NATCH! DISPATCH: The Big Gasp

The Homps were momentarily paralyzed. The “Big Gasp”, as it would later be called, quickly gave way to panic. It seems that a great many devices, countless households and businesses, schools, hospitals, financial transactions, weather prediction, even entire Homp economies had been predicated on the continued excellent service rendered by Google and its cousins, vis-à-vis the satellites. To be clear, the terrestrial towers and undersea cables that streamed data from one community to another were still streaming along, at least in the short-term. But that stream quickly became clogged by an avalanche of knee-jerk reactions and bonehead quick fixes, all driven by mounting fear and suspicion. As one nation of Homp users after another raced to re-route this or that satellite function, the global stream slowed to a trickle. Network outages became a daily scourge. System after system crashed. Googlers typed in their hopeful searches only to be met by the swirling circle of doom. Thinking. Thinking. Thinking. No one could wait for all that thinking to resolve.

“All that thinking drove the Homps ape shit,” Jinx poetically put it. No one could figure out what to do or even figure out how to find out what to do. The Homps had grown so reliant on their technology for communications that, at first, no one could believe that such a thing had happened. People turned their devices on and off. They changed their batteries. They held them up in the air. They climbed stairs and hills seeking reception. They asked their neighbors, “Are you getting a signal? What version do you have?” They sought to find out more, to consult the News, or to ask Those in Charge, but no one could figure out how to do that. In the pre-Google days, it was rumored that some of the Homps had communicated using landline devices called telephones. They had been awkward, clunky objects, often bolted to furniture, with thick, unwieldy cords that tended to wind and knot in the presence of teenagers. Users had to extend their index fingers and crudely dial using a preassigned code of numbers in order to contact the desired party accessing a similar device. Few of these telephones remained in usable conditionoutside museums and a few public parks in Canada. So, even those who still owned and knew how to operate the devices would have no one to call.