It’s the year 2069 in Old Seattle, and somebody’s killing Nobodies.

No one knew what to do the day the Internet died.

It was as if Earth’s hopes and dreams were wiped clean in one fell swoop.

Chaos erupted.

The world fell apart.

Riots. War. Famine. Plague. Genocide. All the boxes were checked.

But no matter how low or high the humans wavered, the World Wide Web was no more.

When it was finally accepted that the precious Internet was dead and gone, a shock wave traveled through all humanity—through the very Zeitgeist of the entire planet.

It was not unlike what happens to a family when the matriarch, the mother, dies. Everything was disrupted. Everything was forgotten. Everything was up for grabs. The same thoughts raced through everyone’s minds: ‘What happens now? Who will hold everything together? Who will comfort me against the chaos? Who will fix my broken dreams?’

The invention of the Internet changed us on the inside. It linked reality, pathos, and imagination forever in the human brain. It combined these qualities in a way that was never fully understood, in a way that way irreversible.

Then someone pulled the plug, and the greatest invention in the whole of human history died like grapes on the vine.

The Internet was gone, but the ideas brought about by the Internet were not.

The death of the Internet released the elder gods of human consciousness to the world—avarice, greed, hate, lust, alienation, anti-compassion. People turned against one another. Common understanding broke down. Empathy was a thing of the past.

Like Pandora’s box, the inception of the Internet had brought about actual changes in the human psyche that once unleashed now raged outside the bounds of landlines, wifi routers, and server farms. All the darkness, terrible ideas, and unconscious thoughts that migrated from the human brain to the world wide web, now spilled out onto the street like an open sewer.

The Internet was now IRL, and it was never going back.

The dark sentiments of the Internet were like blood to a predator; once savored outside the bounds of the web, the thirst was uncontrollable.

Thirty-one years later, in 2069, no one knows who turned the Internet off.

Or do they?