The Earth Stood Still

On a Warm Day

Gosh, the sun is so bright, Abby thought. The sun was blaring, but not scorching her skin because it was autumn. Temperatures were brisk and cool, and the beautiful leaves had been changing and drifting to the ground for a couple of weeks in her New England town, not that she or anyone else noticed.

For years now, the natural order of life had been cast aside in favor of the manufactured world offered to humanity via the internet. It was a lonely world, and life had become indistinguishable from what she had read in school history books or found online in searches.

Abby sat at the dining room table, having a bite to eat as she scrolled through her feed, leaving comments on others’ posts and videos. She then checked her posts to see if she had responses or new followers. She liked it when she saw her friends like her clips and admire them. Then she went to her OnlyFans page to see if her audience had grown so she could rake in more cash.

She had been peddling her body there in suggestive outfits and provocative reels to make an easy buck. She didn’t want to do much to earn her money, but she liked pricey clothes and the status they brought. She wanted to impress her followers and friends. Everyone else was doing it so she thought nothing of it, even though it made her feel ugly inside and cheap.

She took a small bite of her snack and navigated to her analytics page when her screen went black. She must have run out of battery, but she saw no notice that she was in low-power danger mode. She grabbed her portable charger and attached it, but nothing happened.

What's Happening?

Abby looked up from her phone and saw her family at the table. They were all staring at their phones like the devices had grown heads. Shocked by the loss of their artificial appendages, they looked up from their screens and around the table. The looks on their faces were palpable.

Each looked at the others, back and forth among the family at the table, as if they hadn’t noticed them in the room and almost didn’t recognize each other. Then Abby discovered something. She did not remember the last time she had looked at her mother, father, or sister. They almost looked foreign to her.

Abby didn’t remember the last time she had even spoken to any of them. Had it been hours, days, weeks, longer? She seemed shocked, but it fit the world’s experience now that everyone was addicted to the handheld computer wonder.

Once the immediate shock passed, Abby’s sister spoke and asked what had happened. Everyone shook their heads and said they didn’t know. They turned on the television, and every channel was running a breaking news story.

News

“All internet and online activity has come to a stop!” “We have no idea what caused this or how to fix it. Millions have started calling the stations and trying to contact the platform sites somehow. There was no way to send a message or email. No one had phone numbers written down or saved to memory anymore, like in her grandparents’ generations. She remembered laughing at that discovery when she had read about it.

Some stations were getting new information trickling in, reporting that the worldwide crash seemed permanent. It had been caused by an unknown anomaly linked to solar flares. Satellites had all gone down, and there was no way to reach them remotely.

Elephant in the Room?

The awkwardness in the room was stifling. The family had never noticed that they had lost the ability to have a normal conversation. Abby spoke up and asked her parents what they should do. Her parents told her they didn’t know.

A knock came at the door, and her mom went to see who it was. Meg, her mom, opened the door to a middle-aged man and woman standing there like deer in the headlights. Both were holding their dead phones in their hands. The woman looked at Meg and introduced herself and her husband as their next-door neighbors. She went on to ask if they had lost use of their phones and the internet as well.

As Meg went to reply, she realized she didn’t even know who these people were. She had seen them once in a while, she thought, but never knew their names, what they did, or even how long they had been her neighbors. Drake, her husband, came up behind her and told them that there may be nothing that could be done to get their phones back. Drake’s mother, the kid’s grandmother, walked into the living space, laughing her head off.

She told them they would now have to rejoin the world and live in it.

Abby remembered arguing with her grandma that her ways were antiquated and that social media and the internet had brought the world closer. Grandma argued the opposite. “You’ll see,” was always her response.

Back to the Old Ways

The day dragged on like a snail across a rough surface. The boredom was overwhelming. No one seemed to know what to do with themselves, but Grandma did not seem in the least changed. She read her book, knitted her blanket, and hummed her music to herself. She seemed undisturbed.

Abby went outside into the backyard. She noticed flowers she had never seen, and bushes she remembered were tiny new plants once, now shoulder-high. She smelled the heady fragrance of a syrupy flower wafting in the air, remembered smelling something like it long ago, but had forgotten the name of the flower. It was a gardenia, though she couldn’t remember it. A tear fell down her cheek.

Abby’s grandmother came outside and told her to sit beside her on the porch settee. She saw the tear dangling from Abby’s jaw and began to tell her that everything would be all right. Her grandma spoke for a while, and Abby listened intently for the first time in months, maybe years. She told Abby she would love to teach her to knit and shared the books she had read in the past few months.

Abby’s mind was soaring in new directions. She listened to the book details, and her imagination sparked. She realized she wanted to read the books herself and travel to the places her mind was briefly exploring.

Meeting the Family Again

Grandma Betty went up, and Abby followed her into the garden. As they walked, Betty named the flowers and told her to smell them. Each fragrance suddenly brought her memories of a time when she did not have a phone and played outside in the mud among the flowers. Where did she lose that? How did her curiosity and appreciation for life and nature get locked in a box in the back of her life’s closet?

The days went by, the weeks went on and on, and life was becoming a different kind of normal. Not just for Abby, but for their family, the neighborhood, and life in general.

Abby began spending time with her mother and discovered new things about her. She knew her mother’s favorite perfume, went shopping with her, and tried on clothes, laughing over bad choices. She spent time with her sister, listening to music and reading books to one another, opening a whole world of fantasy and possibilities to their minds. Abby even spent time with her dad, who taught her how to make simple appliance repairs and how to mow the yard in perfect diagonal rows.

Betty and Abby spent a lot of time in the flower gardens, where she learned to prune and care for the numerous plants and the bees that came to visit. They learned together how to keep bees, collect honey, and grew very close.

Community

The family’s neighbors began to get to know one another and decided to hold a monthly gathering, rotating homes, to get closer.

Abby began spending time with school friends, too. The time was awkward at first, but as time went on, the friends began looking forward more and more to seeing one another and getting together. Friendships, real ones, developed. Everyone’s ability to socialize again returned to what it had been in the olden days, as the younger generations had called it.

In fact, the more that life returned to those norms from years past, the happier and more connected people became. No one seemed lonely anymore, and there was far less anger and hostility. People seemed calmer, less volatile, and friendlier all around, and it was nice.

Ping

A year later, Abby was sitting with her mom one night when she heard a ping. It sounded strange, unfamiliar yet familiar. Then she remembered what she was hearing and realized her phone had pinged back on. Her mom also noticed the sound. They looked at one another and stared for a moment. Then they continued to sit and talk for a few more minutes.

Meg got up a while later and went to get her phone in her office. She came out with the phone in her hand and looked at Abby, who was now heading to the kitchen. Meg followed her there and looked thoughtfully at her daughter. She looked deep in thought when she suddenly opened the trash bin and tossed her phone in.

A Choice

Dad and Abby’s sister entered the kitchen just as she threw away her chains. They looked at each other, then all walked to the bin and did the same. Then they went into the den and sat with Grandma, who had been napping. As she woke, Abby asked them if they wanted to grill some burgers together and then play a game afterward.

There was an understanding between them. They all felt it. They knew they had grown together without phones in their daily lives. They had once again become a family. They were, for the first time in a long time, happy. A decision had been made that evening. They had no regrets.

Abby didn’t miss selling herself to gawkers online, and she sure didn’t miss how it made her feel inside.

As the internet came back online, families across the world were having the same experiences. Many more than one would have thought were coming to the same conclusion and making the same choices as Abby’s family.

Normal had returned, and loneliness had become the stranger in the room.

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