The satellites, unguided by their ground control stations, began to tumble into irretrievable orientations, experienced orbital decay, and eventually came back down to earth. Without satellites, modern communications of almost every kind faltered and failed, and the world was no longer sufficiently knitted together to conduct the necessary technological business of the modern global society.
Billions of people believed that Homo sapiens had achieved a permanent higher station since the retreat of the last great ice age. Unlike destruction by a slowly grinding ice sheet, however, all our technological modernity was swept away in a blink. The last live radio programming I’d heard had been from an AM station out of Knoxville that lasted for a few weeks after the power went out. And there was a canned FEMA broadcast alleging to be from the nation’s capital, but that radio frequency, too, had gone silent. How had it all happened so fast? I had a master’s degree in history, and I understood enough of it to come up with a few theories to explain what had happened, at least in the broad strokes.
Modern society was engineered for the maximum production of profits, providing the maximum comfort for the maximum population, using mankind’s most cutting-edge technical trickery and marketing magic for leverage. Maximum profits for producing maximum pleasures, and it would only get more maximum forever, as humanity’s greatest minds piled one technological miracle atop another, leading to ever-rising standards of living for most of the world’s billions of people. Onward and upward the towers of our modern cities soared into the sky as the suburbs spread outward and merged.
At least that’s how it was supposed to work. And it did work, for quite a while. But a few novelties unique to our time went almost unnoticed. Never before in history had so many been fed by so few, from so far away. By the end, our cities had grown into traps, with the easy creature comforts they promised as the bait. Billions of people moved into these technological beehives, where food, shelter, and (sometimes) work could be found in close proximity. City life was easier for the worker bees, and more profitable—and more controllable—for the queens.
That is, until the digital blood of the global communications network froze in all its infinite circuitry, and the machinery seized up and jammed in place. Suddenly left to their own nearly nonexistent devices, cut off from the food from distant agro-business farms, the inhabitants of our densely packed cities panicked and looted the stores and other food sources like locusts. After that, if the occasional travelers were to be believed, they literally consumed themselves. It was the modern consumer society’s final stage: Consumer, consume thyself. Did I, myself, see it? No. But what I saw with my own eyes in small-town and rural America left me in no doubt about what had taken place in the cities.
A popular historian from the end of the last century named Fukuyama had referred to the end of history, with an evolved mankind finally the master of the universe and his fate within it. Hardly the master, as it turned out. Instead, for decades we had lived inside an increasingly delicate techno-bubble, floating ever higher on digital money created from thin air, and we believed it was all as permanent as the pyramids!
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