Digital Silence

The world didn’t end with a bang. It ended with a notification.

GLOBAL SERVER FAILURE. INTERNET COLLAPSE IMMINENT.

At first, people thought it was a hoax. A stunt. Another attention-grabbing headline designed to go viral. But as the hours passed, reality set in. The internet—the omnipresent force that had woven itself into every fiber of modern life—was unraveling. It wasn’t a sudden blackout, but a slow, inevitable disintegration. Websites flickered, social media stuttered, news outlets went dark one by one. Cloud storage vanished like smoke in the wind.

For Mia Carter, an investigative journalist turned digital content creator, the loss was more than just inconvenient. It was an identity crisis.

She had spent the last decade documenting the rise and fall of influencers, dissecting trends, and feeding the algorithm. Clicks, likes, engagement—that was her currency. She had built an empire in pixels and timestamps. And now, it was all dissolving before her eyes.

Mia stared at her phone, the last remaining platform still functional—VoxSpace, an underground social hub that had somehow survived the first wave of crashes. She observed the update from the real-time tracker: 12 HOURS UNTIL GLOBAL DIGITAL WIPE.

Her fingers hovered over the screen. What did one even say in the face of a digital apocalypse?

She wrote: “If this is it—if the internet is truly disappearing—what do we want to be remembered for?”

Within minutes, responses flooded in.

@TheRealTheo: “That I made people laugh. even if it only consisted of memes." "That I was more than a username," wrote @MomofThree. @NoFilterFrank: “That we existed beyond the algorithm.”

Mia exhaled. The irony wasn’t lost on her. The internet had always thrived on urgency, yet now, in its final hours, people weren’t chasing engagement. They were searching for meaning.

A knock at her door startled her. She wasn’t expecting anyone.

When she opened it, she found her neighbor, Ethan, standing there with two cups of coffee. They had lived next to each other for three years but had barely spoken beyond a passing “hey.”

“I figured,” he said, holding up a cup, “if we’re all about to be thrown back into the dark ages, we might as well start with a conversation.”

Mia hesitated, then smiled, stepping aside to let him in.

They talked. About life before the internet. About childhoods spent outside instead of online. About fears and hopes. About how strange it was that the world outside looked the same, yet inside, everyone was silently bracing for a future they had forgotten how to navigate.

As the final countdown ticked away, Mia’s last livestream began. No scripts, no filters—just her.

“If you’re watching this,” she said, “we have minutes left. Maybe this is the end of an era, or maybe it’s a new beginning. Either way… who are we without the noise?”

The comments rolled in—confessions, reflections, goodbyes. After that, individuals began logging off one by one. Not to doom scroll. Not to panic. But to live.

Mia and Ethan walked to the rooftop, watching as the city lights flickered like a sky full of fireflies. Her phone screen dimmed. Notifications slowed. The internet—her world—vanished.

And in the silence that followed, for the first time in years, Mia felt real.