A Cursor Story

Chapter 0: Decursorification

New York, 2025

All Cursors have disappeared from computers across the world. Pointers too. It happens instantaneously and simultaneously way before people can realize. It is a dark night in the West. Most have thought it as a system malfunction and switch off their devices. Nightowls get an excuse to call it a day ..or night.  

The world soon realizes that there is no way to use computers since no typing is possible. Web browsers have stopped responding due to the lack of web addresses. Software windows already open can only be closed through brute key commands. Computer users who have their software windows open get trapped in the same quagmire as those who cannot open their favorite software from the program icons on the desktop.  It's a chaos of planetary proportions.

No search engine or social media website can be accessed. No online food delivery can be made. Videos and comments thereon are missing. 

The morning

The horizon becomes red. The sun shines ever brighter as if the atmosphere has given a free run to the sun's rays. 

As the morning comes, the transportation sector becomes the first hit with trains and flights booking coming to a halt. Ships get stranded mid-sea. Only road transport is still functional but no automatic drive is available since destination can not be fed in. Some students are happy that their exams would be postponed, some are gloomy as they have to return empty-handed from the online exam centers. 

By the day the automated industrial complexes had to switch off the power supply of the assembly lines.

Financial transactions can barely take place since only offline transactions are possible. The total number of transactions has been reduced to 0.0012% of the usual daily count as the banking system comes on tenterhooks. Only scheduled transactions are taking place leaving some people in want of money while some other with large sums of money. The cash flow of companies whether big or small is either overflowing or drying. Stock exchanges have become a place where more rumors than shares are exchanged.

No calls can be made to customer service centers. Major computer security companies are scrambling to come up with a quick fix. Still all of them kept quiet. They are simply out of solutions. 

In the absence of the online transactions, people first resort to cash but soon realize that cash supply is not enough in the market. All these years, the Central banks have forgotten the Gresham's law of bad money drives out good money. In fact central banks have lost their much-coveted relevance ever since cryptocurrency usurped the space of fiat currency. Today in shortage of the cash supply, once again Gresham's law has been manifested in its ultimate veracity. Cryptocurrencies become worth nothing because transactions cannot work forcing the government to print money using 18th-century technology and dye watermarking.

The situation is no better in countries of the East. People used to live with power cuts and 2G data speed have thought that they have nothing much to lose from the catastrophe. They still believed in their driving skills more than GPS based automatic cars. But soon it is clear that they are facing the same cataclysm phase-shifted by a few hours.

With TV, internet off everyone from students to professionals, homemakers to media, government to the industry has been affected. Communication systems across the globe have totally collapsed. The global village which became a reality after sustained efforts of decades of scientific research and technological breakthroughs has indeed been reduced to a village in a literal sense.

Mankind is never behind in using its ingenuity. A few people come up with a long list of key combinations for getting at least some basic work done however still at significantly reduced speed and efficiency. Still they are not able to change the settings of any software. Since no customization is possible, this renders a lot of software useless for specific kinds of people. The tech-savvy computer users who are used to putting character-based code to unlock the screens of their devices have been locked out. Re-installing the Operating System (OS) is not a solution because in the year 2025 most computer services will be beamed from a central server of the Quantum Global Rational Intelligence and Information Device or Quantum GRIID or in short the GRIID. GRIID required typing authentication codes. Even after reinstallation the same problem persists.