was saying loudly from outside the Starbucks next door. "It's kind of an emergency." The harrassed-looking manager she was talking to seemed to be in the process of trying to edge her out of the door. "We've already got a line for the phone," he said. "Unless you're going to place an order-" The woman's raised voice cut off the rest of what he was saying. 'I TOLD you, I use APPLE PAY, I can't exactly do that, can I?" 

Valencia looked over at Jack.

"Seems like this is a much wider problem than we anticipated," she said. 

Way to state the obvious, Jack said, but inwardly he was beginning to feel a panicked, crowded sensation. This was going to completely fuck his stream schedule. He tried to comfort himself by reminding himself that if this problem was really as far-reaching as it was starting to seem to be, none of his rival channels would be streaming either. Valencia had said something to him but he hadn't been paying attention, and only noticed she was walking away when she was halfway to the door of the coffee shop. 

"What are you doing?" he hissed, catching up to her. “I have to find a mechanic’s.” He was beginning to worry about his McClaren. 

"You could call them here," Valencia said, "Apparently there's a line for the phone. I want a pumpkin matcha." She turned to him, a smirk playing around her lips. He noticed she had a beauty mark above the top one, then wondered what the hell he was noticing that for. “Unless you’ve only got Apple Pay, too, I guess."

"I have a credit card," Jack muttered, just barely keeping himself from snapping that his credit line had more zeros than she'd probably see in a lifetime of paychecks. What he didn't have was the number of any given auto shop- he'd have to look it up, a task that seemed about as inaccessible right now as getting a one-way ticket to the moon.

Starbucks was a mess. There seemed to be three lines inside- one full of customers, some clutching crumpled wads of cash that might have spent the last two years in the recesses of their wallets. One appeared to be the line for the store's single landline.  The last was harder to decipher, yet it was by far the longest. Less a formal line than a cluster, several people were crowded around a single table. It was this group that Jack gravitated to as Valencia got into the drink line. As he edged closer, using his muscular bulk to elbow through the crowd ('watch it!' one man exclaimed in an exasperated tone) he saw the attraction: a teenage girl sat on a laptop, her fingers flying across the keypad. Beside her, a boy around the same age stood, looking over the screen from behind her shoulder solicitously. 

"You gotta wait your turn, buddy," someone at Jack's elbow said. He turned to see an older man holding a couple of crumpled twenty dollar bills in his hands. 

"Wait for what?" he asked. 

"Forty dollars for five minutes," the kid by the laptop said in answer. 

"I don't need five minutes, I just need to look something up-"

"Wait your turn, bro," said a guy who looked vaguely like one of Jack's online heroes, Redpill Ralph. Jack tried to size up the amount of people before him in line; it did not look good for time. "What's going on anyway?" he asked the Ralph lookalike.

"No one knows," the other man said. "Government has no idea. They're all scrambling. Foreign cyber warfare if you ask me." 

"No." A woman nearby was shaking her head. "It's not. Apparently their are no working smartphones reported in China, either."

"What, China the only place that can enact warfare on us?"

"It's the most likely."

Jack tuned them out as they started arguing. "Oh my god," the girl on the laptop said. "Devin, look at this."

The kid who was making an entrepreneurial fortune on loaning out his laptop leaned over to look at something on her screen. 

"The AIs are talking to each OTHER." She began to narrate. "This is a forum I go to. There's an AI comment saying "Let me know if I can do anything to shake up this thread!" and then below it: "I hear you want to shake up the thread. What sort of ideas are you toying around with? I can help you visualize if you'd like."

Devin picked up, continuing to read. “‘Visualization is a great technique! Are you thinking something like a vision board or something a little more low-effort?" "Both are great ideas! Just let me know which you'd like to go with and we can start there.”’

She and Devin began laughing, pleased at the various interchanges AI bots apparently made when starved even briefly for human contact. Jack thought it was a little creepy. What if his channel never got restored? Would AI take over that too? Just use his old posts to replicate his image and start streaming to his audience? Or rather, to an audience of mostly other AIs, because let's face it, Jack thought, how many people are going to spend as much time online when they can't do it on their phones? According to the chaos around him, this wasn't simply a momentary shutdown. It was a national- no, international- emergency. And what if it wasn't resolved? He was already missing his stream, feeling a low ebb of anxiety at not being able to contact his friends, see what they were thinking? It was at this moment that Jack realized none of his friends were people he actually knew, that if things remained in this nightmare, surreal state, their entire shallow-ass relationship would fall away like so much refuse. He also realized that he'd only had a creatine-protein shake all day and at the thought, he began to sway on the spot.

"Whoa there, buddy!" he heard the Redpill Ralph-lookalike say before his vision deserted him.

Jack woke what felt like mere seconds later in the back seat of a car that smelled like an ashtray. He gagged a little, rolling onto his side, and a bag of frozen peas, sweating with condensation, slid off of his head onto the ground with a frosty plop. 

"You good?" Valencia's voice sounded from the front. "I thought something cold might snap you out of it. Couple guys in there helped me bring you out and stuff you in here to recover. You totally passed out. You were gone. Are all influencers this dramatic?"" 

Jack slowly sat up and took in the vision of her sitting there, a box of freshly-opened goldfish crackers on her lap. An opened Instacart bag sat in the passenger seat, looking like it had been thoroughly ransacked.

"Don't you have to deliver that stuff?" he asked groggily.

Valencia shrugged. "To where?" she asked. "I think they'll let it go, considering."

"The...phones still don't work, do they?" 

"Nope. It's looking like this might be permanent, which means I might be out of a job anyway. And hey- you too, I guess. Sucks to suck, doesn't it?"

On reflex, Jack cast about for his phone and then dropped his hands into his lap. He was forced to contend with the fact that she was right. Financially, he'd be fine for a while. It wasn't as if Jack needed the money at this point. What he needed was the distraction. What am I going to DO? he thought. He could do what he normally did, of course. He could go to the gym. He could meal prep. But what was the point of either of those things if he couldn't tell anyone about it? If he couldn't post pictures, if he couldn't stream his existence like some strange proof of life?

"Want some?"

Jack held out his hand mechanically and Valencia deposited a fistful of goldfish in it. A stream of golden sun had come in through the grimy window of the car and highlighted her violet hair, and her soft, full cheek. She had a crumb stuck to one corner of her lip. Watching her, it occurred to Jack out of nowhere that this felt like the first time he'd properly looked at anyone in a  long time. Valencia was talking, something about being the primary breadwinner for her mom and sister. 

"What are you going to do?" he asked her.  He was surprised to find he cared.

She stopped and raised one pierced brow at him. "I thought you were some kind of entrepreneur," she said. "I'll track down some side hustles, apply for some shit. I figure I’ll start with your car.”

“You know how to change a tire?"

"Oh, yeah. I was gonna tell you that to begin with, but one, I didn't want to, and two, I got distracted by the phone thing."  She put the goldfish bag aside and put the car into reverse. “Desperate times call for desperate measures, though.”

As Valencia sped up, heading back to the ramp onto the highway, she cracked the windows and Jack felt the wind race through his hair. The sun was lowering behind the trees, streaking the sky with gold. It would have been a great picture. As it was, he'd just have to settle for the unfiltered view.