Powerless

Wrapping up his afternoon run, the kid walked up to his house to find the door ajar.
Confused and slightly concerned, he pushed the door open.
“Mom?”
“In here,” he heard echoing out of the kitchen.
Walking into the room, he almost collided with their robot, which was standing motionless just over the threshold.
“What’s going on?”
“Don’t know, it just stopped.”
“Did you try calling the company?”
“Yup, phone is dead too though. Just like the lights and appliances.”
“What?”
“Nothing is on.”
“What do you mean?”
“See for yourself.”
Looking around for the first time, he noticed that the familiar glow from the fridge screen was absent. Light switches made their quiet clicking noises but illuminated nothing.
He went to leave and noticed the electronic lock was disengaged. Moving outside, he saw that some of his neighbors had reached the same conclusions. Small huddles of people had begun to gather.
He started walking towards one of his neighbor’s houses when he remembered that he had left his phone charging at home when he went out. Running back upstairs, he found that it too was unresponsive. He pocketed it and headed back down the stairs.
“Hold up there- I don’t want you going out right now. Just wait for your father to get home and then we’ll figure this out,” his mom caught him as he started toward the door.
“Why? I was just out and nothing happened. Doesn’t look like any cars are starting either. I’ll be fine. I just want to walk around and see if I can find an outlet.”
“Alright but don’t stay out too late. Oh, and stop by the store, see if you can get some candles or something. Good thing we picked up groceries early this week.”
No instructions were forthcoming from the television. The radio was full of static. The internet was totally inaccessible, and telephones smart and stupid were useless. Civil servants scurried between offices, while their superiors tried to figure out who to blame.
They were not alone in their misfortune. Across the country, millions would soon discover that their evenings were not going according to plan. A few rugged individualists in the backwoods noticed nothing different, but the big cities were hubs of chaos. Everywhere else was somewhere between these extremes.
As day turned into night and no new information came to light, the chaos only grew. A few hundred people milling about turned into a few thousand crowds gathered outside the offices of their local representatives. Police worked to manage the crowds as best they could, but with the only means of transportation being bicycles, horses and a few ancient gas-powered vehicles, they were quickly overwhelmed and forced to regroup.
After exploring the town for a little while and finding the same situation everywhere, the kid made his way to the store. He pushed past the frantic shoppers and occasional shoplifter to escape with a few large scented candles, a dozen packages of beef jerky, and two gallons of water. The one remaining cashier was too frazzled to figure out how much was actually owed, so the kid threw a twenty at him and left.
He returned home just after sunset to find his mother ready to leap off the front stoop, awaiting his return.
“Any word from Dad?”
“Nothing yet. Are you okay? How’d you make out?”
“The store was getting crazy but I grabbed a few things. Couple of old gas guzzlers were rolling around but otherwise it seems like the whole town is blacked out.”
“…what are we going to do with beef jerky? Alright well it’s too late now. We should check on your grandfather tomorrow and see what else we can pick up. I’m sure they’ll fix whatever this is soon.”

Several stories below ground, the man paced around his laboratory, going over what exactly he had done. He had input the last few lines of code, uploaded the new program, then sat back while the computer did its work. Moments later, everything shut down and the red emergency lighting came on.
He had been trapped alone in his lab for what felt like an eternity, but was probably closer to 16 hours. He was glad for the mini-fridge where they kept snacks and water, but it had stopped working when the rest of the power cut out and was barely doing the job keeping things cool.
He wondered what was going on upstairs. His wife and son must be worried by now, and he hoped that the proper authorities were figuring out a plan to get him out of here.
All of a sudden the lights came back on, and the computer displayed an unhelpful “Upload Success!”
He immediately went to leave his lab and was practically bowled over by his assistant rushing in. “You’ll never believe what happened! I was in the main server room… was it yesterday? I was running but I tripped over a cable and all the lights went out. Would you believe there are no lights in there?”
“Why were you running? We haven’t even had to go into the server room since we automated the whole thing.”
“The main bathroom is apparently under construction so I was cutting through, I really had to go. I spent the next few hours trying to figure out what I’d tripped on; it must have been the main power cable. Plugged it back in as soon as I could find it, can you believe it?”
The man could only stare.

