Radio silence

Everywhere he looked there were posters proclaiming the same thing" all mobiles will be off for 24 hours for phone mast updates"

To the older people in town this wasn't too much of a worry, it was happening on a Sunday, people would just have to talk to each other. The news and weather was on the TV, books were on the shelves and games in the cupboard. As the age demographic dropped, the anger rose. It was the end of the world for many teenagers, even a few adults.

The maths were useful in trying to placate the disgusted youth. Phones off for 24 hours, at least 10 hours of that would be covered by sleep, hour for food and 10 minutes in the shower. Parents tried to soothe many a furrowed brow, many more gave up with placating and resorted with various iterations of "tough, get over it"

Phone companies noticed a massive spike in downloaded videos and uploaded music files, enough to fill far more than 13 or 14 hours. It became like each Christmas, shops were shut for 2 days but many bought enough milk and bread for an army feast. Many people with a sceptical bent wondered if this had been a plan all along. Frighten people in to downloading a ton of stuff, phone companies make a fortune while not really doing anything.

Dan and his friends were looking from a very different direction. They accepted the shut down, what they were interested in was the reported update. There were a number of massive phone companies involved, why would they all need the same update. If they were only updating their phones, why was it all done together. Maybe one firm announced its plans quietly and everyone else joined in.

The main question was simply, why 24 hours shutdown and why a blanket switch off for everyone. If there was ever a visible update, it came from the people who made the phones and could be loaded in a few seconds. The consensus of Dan and his friends that something very dodgy was going on, and it was controlled from very high up. It had to be an update that meant something very bad for all.

The options included , spyware to log activity on the phone, a program to switch the camera on when required or the microphone switched on for recording. A couple wondered aloud , if in fact it could be all the above. They collectively compared theories why and how this might be the outcome. Some even tried to answer the "why?"

They realised that they were sounding like the conspiracy theorists that claimed the covid jab contained a microchip. Their theory being Bill Gates wanted to track them. A common reply would be along the lines, why would he do that when we all have phones. Every phone use, every social media visit and every shopping trip was tracked and monitored. If this logic was in any way sound, then maybe now the phones were being tracked or monitored. Maybe the phone masts were being adapted to record traffic that went through them.

If it was just the actual masts involved, then the phones should carry on without anything to obvious happening. Maybe the phone companies would send a fake update in order to make believe this was happening. None of his group were 100% positive of anything, they just accepted all possibilities could prove to be true. The next problem was obvious, what could they or anyone else do about what they feared was happening.

Computers were mostly running, although internet access was patchy. They could contact others to see if they had ideas. Even then , what could they do. Without phones they couldn't gather people to protest or too take any action. If they took action, what could they do? if they tried to burn or break the masts they would just look like the people who said 5g masts made your brain melt. Also if they could get people to attack a few masts, they would lose phone signal for far longer.

The only viable alternative seemed simple, they had to trust the phone companies . The government presumably had to agree to the outage, making them either complicit or equally innocent. There were so many services and business using mobile phones that there had to be planning. You couldn't suddenly decide to swich off services used by ambulances and the police. If they could ask one of the service groups what was actually happening , they expected to be fobbed off.

Finally the decision was simple, they couldn't really do anything. They posted on line their theories, suggested how to stay safe and what precautions to wild idea was to leave all phones turned off until everyone could see what had happened during the shut down. See if there were reports of new software or hard ware linked to phone masts, were cameras recording what you did or microphones what you were doing.

As midnight Sunday approached, the consensus with Dan and his friends was to have all phones turned off as the shut down finished. Then they would turn on the very cheap and nasty phone that Dan had found in a drawer. It turned on, it could play snake and it could text. If that worked for an hour or so then maybe one by one they would turn their phones on and see what was going on in other places.

They expected pages filled with conspiracies, phone companies saying thanks for your patience and a million downloads about what everyone had done to survive the day. people saying how great their time had been, how the fresh air was good and even talking to people face to face had been fun.

Privately Dan presumed that come midnight the whole world would simply switch their phones on and carry on as normal. They wouldn't change the security features, no extra protection against microphones or camera misuse. The world would have to work out in time what, if anything had changed.

Then it became Monday................