DAY THREE. REALISATION.
It's actually kind of hard to believe that it took me this long to realise what had happened.
The Internet disappeared.
Not with any ceremony, no big bang or anything. It just happened kind of quietly, almost in a polite way. I have a friend who says he was loading up some videos (probably the dirtiest kinds of porn) and when he went to watch them, he got the "An Error Has Occurred" screen of doom. He tried refreshing, got nothing. Rebooted his router. Got nothing.
That was three days ago, and I'm only just finding out now that the Internet is dead. Most people are telling me that it won't be long before it is back. All the big internet companies in Australia, Telstra, Optus, Dodo, TPG, etc., are all saying that they don't know what has happened, but they're working on restoring our services, Sorry For Your Inconvenience.
I've got the strangest and most inexplicable feeling there's no going back.
At this point, I'm wondering if this is a good thing. People will be able to go out and do things. Actually interact like the human brain is programmed to. Maybe cinemas and movies will start to generate a little more money. Newspapers might be forced to print proper news again. Maybe people will start reading books again, and I won't be the only one who knows how to use a paper dictionary. People can shift back to the way our lives were before the Internet, right? It isn't like we are dependent on it as a society or anything.
DAY FIVE. THE DESCENT.
Wrong. Very wrong. So very wrong. More wrong than Hitler when he assumed it'd work out to keep his troops in Russia during the winter.
People can't live without the Internet.
My life hasn't been overly affected. I go to university, I take notes in lectures like I always have. Tutorials carry on, with me being the only person who appears to be paying attention. The lecturers seem largely undisturbed, most of them having grown up in a time long before the Internet reared its head and ate people's brains, and operating mostly outside its ghostly bindings. So the older people tend to show no symptoms of withdrawal.
What's truly disturbing is the students. Most of them have become pale despite the fact they wander outside listlessly like they don't know where they are, bags under their eyes so deep and wide you could stand a Snorlax in them and it wouldn't touch the sides. And their eyes have lost their shine. They wander around pathetically, unsure of how to interact with real people. Most of them spurt meaningless information at you uncontrollably if you make eye contact.
"Burnt my toast. WORST! DAY! EVER!"
"This song is so amazing. Love love love, less than three."
But you never know what song they're talking about, because it would ordinarily be accompanied by a link and people seem genuinely confused that the real world doesn't work like that.
I was even awoken last night by a knock on my apartment door at one in the morning. When I opened it to see who had been gently rapping at my chamber door, it was my across-the-hall neighbour. She looked at me with dead eyes, pale blue lips, shivering slightly, and said in a lifeless voice, "It's cold. Snuggle weather."
I shut the door on her, and for the first time ever, locked all three locks and pushed an arm chair against the wood that no longer seemed substantial enough.
From the brief few moments of TV I've watched, these people have been called "Internet Zombies", and they're harmless.
But I've only really seen the Facebook internet zombies so far, and a couple of Twitter zombies (Twits. Don't ruin this for me.), who are infinitely more annoying because they just follow you around until you tell them "Delete account? Yes". But I have to travel into the heart of Sydney to get to uni, so I know that if there are more zombies, I will see them. I'm waiting for the worse ones… Reddit zombies, I Can Has Cheezburger? zombies… 4chan zombies.
Oh God.
What will happen when the /b/tards step out blinking into the real world?
DAY SIX. RISE OF THE FANATICISM.
People are believing the TV news.
This is the scariest thing I have seen since the Internet has died. In Sydney, there are two main factions – the 7ers (supported in the rural areas by Primes) and the 9ers, who line the streets and scream conflicting news stories at each other. And with the inability to easily be a sceptic that the Internet afforded us, people latch onto things that they are told and they aren't questioning it. People forgot the scorn with which they viewed the TV news back when the Internet was a thing.
That was only 6 days ago.
Everything news programs tell these people is taken as gospel truth. I have seen two groups of middle-aged business men brawl like wild animals in Town Hall train station because one group supported Channel 7's story that the Internet would be back in two weeks, but the other group believed Channel 9 when they said it'd take three. It took more policemen to break them apart than I'd ever seen in one place before.
Many people are attempting to fill their lives by replacing one screen with another. Watching TV means that they don't have to interact with other humans in any sort of proper fashion, but it isn't enough. There are ads on TV. You can't control the content, for the most part.
And also, TV sucks.
It always has. That's why I tried very hard not to watch it. I always tried to read instead.
But people are latching onto it like ex-heroin addicts become addicted to methadone. People are trying to adapt. Some people are even trying to fall back into my pass-time, reading books. But they can't get the hang of turning pages, they reach for a mouse or a touch-pad, and are baffled when these actions have no results.
People's brains entirely adapted to having the Internet present, tossing out all other information like that episode of Spongebob Squarepants where he needs to become a waiter, so the little Sponges inside his brain toss out all other information. Most people can't remember how to do the majority of things without the Internet there to guide them.
Mobile phone companies are failing, with many services being completely overwhelmed with the sudden influx of people sending text messages in place of online IMing. Telstra, Vodafone and 3 are all already down, their phones not working.
The postal system has been flooded with stamp-less pieces of paper covered in "LOL" and "OMG U R SO FUNNI" and, if the worker is extra lucky (or, to be realistic, damn fucking unlucky), amateur nude pics, addresses scribbled un-understandably on them. Because of the amount of crap being pushed into post-boxes, the delivery of real mail is sporadic at best.
It hasn't even been a week yet.