The Outage

Prologue

People these days.

That's what my grandpa said everyday. Sometimes he'd be talking about the people who drove like idiots. People have always driven like idiots. Some days he's referring to the rude coworkers he was forced to cooperate with in his projects. But people have always been rude. At least most of them. But most of the time he was talking about the obsessed.

The obsessed over tiny little devices that held the world in their screens. What innocent pieces of entertainment and usefulness we assumed they were. How stupid we were to be so in love with something inanimate! The cell devices were by far too much already. The amazing ability to contact other people in seconds, to see their face smiling back at you thousands of miles away, to play games with comrades from around the globe, the infinite amounts of information supplied on the Web.

But we couldn't get enough. We needed eerily human resembling automatons to enchant us and follow our every command like servants. We required robotic machines to complete our chores and our daily labor. Eventually, we depended so entirely on the technology we had created and developed, the cyborgs were born.

Half-mechanized humans with their lives hanging on the dependence of the gears and robotic filaments throughout their fragile bodies. We had so ruined our environment with the factories and manufacturing plants of our planet that most young children died before the age of seven from radioactive sickness.

Transferring to the Cyborg Program prevented this sickness. There was no antidote to the disease. No vaccine like we had for every other documented illness. When the lights went off on this Earth, and the program came to an abrupt stop, was the day I died.

My name is Quen. I am fifteen years old and this is the story of how the world ended.