The Digital Sky is Falling
A Fiction by Cylon2036. we/us
(Fused to the underbelly of time. Pseudopod-certified.)︎
The first hint that something was wrong came at 6:57 a.m., when Nora Brighton’s rooster stopped competing with the chime of new emails.
Morning on Denman Island was normally a quiet duet of nature and notifications: wind in the forest, clucks from the chicken run, and the steady ping of Hunterson Dynamics overnight messages arriving from the city. But today, no pings. Just the rooster, who seemed altogether too pleased about the interruption.
Nora tapped her laptop. The cursor blinked patiently in an offline document she’d opened the night before. No network. She frowned, toggled her router and waited for the usual green constellation of indicator lights. Instead she got one sullen, blinking red star.
She sighed. Living on a semi-rural island meant treating the internet like a temperamental deity, capricious, prone to moods. But this felt different. The outage didn’t have the usual signature, no sputtering reconnections, no half-loaded pages, no brief flashes of normalcy. Just… absence.
Her phone buzzed once, then died mid-notification. A moment later, even her cell signal bars dropped to nothing. She held the phone up like an offering to the kitchen window. Nothing. “Fantastic,” she muttered. “A technology meltdown before coffee.”
By 7:15, she’d tried everything: rebooting the router, switching hot spots, even walking down her gravel driveway to see if elevation would coax the cell tower gods into cooperation. The island was peaceful, unbothered, and profoundly unhelpful.
Returning inside, she found her cat perched smugly on her keyboard, which at this point was about as useful as a brick. Her mid-morning video meeting with her Project Integration Team was officially doomed.
At 7:30, her landline rang. Nora stared at it. The landline never rang. It was there mostly to appease storms and power outages and the occasional elderly neighbour who believed cell phones were a passing fad. She answered. “Hello?”
It was Chris from IT, speaking at the speed of someone trying not to panic. “Nora! It’s not you. It’s not us either. Actually….” he inhaled sharply. “it’s everyone. The entire internet is down. Global, we think. Or continental. Hard to tell with all our tools offline.”
Nora blinked. “Global, like… the entire internet? That seems… unlikely. Are we sure this isn’t another case of raccoons in the data centre wiring?”
“Not unless the raccoons unionized internationally. Leadership is trying to put out a statement, but no one can send anything except landline calls. And half our executives don’t even have landlines. So for now… we wait. Stay put. Don’t reboot anything important. And, uh, maybe find a hobby that doesn’t require cloud syncing.” He hung up before she could ask for clarification. Classic Chris.
Nora set the phone down slowly, feeling the unreal quiet settle in. Her entire workday, her entire job, existed on servers she could no longer reach. Documents, project roadmaps, messaging channels, dashboards. All evaporated.
She opened her front door. The valley spread beneath a soft fog, farms and ridgelines fading into white. It looked exactly the same as always, which made the collapse of the digital world feel even stranger, like a silent catastrophe no one here could see.
Across the road, her neighbor, Mrs. Priestly, waved from her porch. “Internet down at your place too? My granddaughter can’t watch her cooking shows. World’s ending.” Nora offered a nod and a weak laugh. It didn’t feel entirely like a joke.
By 9:00, she’d brewed a second pot of coffee, stared at her dead laptop, and rediscovered three notebooks she’d forgotten she owned. The quiet was unnerving. No messages. No meeting alerts. No relentless parade of digital urgency. It was almost peaceful. Almost.
But beneath that quiet, Nora felt something else creeping in. Uncertainty. She worked hundreds of miles from the nearest Hunterson Dynamics office, reliant on invisible threads that now lay severed. In the city, there would be teams, protocols, co-workers gathering in worried clusters. Out here, it was just her, a rooster, and the creeping realization that the world had changed without making a sound.
She stepped onto her porch, coffee in hand, and listened to the wind moving through the forest. For the first time, she realized she could hear her own heartbeat. And for the first time, she wondered, not about when the internet would return, but what the world might look like if it didn’t.
