Member-only story
When The Systems Fail
When the blackout hits, Emma doesn’t just sit in the dark. She unravels. She has spent her entire life as part of a system that tells her who she is and what to do. Her skills are brilliant, specialized, and entirely digital. They have made her indispensable to many tech companies. She engineers predictive algorithms for global markets and writes code that anticipates human behavior. But when the blackout renders everything offline, she can’t even figure out how to make her next meal.
Emma isn’t just lost; she is paralyzed. Without electricity, she has lost the system that has defined her. She has never needed to trust her instincts or make decisions without a framework to guide her. Now, when she needs one most, she has no framework at all.
Water no longer flows from taps. Stores stand empty. She possesses nothing of value to trade, and worse, she doesn’t even understand how bartering works. Perhaps most devastating of all, she doesn’t know who to trust, especially herself.
Emma exemplifies what our siloed society builds: humans fragmented to extremes, mentally, physically and socially. Citizens who must rely on systems to make all decisions for them. From the moment she entered school, she has been taught to specialize, to master narrow skills that could slot neatly into society’s machinery. Math. Coding. Data analysis. These tools give her career…
