No one knows just how or why it happened; there was no warning, or official announcement.
We just woke one morning and it was gone. The internet, life blood of the republic, gone. At first we thought it was just our connection and we checked and re-booted, oh how we re-booted. Our service provider told us it was a system wide failure, and they re-booted, oh how they re-booted, but to no avail. How could this be? Was it a plot or sabotage? Hostile nations abound and it was easy to believe this was the case. Our leaders told us it was just a temporary problem. The president tried to send out a reassuring tweet, but no one saw it. Panic and riots ensued. Over non-streaming airwaves came the call for calm. No one heard, for days no one heard or understood. The armed forces were put on max alert, but few reported to their bases awaiting confirmation emails and flight information. Voice calls from overseas confirmed world wide failure of the internet. Even the least visited sites were down. Satellites fell from the sky, the seas began to boil, people of all faiths and no faiths began to pray. It was widely reported that internet café’s were being fire bombed and libraries ransacked and burned. Top scientist claimed to have established a local network, to share important messages, but they were quickly denounced as charlatans and frauds. Protesters stormed the white house and capitol building hoping for free Wi-Fi. It was indeed our darkest time.
Months later a message arrived from the Amish, it read simply “we told you so”
People wandered the streets aimlessly looking for wireless data connections.
People being resourceful, found a way to use their texting devices to develop a voice form of texting, called tel-e-hearing, it was like tel-e-vision but for your ears. Emoticons had to be verbally explained. It was as if the world itself had come to an end.
Just as it seemed all was lost…
The UN met is special session though it took nearly 3 days to contact everyone by tel-e-hearing and something called a fax machine. This was like texting, only you had to send a handwritten message back and forth over a tel-e-hearing line… Come to think about it, it was a lot like texting, it was a lot like texting!?! It WAS a lot like texting!!!!
Epilogue – at first portable fax machines were large and bulky, and it was hard to read, write and load a fax machine while driving, but it was a brave new world.
After I quit laughing, I realized that we have become so dependent on all these technologies that going back and attempting to use older technologies to do what we do becomes laughable.
All of those elderly writers with convenient amnesia who want to go back to a simpler life need to read this because I think they would find in a couple of days that it wasn't camping out and they would desperately like to get back to the present.
Boom! Pain! Blackness!
After an RPG attack on their barracks in Afghanistan, corpsmen, Amber Fox and Luke Owens wake up in an Army hospital in Germany.
Thus, begins a four-month recovery for both of them. Amber lost her left leg bel
A true page-turner, Jeff Ovall’s futurist work of fiction peers into the history of a world not yet realized, yet ominously closer than most could imagine. A time in which the past has been reborn and humankind, in all its glory and misery, has final
Ninety-Nine Novellas, Part II (1,125 book pages) is a collection of 99 popular Jay Dubya stories and it is the companion e-book to Ninety-Nine Novellas (1,600 book pages).
