Kill switch engaged

Several months have passed since the world changed overnight. In the span of a heartbeat, every smartphone on the planet malfunctioned, creating a ripple effect only movie scripts or doomsday novels could ever imagine. The aftermath continues to overwhelm the world and stretches farther than any writer's pen can ever hope to describe.

But on the day it happened, no one saw it coming.

"Well, that's it. You ready to do this?"

"You really think we can pull this off?"

"Hell yeah! We've been working on this project for over a year, and all the test runs made it to the finish line. All we have to do is press this button and voila, we'll be swimming in cash by morning."

Few enemies of modern society can compare to hackers, whose objective is to complicate our lives by costing us time, money and effort. Voted humanity’s worst headache, these digital pirates come in all shapes, sizes, demographics, political backgrounds, age groups, professions and skill levels. And in some instances, they can even turn out to be a couple of young men sharing a last name. Siblings.

Brothers, Heinrich and Lito Schmidt find the ultimate pleasure in breaking through the most difficult cyber security systems. It's like a puzzle. A game they play where if they win, the loser is at fault for being vulnerable and they take whatever they want.

Born in the mind of Lito, they set their sights on the biggest project of their lives. Something much greater than getting away with a few thousand dollars from a local bank. Or changing digital records at the county courthouse. No, this will be the job that places them among history's most infamous criminals...assuming they are ever caught.

Reckless ambition fuels their dream of becoming billionaires overnight...

They both sit at a cluttered desk in their two-bedroom apartment overlooking the Manhattan skyline. Several laptops, a few phones and a dozen schematic printouts litter the surface of the desk. Lito's finger hovers above a black button on his phone.

"I'm doing it."

He presses the button...

Almost immediately, one of the laptops makes several beeps before digits on a 3-minute timer begin reducing. Below the timer is an intricate, neon blue maze. Lito plants the cursor at the start of the maze and clicks it. A stick figure icon is released and begins traversing the many turns and roadblocks inside the maze, trailing a path of tiny dollar bills to mark where it has already been. It has exactly three minutes to find the exit before the system window closes and the opportunity vanishes.

"Is it going to make it in time? Heinrich, asks, putting his glasses back on and moving closer to the screen.

"Yeah. We still have two minutes left and its halfway there. It's going to make it. Just be ready."

As the figure gets closer to the exit, the brothers lean forward, animated by suspense as if watching the climax of a thriller.

With eleven seconds to spare, the barrier falls. The brothers stare at each other in stunned disbelief before the adrenaline of victory hits them.

"We fucking did it! We're in!" Lito says, high-fives and bro-hugs follow. "Alright, man, how long should we set it for? We have at least twenty-four hours before anyone even comes close to knowing they've been heisted."

"I say we play it safe and set it for ten hours. We can scoop more than enough cash by then."

“You're right. Don’t press our luck. Go ahead and set it for ten.”

Heinrich reaches for his phone to input the desired time, but the screen doesn't budge when swiped. He tries over and over with wasted efforts. The screen is locked, displaying the last email he read. A light layer of perspiration covers his forehead as the issue sets in.

“Dude! My screen is locked! It doesn’t move. The phone won’t even turn off!”

“Really? What did you do?”

“Nothing. It was like that when I picked it up. Try setting the time with yours.”

Lito reaches for his phone, mumbling under his breath about how he always has to fix issues.

“Oh shit… my phone is locked too. It won’t power down either."

They each pull a laptop closer to them to try and trace the phone issue, unaware that the internet is also affected and they have just triggered the largest outage in history.

"Man…It's not just our phones." Lito says, tapping his fingers on the desk.

Simultaneously, people across the globe are doing the same, swiping up and down. Each of them feels it’s only them at first until they see others doing the same.

In a matter of minutes, the world loses its connection, like a digital plague has swept across every continent. The brothers can furiously type all they want. Reversing what they've done is going to be more complicated than anyone ever imagined.

Apple Inc.'s headquarters is among the first corporations to begin troubleshooting the issue. Programmers are frantically trying to understand what happened.

