Callum Fraser

When The Servers Died

The servers went down all over the world. At first people waited, glued to their radios and televisions, secure in the knowledge that life would soon be restored. Then, two hours later, the radios and the televisions stopped reporting. They had run out of news. The nice Welshman, usually so reassuring, was sweating, fervently repeating the message, ‘as soon as normality is restored, the news will resume.’

Two days later, normality had not been restored. There were scattered rumours of connectivity in Scotland, China and Fiji, prompting mass immigration. The claims were bogus, but still the people went.

Two weeks later true panic had taken control. Every bank had collapsed, money was being piled into bonfires and people were resorting to cannibalism in the absence of quick, easy to follow recipes. The only surviving paper, the Daily Mail, ran headlines appealing for calm.

Two months in and the world’s population had halved. In most countries martial law had been installed and summarily overthrown. Society had returned to tribalism, and John Prescott had revived Druidism in the hope of being declared Grand Wizard.

Two years later. Things began to change. At first it was little things, like street-lights, long dormant, springing into life. Then the radios and the televisions began to broadcast once again. The nice Welshman, dressed only in war paint, began to speak of a new source of knowledge, shrouded in mystery, which was beginning to restore normality. Soon the banks reopened, only better than before, and shops too.

People marched on the great seats of Government, so long abandoned, expecting to find the empty buildings thronging with the new politicians who must have saved them. They did not find them. Instead, all across the globe, the people of the Earth discovered small but determined bands of people in cardigans. It was they who had restored normality. Using nothing more than rubber stamps and well put together index cards they had rediscovered things like how to run the power stations and the economy.

One of the cardigans, marked out as a great leader amongst her people by the silk ribbon on her reading glasses, spoke of a great tome called ‘Encyclopaedia’. Apparently it was like Wikipedia, only harder to spell. She seemed to believe that being harder somehow meant better, too.

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