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Everyone had forgotten everything, because their phones told them what they needed to know. When you have a device that remebers for you, you don;t need to remember, and your mind surrenders its knowledge to the thing in your hand.

Not everyone had one, and the ones without them had kept their souls, but the ones with phones had become little more than zombies. Each moring their phone woke them up, reminded them to get a takeawy breakfast, take the kids to school, go to work, do the job, come home, watch the latest reality TV series then go to bed.

For them life was a prescription, and anyone who deviated was seen as weird, and to be avoided and definitely not trusted.

Then the phones stopped working, not just phones any communication device that relied on digital tranmission stopped working, that included televisions and DAB radios. Anty device that was "SMART" was now effectively isolated. Fridges, heating systems, drones, all were now unsmarted.

Mobile phone shops were attacked by mobs and were quickly shut down.

The government broadcast messages by FM and AM radio, and these were routed to loudspeakers in town centres. People were advised to get an analog radio, and news was broadcast via reels in cinemas, including outdoor screens.

Advice was given to start using landlines if you had one, or using still operational telephone boxes if there was one available.

Teenagers got a taste of what life was like for their parents without mobile phones. There was no calling on the way, times had to be decided and kept to for meetups to work. They complained that they were living in the past, but it was either that or social isolation.

Basic mobile communication was established for emergency services, the police, and the army, CB Radio came back, but it would not fit in your pocket.

All those smart phones were dead. They still looked nice, but nothing worked on them, not even the cameras. They could not even be sold because they were useless.

Email was still ok via wired communications.

People began to realise that they had to trust themselves and their own memories. Diaries and File-o-Faxes started to make a resurgenge, which men sales of pens and pencils surged.

Life changed.

People on streets weren't engrossed in their hand held devices, which meant that they looked where they were going, so accindents caused by mobile phone usage dropped as well.

High level investigations into the cause of the digital failure, but they kept coming up against what once worked now didn't, and there was absolutely no reason for it. Technology companies said they were working hard to fix things, but as the months rolled on, there were no announcements, and nothing happened.

Day after day more landlines became available, and new phone boxes started to appear. Phoneboxes became one of the hangouts for the youth.

People carried books with the phone numbers they couldn;t remember in case they had to call someone, or were late. They also found that they could now remember phone numbers and addresses far mor eeasily than when they had their mobile phone. As time went on they realised that they did not really miss having a phone in their pocket.

The internet was still there and they could still use that, but they realised they had gained a lot more privacy by not having a mobile phone on them 24/7.

Life had changed, and while people had lost some convenience, they had woken up from their almost zombiefication.

Civilization had not fallen apart, if anything, it had improved.