Digital Silence

I could feel my heartbeat in my fingertips, my ears, the pulse throbbed in my head with the heat. This summer had been the hottest recorded. Just like last year. They just kept getting hotter. My heart beat went on the fritz briefly. I glanced down. Not my heartbeat. My phone.

The phone screen lit up, a cheerful little chime sounding as a message from my mother came through. I cringed at the sound. Work required sound notifications so we didn’t miss anything, and I’d forgotten to turn it off at the end of my shift. I unlocked my phone, clicked on the notification.

“out of milk. pick sum up on way pls.”

I hated the way my mother texted. Like adding the extra letters to spell out some and milk was too much effort. Why she felt the need to shorten a four-letter word was beyond me. My fingertips hovered over the keyboard as I formulated a response. My thumb was pressing down on the O key when the screen went black. I tapped on it a couple of times. Clicked the power button.

Nothing. I frowned. I could have sworn I had more charge than that. Stupid phones with their weird, shitty batteries. Guess my mother would have to wait for the milk. My card was on my phone.

A car pulled up next to me, a woman rolling down the window.

“Do you know where the nearest supermarket is?” I paused, then nodded.

“It’s just up the road a ways back.” I stuck my thumb over my shoulder. “Called Sapson’s Grocer. Should be able to pull it up on maps.”

The woman shook her head. Tapped the screen in her car a few times.

“I would but my both my phone and navigation are on the fritz. Neither will turn on for me.”

Weird. Maybe there was something about this area, though I ‘d never had an issue before. The screech of tires stopped me before I could say anything else. The screech, and then a loud bang and shattering glass. Another screech and the sound of cars colliding sounded, then another. I sprinted towards the sound.

I wasn’t prepared for what I would see as I rounded the corner. The main road was one massive pile up of the crumpled bodies of cars. Dark grey smoke curled up as pedestrians ran towards what now essentially constituted as scrap metal.

A man clambered over the wreck towards the one in the middle, shouting about calling emergency services. He wrenched desperately at the door of one of the most severely damaged cars. I could hear screaming coming from somewhere. I pulled out my phone to call someone. Still dead. The blank screen stared back at me with my own eyes. I looked around. Other people were fiddling with their phones too, the screens remaining dark. One girl pulled out a relic, flipped open the screen and started dialling. Clearly her phone still worked.

World Leaders Give Up.

World leaders have made the decision after 3 years of attempts to revive smart devices to pull funding from research, and redirect towards a future without…

I turned off the radio. Opened the blinds. Sunlight filtered through clouds that drifted lazily past like that day three years ago had never happened. Seven people had died in that pile up I’d seen that day. Five were severely injured. The woman in the car that man had been trying so desperately to get to had died. So had their three-month-old in the back. The girl with the old flip phone was the only reason anyone had survived. It wasn’t even the worst crash that day.

Every smart device made after the 70s had stopped working that day. Some technologies from before then too. The cars had the most widespread immediate impact. One minute they were working, the next, drivers had lost control of their vehicles, and people were careening into each other on highways, trucks and other cars swerving to avoid them. Car crashes that day had made up 70% of the deaths here that year.

It was weeks before the world returned to some semblance of normal. Everything was different though. Bike sales went through the roof after that. No one trusted the cars not to stop. We didn’t know what criteria something had to meet but we knew we didn’t want it to happen again.

People had gone back to landlines, and meeting in person. Some governments had tried to capitalise on the need for social spaces again by having paid entry into parks and other open spaces. Their plans ended abruptly when the rioting began. As politician’s houses burned with their corruption contained inside.

The first few months without smart devices was spent adjusting to a new world order where news was back to being drip fed through newspapers and radio channels, and advertising went back to being on paper. It was quieter too, without so many cars. Roads were demolished, and bike paths added back in.

Small townships had crept back into popularity with how much longer it took to get places. If you wanted to get somewhere faster, you had to take one of the steam trains they’d brought back into fashion. By year two, small businesses had overtaken the conglomerates that had previously crippled the marked, proximity winning out over pretty much everything else.

I pushed out of my room, pattered down the stairs. My mum stood in the middle of the kitchen, staring out the window with a mug of coffee cupped in her hands like it was her only source of warmth. There had been other unforeseen effects of the tech crash of 2034.

Medicine took a hit with how many advancements they had made after the 1970s. my mum had been a nurse before the tech crash. Now, she spent most of her time looking out windows with a look in her eyes like she was a thousand years away. Lots of people were that way these days. The trauma from then lingered well beyond the years it took to rebuild everything anew. I could still smell the smoke from those cars sometimes. The smell of blood and metal burning. Hear the screams.

I touched my hand to the side of the mug. Cold. Gently prying my mum’s fingers from around the cup, I set it down on the sink, then slunk out the door into the warm day. The newspaper sat, sun warmed at the end of the driveway, some news story about another technology they’d discovered had fallen in the crash plastered across the front of it. The positive ones would be further in. I got the newspaper for the puzzles, personally.

I pulled my bike from the side of the house, swinging my leg over it. Pushed off the ground and pedalled down the street past the skeleton of houses that had previously stood along the way, long since burned in the raids that had followed the rioting. I had to get some more milk today.