Prologue:
There was a loud clickity-clack of fingers on a keyboard that filled the small echoey room late at night. The computers lit up the room in an artificial half-light. On the screen was a list of numbers and letters, program coding. A slender boy sat slouched in front of the computer. A message popped up on the screen.
“Grant, log on already and go to bed.”
“Yes, Mother. I’m almost done,” he typed back. Grant finished up the last of his programming and typed, sleep.end(21);, for his last command of the night before putting on his visor. “Log on, Azalea,” he spoke aloud. It was the only time he had spoken that day. The only time anyone ever spoke was to log on.
Grant didn’t remember the last time he heard another’s voice outside the virtual reality game. He had never seen the person he calls mother before. He hated it. He hated the visor that he wore at least sixteen of the twenty four hours of the day which connected him online.
“What is a family?” Grant thought after he turned on a two hundred year old TV show recreation called “Modern Family” through his visor on a holographic imaging screen. His avatar sat on a leather couch in a virtual living room. The walls were bare and white. The floor was covered in unforgiving hardwood and chaotic mess.
After an episode had finished, he pulled up the completed program that he had just finished writing. “My family is nothing like that. This could fix everything.” Grant’s avatar, Azalea’s, fingertips hovered over the button that could transform the world. All he had to do was push “Run.” The world would be infected in minutes. There was a glitch in the game. His finger twitched accidentally hitting run. The button disappeared as the virus was sent.
A horrific silence fell on nearly all seven billion inhabitants of planet Earth, their world had stopped turning, at least online.