It started as a Company raid, aided by a hacker who crashed the system of a Rival company. It escalated, every computer system in the World crashed. Hospitals, Electricity, Money. All were lost and the only way to even get the beginning of a re-start needed electricity. -- Anon Guest
The moral, if there was one, was always add extra stop clauses in your trojan worms. Some would say it should have been, don't create trojan worms that will end the world as you know it. Regardless, ConnSafeT should never have hired hackers to end the profits of MegaGloboSecuriCorp. Having had the idea of hiring hackers to do that, they really should have looked into those hackers' records.
Now the world was ending. So had ConnSafeT and MegaGloboSecuriCorp.
The global power grid went down, and so did every system of records with it. Surges fried just about every hard drive and server in the world, and those that remained could not work without power. For twenty-four hours, those in urgent need of electricity scrambled to attain some. Power corrupts, but electricity is life. For twenty-four hours, volunteers manually pumped ventilators that kept tiny premature newborns alive. For twenty-four hours, transactions that could not go ahead electronically did not go through. Communication died between nations. Between states. Between cities. Between towns.
The world did not end. Several people did, though, including the executives in charge of the companies that should have prevented such from happening.
And yet, from out of the woodwork, from out of the ashes, new structure arose.
Techie sorts created 'hamster wheel' generators out of exercise equipment. Jocks and sporty types became generators for the most vital equipment to save as many lives as they could. Alternative power sources charged phones. Horse people became couriers.
The world rebuilt itself, caring for the people first.
Chemistry majors created free medicine in local laboratories. Those with green thumbs turned their lawns into croplands. Those with the knowhow shared their knowledge with their neighbours. Historians helped the mechanics build human-powered devices to take up the slack whilst the electric grid restarted.
In all of this, only the most useless perished. Those who were not accustomed to hard work, or had a minimalist knowledge base, perished in the new order. Those whose money had been entirely virtual, those who rarely lifted a finger for themselves, they perished.
The world did not miss them.
Humanity stumbled backwards, as it often did, as the system shuddered. Humanity did what it always did best - it rebuilt. Better. Stronger. The redundancies once eliminated by those in love with the bottom line were maintained, because We remember the last time.
People living in rented spaces no longer had landlords to pay. They maintained their own resources, or paid others to do so. They often maintained their spaces better than the landlords who had once threatened to render them homeless for complaining about mould in the shower stalls.
In a handful of years, the people in the cities were living in better homes. They were living in a better system. Those who were too violent did not reign for long. They found themselves without any kind of sustaining structure. There were, after all, plenty of opportunities elsewhere.
Electricity came back in due course. Technologies once refused as too difficult to install soon became essential everywhere. Some could be made from materials found locally, and they were - in abundance. From there, it was only a question of scaling up.
Some servers could be restarted. The satellites in orbit kept doing their job. Infrastructure evolved around stopping the gaps as they occurred.
Creating destruction "for the lols" was never tolerated again.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / DeziDezi]
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