u/AnimatorNew5849

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"Two centuries. Two hundred years of war, never-ending, every day bringing new atrocities, every day showcasing who was doing what to whom. The bodies never ran out; weapons seemed infinite.

Escalations increased amidst outcry, blame, finger-pointing, anger, and despair. After so long, the original reason for the war was twisted beyond recognition, but it continued anyway. Propaganda from both sides was constant, trying to pull at heartstrings and rally the masses. How were there any masses left?

'We have destroyed their main defense; it will all be over in two weeks.'

'Our main defense is perfectly secure. I am recording this video from inside it now—do not listen to the lies.'

On and on it went. Missile after missile, drone after drone. Refineries hit, ships sunk, civilians dead by the millions.

Two hundred long years."

"Will it ever stop?" a small voice called from the back of the classroom.

"Maybe, one day," said the teacher. "It was decided over a century ago to just let the internet do its thing—let the AIs and the bots carry on doing what they were programmed to do. They aren't even aware anymore that it's a closed-loop system. They just keep waging the war they were told to start."

A bell rang in the distance.

School was finished for the day.

It’s been sixty years since the power went out.

I don't mean the little power. The windmill outside your house. The town generator. The water wheel someone has rigged up to keep the lights on in the school.

I'm talking about the big power.

They say it lit up the sky.

Everything used it. Cars, trucks, factories, shops, hospitals. Libraries, though I suppose libraries needed it less than most. It was used for writing, for keeping people entertained, for talking to people thousands of miles away without ever meeting them.

I hear it even did some of the thinking for people.

That's the part I find hardest to understand.

My mother says that before the Great End, people carried tiny machines in their pockets that could answer almost any question they asked. They could tell you where you were, what the weather would be tomorrow, what happened on the other side of the world, even what you should eat for breakfast.

"Why?" I asked her once.

She laughed.

"Because we were lazy."

My father always says it was more complicated than that.

I suppose it usually is.

I was five when it happened. I don't remember much. At least, I don't think I do. Sometimes I remember things that I know can't possibly be memories because I've heard the stories so many times.

I remember the sky turning white.

I remember my mother grabbing my hand.

I remember my father shouting.

And I remember the silence.

Not ordinary silence. Not the sort you hear late at night when everyone is asleep.

A great silence. The sort that seems to swallow everything.

My parents were lucky, or so they tell me. They had never trusted the new world completely. They kept books. Real books. Shelves full of them. My father grew vegetables, and my mother kept chickens. They stored food, saved seeds, and learned how to repair things instead of replacing them.

They called the new technology "smart."

My father used to say that anything that needed to be called smart probably wasn't. They kept it out of our home as much as they could.

Other people weren't so careful.

The old world had convinced everyone that the machines were harmless. Useful. Essential. Then it convinced them they couldn't live without them.

Everything went into something called the Cloud. Photos, letters, money, books, music, medical records, memories. People paid companies to store their lives for them. If they stopped paying, their lives became inaccessible. My father says some people couldn't even start their cars anymore without connecting to the system.

Imagine that. A machine you owned refusing to move because some company somewhere had decided you hadn't paid enough.

And people accepted it. For years.

Then something changed. Nobody knows exactly when. There are stories, of course. Some say it started with teachers. Others say farmers, or engineers who had finally realised what they'd helped build.

My father says it was all of them. Groups of ordinary people, scattered across the world, who had come to the same conclusion: the system was too powerful to fight from inside.

So they decided to bring it down.

They called themselves nothing. No names, no leaders, no organisation.

They communicated by letter. Paper. Ink. Hands.

People laugh when I tell them that. How could something so large have been organised without phones or computers?

But that's precisely why it worked. There was nothing to hack, nothing to intercept, nothing to trace. A letter left in a cupboard could be carried hundreds of miles by someone who didn't know what they were carrying. One person knew one part. Another knew another. Nobody knew everything.

It took years. And then, one night, it happened.

Boom.

Gone.

The data centres went first, then the networks, then the systems that depended upon them.

The lights went out across cities. Cars stopped in the middle of roads. Factories fell silent. Planes disappeared from the sky. Hospitals switched to generators, then ran out of fuel. Millions of people lost everything they had ever stored.

And when morning came, the world was still there.

That surprised everyone. There had been predictions of the end of civilisation. Maybe it was. But civilisation, it turned out, wasn't a building.

It was people.

People still knew how to grow food, build houses, sew, fish, make fire, and teach children. They remembered enough, and the ones who didn't learned.

It wasn't easy. There was violence, hunger, and wars over fuel and food. But strangely, my father says, the worst of it came from the people who had lost their power. Corporations that had once owned half the world suddenly owned nothing. Governments collapsed. Men and women who had spent their entire lives believing they were untouchable discovered they were just men and women.

The rest of us carried on.

Sixty years later, we have electricity—just not the big kind. We have small generators, windmills, water turbines, and solar panels where we can get them. We don't connect the whole world together anymore.

Perhaps that's for the best.

I sometimes wonder what the old world would think of us. We still read, write, make music, fall in love, argue, and tell stories. Some things, it seems, never needed electricity.

Yesterday, I found something in my father's workshop: a small black rectangle, about the size of my palm.

He saw me holding it. For a moment, he didn't say anything. Then he took it from me.

"Where did you find that?"

"Behind the workbench."

He turned it over in his hands.

"That's from before."

"Does it work?"

He smiled.

"No."

Then he put it back in the drawer.