It was 10:13 a.m. on a gray Wednesday morning when the internet first went out. Initially I thought it was just the piece of shit app I was scrolling through, but after several failed Google searches I realized the issue stretched much further. I sighed and slammed my laptop shut before stumbling out of bed. I was on the tail end of an especially heinous bender and was feeling a little light on my feet. Life had been throwing me curveball after curveball lately and I was swinging and missing like it was my job.
Yawning, I staggered out into the hallway and made my way over to the router. Nestled neatly between a stack of unread books, it blinked lifelessly back at me. Three little red lights illuminating the dingy space.
“Damnit,” I cursed.
First my job, then my girlfriend, and now my internet? I just couldn’t catch a break. Too hungover to deal with this issue though, I picked my sorry ass up and transitioned into the kitchen. Grabbing a can of coffee from the cupboard, I lit a cigarette. If I didn’t have the Hub and Netflix to get me through my morning, I at least needed some nicotine and caffeine.
I was making my best attempt at blowing smoke rings when I first heard it. I had lived in the city for well over a decade at this point and thought I had heard every sound worth hearing. The sharp crackle of gunfire, the screeching squeal of tires, the guttural moans of the pleased, the angry cries of the distraught, etc. But this sound was different. Deep, resounding, and unnaturally thick, it was unlike anything I had ever heard. Yet at the same time oddly familiar.
The coffee finished with a “ding” and I poured myself a cup before taking a seat on the couch. The wailing scream of a passing siren sent lightning bolts of ache across my forehead. This, combined with the flavorful remnants of last nights binge, made me sick to my stomach. If I didn’t get my shit together soon, I knew it would only be a matter of time before I was as yellow as SpongeBob SquarePants.
As I sat back and sipped my coffee though, I began to realize just how truly lost I was without my daily dose of internet. I probably spent anywhere from five to seven hours a day logged on, perusing social media, watching videos, listening to music, etc. It was the first thing I did in the morning and the last thing I did at night. I hate to admit it, but it had become as vital to my existence as the air in my lungs and the blood in my veins.
A second set of sirens filled the block. I figured a car must have hit a utility pole or something. It would be hours before the internet was restored if that was the case. Long enough for me to lose my goddamn mind. And that’s when it hit me. Cell service, duh. I grabbed my phone and flipped through its settings, scrolling through dozens of applications before finally landing on the Wi-Fi tab. With a flick of my finger, I switched it off. Cell reception was historically pretty crappy up here, but I figured anything was better than nothing.
I waited a second before trying my browser again.
“No Internet Connection,” stared back at me through a cracked screen.
“Fuck!” I cursed.
A seething sense of irritation swept through me. I had to get out of here. It had been almost three days now since I had last left my apartment and the walls were quickly closing in. Plus, it’s not like there was anything else to do up here. So, taking one last long drag off my cigarette, I grabbed my shoes and headed downstairs.
A gaggle of gawkers were crowded around the back door of my building when I slipped outside. They were standing over something and looking down at it with dumbstruck eyes.
“It’s Katie P!” Someone yelled.
Katie P, the hottest new sensation on TikTok. A vlogger/streamer/lifestyle guru, she took the internet by storm last summer and had been a viral sensation ever since.
A second sound rang out.
“Thump.”
Only this one sounded much closer and clearer.
“Thump.”
A third sound
“Thump.”
A fourth.
By this point the gaggle had turned into a mob. A mob that was bustling about: crying, screaming, and staring blankly at their electronic devices. Despite the growing frenzy around me though, I couldn’t seem to tear my attention away from a small bedroom window. Sitting directly above us ten floors up, it was wide open and had little wisps of white curtain hanging from it.
Terms like “cyber-attack”, “electromagnetic pulse”, and “judgment day” were being thrown around the crowd like lawn darts at a nursing home. And with each thump it became increasingly obvious that this was no accident.
A young woman wept hysterically beside me.
“How am I supposed to Snapchat my boyfriend?” She cried as paramedics feverishly worked to scrape a hunk of pink goo off the sidewalk.
A fifth thump sounded.
Another woman checked her phone feverishly, frantically opening and closing her apps like some kind of obsessive-compulsive meth head.
I could feel a growing sense of panic beginning to hum throughout what had quickly grown into be an army of onlookers. Like a thick cloud of chlorine gas wafting across Flanders, it jumped from person to person with dreadful randomness, leaving scores of anxious souls in its wake. It wasn’t until the ninth thump rattled the pavement though that I too began to panic. My heart raced as all sorts of questions suddenly began to flood my mind. Like what would happen to my Spotify playlists? Would I be able to retrieve the money in my Venmo account? Were all my Snapchat memories gone for good? And how the hell was I supposed to date without Tinder?