In Washington D.C. the white house doors are being locked. No one is allowed to enter or leave.

A couple hundred miles away in Times Square, people stand in place starring at their phones, madly swiping. Electronic billboards fail to move.

In China, factory workers are told to go home for national security reasons. Their government puts defense probability at a level 4.

Thousands of miles away in Paris France, groups of people stare at screens setup in the subway district, being one of the first to see the breaking news.

Across the ocean in Australia, a rugby team is getting off the bus for a match that's been postponed due to the loss of signal.

These abrupt situations are occurring everywhere. It's just a taste of what's to come.

At the bottom of the earth, in Antarctic, equipment controlled by the phone's automation malfunctions, setting off endless alarms.

Back in the US, pandemonium ensues as the pentagon races for answers. Cities everywhere are slowly shutting down as card readers can no longer complete transactions.

On the smallest scales, individuals sit dumbfounded, waiting for their beloved fifth appendages to spring back to life. The reality is sobering for most, tragic for others, and completely unacceptable for the rest. And It's only been 137 minutes since the start of this calamitous event.

Millions of delivery drivers head back to their warehouses, no longer able to access GPS or customer addresses. Some users panic beyond belief, causing nausea and nervous breakdowns.

Landlines exist inside businesses and a tiny percentage of homes, but they also malfunction due to being coordinated through electrical grids controlled using the internet.

After the first four hours the world seems to stop…completely. The brothers' expertise has been met with a cold slap. Without their phones, even they are blind. Critical steps were stored on their device's hardware to prevent the operation from being traced back to them. They now rely on tech wizards to figure out a way to solve the issue.

Around 6pm, when the sun begins to dip towards the horizon, Heinrich puts on his shoes and a jacket to venture out and observe the city's reaction to their unprecedented blunder.

Closed signs adorn his favorite eateries, including the pizza shop where he planned to stop.

A young woman sits at a bus stop alone sobbing while holding her phone in front of her, a selfie-stick dangles by her legs.

An outraged man slams his phone into the concrete sidewalk, unleashing a torrent of expletives as it shatters by his feet. Just before Heinrich passes him, he decides to ask the man a question.

"Why did you do that? The phones could come back any moment."

"Leave me the fuck alone. You must not have heard. It could take months until the issue is fixed. I quit my job and moved here last week to start a business. I can't do shit without a motherfucking phone! Might as well move back!" The man says as he kicks a soda can and keeps walking.

Heinrich doesn't know how extensive the damage is, nor how many people rely on a simple device to make a living.

This wasn't at all what they were trying to do. Their plan was to infiltrate a few selected satellites long enough to exploit the algorithms into delivering payloads of cash into an undisclosed bank account. Instead, they infected the transponders which quickly spread to the command systems and memory boards, malfunctioning all communications within themselves and with other satellites.

The deed is done. Dystopian nightmares begin to unfold as billions come to realize how much the world relies on a device small enough to fit in your pocket. Henrich feels responsible for a world without a pulse. People are walking around in a daze, like ghosts of their former selves. Heinrich returns to the apartment dejected. Lost. He sees that Lito hasn't budged from the laptop.

"Lito...It's over, man. Where not getting the cash and the world is screwed right now. It's only the beginning. Everything is closed out there. People don't know what to do. I think we should compose some kind of anonymous letter explaining what we know and get it to the right people. It might help them fix it faster."

"Are you fucking kidding me? We don't cave in for shit!"

"A man told me out there that it could take months to fix this. Are you willing to go that long without talking with family or the people who owe us money?" Heinrich says, followed by an extended pause.

"Months? How does he know that?"

"It's all over the news now. I don't know how we did it, but we fucked up...bad."

Humans are smart creatures, evolving at a steady pace. A great majority of the population remembers life without a constant companion in the form of a handheld device. Others who are born into existing technology have never seen the previous side. They will never know what it's like to go looking for a payphone.

Unless, of course, the cellphone itself becomes a useless relic.