Before I knew it hordes of distraught internet users were descending upon us, coming out of the woodwork like a bunch of lapsed Catholics on Christmas. With them they brought a whole bouquet of varying emotions: anxiousness, fear, confusion, and maybe even a little bit of excitement, as they came looking for answers to a question that none of us knew. But then all of a sudden, without even the slightest hint of provocation, something changed.
What had largely been a rather docile group quickly transformed into a pack of wild animals. I watched in shocked silence as regressive ripples of pure primality tore through the crowd like a raging wildfire. It started with a single punch, but quickly devolved into an all-out bloodbath in just a matter of seconds. A speeding van barreled into a cluster of Instagram influencers, legions of TikTokers committed ritualistic suicide en masse, and hundreds of Twitch streamers attacked each other with a sense of brutality that I didn’t know was even humanly possible.
I snapped out of my shocked daze only after witnessing a preteen girl gut a full-grown man to death with a shard of broken glass. Seeing his slimy entrails dangle like a freshly dressed buck, I pulled out my phone in an effort to document this mind-bending metamorphosis. But before I even had the chance to hit record, it was knocked clean out of my hands by a spastic middle-aged woman. As I watched it clatter to the pavement, shattering into dozens of tiny pieces, I felt a blinding sense of rage overtake me. One which knew no sympathy nor reason. Then without warning I snatched a giant chunk of concrete up off the ground and swung it hard at the woman’s head.
By the third blow her skull was severely misshapen and had little bits of brain leaking from it. Like a bowl of granola with a few scoops of yogurt, it looked both rigid and mushy. But this barbaric display of cranial anatomy did next to nothing to quell my hypnotic rage. In fact, it might have actually done the complete opposite. I swung harder and harder as the fear of never watching a YouTube video or reading a Subreddit ever again engulfed me. All the while three little words played on repeat in the back of my mind.
“No internet connection.”
I didn’t finally stop until my face was soaked with blood. By this point there really wasn’t much left to swing at anyways as the woman was nothing more than a soupy mess of splintered bone and pulped flesh. Right as I began to set my sights in on a second target though, a familiar sound stopped me dead in my tracks. A “ding” that I had heard thousands of times before and a “ding” that I knew could only come from the resumption of internet connection.
A haunting sense of clarity flooded my mind as whatever it was that had taken a hold of me suddenly let go. I swallowed hard, trying my best to maintain my composure while struggling to understand what all had just happened. I was still a little hazy from the rage, but the mountain of corpses laid out before me expedited my understanding.
A crushing tightness filled the center of my chest as the chunk of concrete slipped from my shaking hand. The murderous band of psychopathic savages that had spent the last few minutes tearing each other apart were now eerily calm as they nonchalantly stepped over the bodies of their deceased neighbors. The sounds of bones breaking, flesh tearing, and lives ending had quickly been replaced with those of Facebook reels, Twitter videos, and LinkedIn posts as the oblivious clicked away at their phones like nothing had happened. No one seemed to notice or worse, no one seemed to care.
It was months before everything was finally cleaned up. But despite the rivers of blood that soaked the streets of New York, Berlin, Paris, Lagos, Beijing, and thousands of other communities across the globe, the reason behind why all of this happened was never discussed. Not once did anyone ever question why humanity was suddenly inflicted with such an unquenchable rage and what had brought us back to baseline.
But I knew. I think deep down we all knew, just no one wanted to admit it. Because admittance requires a certain acceptance and no one wants to accept the fact that we are capable of such senseless violence. No one wants to admit that the only thing keeping us from tearing each other apart is distraction.
So, my advice to you is that if you ever see those three fateful words scrawled across your phone or plastered across your laptop, take a leap of faith. Because distraction can only take you so far and once you come face to face with the animal within there is no going back. So, here’s to Katie P, a visionary who laid the groundwork for me and thousands of other broken souls immune to these distractions. Thank you for showing me the path to peace and the window to hope. Ten floors up and ten floors down. See you soon my friend.
“Sup peeps and welcome back to another episode of ‘Kicking it with Katie P’. I am so excited for today’s episode. We have tons to talk about in terms of the animal within, but first and foremost, I want to tell you all about our amazing sponsor, Xfinity Home Internet…”