Seen

When the rumors started, we thought it was a hoax. Typical internet rubbish, drummed up by bored teenagers, Russian operatives or hysterical citizens who saw the imprint of nefarious actors on even the most mundane of inconveniences. We didn't take things seriously until articles started popping up in the New York Times and the Washington Post, around the same time the contagion started making its impact felt in our physical world, with schools and workplaces starting to take precautionary measures. Maybe we would've picked up on it sooner had we been watching the news - I'm sure there were reports on local and then national stations of the developing story. But who watched the news these days anyways?

I worked remotely, as did my wife Emily. We both did what we called "e-mail jobs" - they consisted primarily of sending e-mails asking people to do things and telling other people what things had been done. We were great shuttlers of information back and forth along the information superhighway. They were superficially good jobs, the kind that pay in the low six figures and don't require too much effort but which you'll suddenly wake up and find you've been doing for six years without any real progress in your responsibilities or financial situation.

We were on year five of that timeline, in our early thirties and happily married if professional frustrated, when the contagion began. The origins of it aren't fully known yet. Some say it was unwittingly first unleashed in the Philippines, in those crowded internet cafes where many viral TikTok sounds were birthed. Others maintain it was a more consciously nefarious act, from a bad actor like North Korea or Russia, who had already been maliciously exploiting our internet and device addictions for years. In the end, it didn't really matter - we were all affected equally.

At least, that's what I assume. It's been more than three years since I've interacted with any internet-connected device, meaning it's been three years since I learned what was taking place farther afield than the few miles surrounding the shelter. Theoretically, there could be similar pockets of people out there, doing just what we're doing. In fact, I'm sure there are. But we have no means of long-distance contact, and no will to venture outside the relatively safe haven we've built for ourselves. While I'd like to believe in the goodness of the human spirit, I saw too much of the worst of human nature in the weeks when everything was falling apart, before it settled into the post-internet world we're living in now.

We first started to entertain the possibility that the contagion was, in fact, a real thing, at the start of summer. My mom had called me worriedly a few days before, from her idyllic Nantucket retirement community.

"You're sure this isn't a real thing, honey?" she probed. "I know you're always on the computer, doing important stuff for your work, and I just want you to be safe."

I reassured her I was fine, hung up without a trace of reciprocal worry. But later that week, we got an all-company e-mail from corporate. It was something along the lines of:

Dear employees,

We are always keeping abreast of any global and local health concerns that could affect ourselves or our customers. In light of recent reports, we are recommending that employees wear protective eyewear when conducting any official business, whether on personal devices or company-issued ones. We can recommend several providers of these eye shields (please see attached links below), and we have compiled an FAQ on why they are needed and what they will do for you. As always, we will keep you informed of any developments and continue to evolve our policy to meet your needs.

More intrigued than concerned, I pulled open a few articles from news sites I considered reputable. Their rhetoric had ramped up in recent days. There were now articles describing how, while we didn't know exactly how it worked, it appeared that certain websites now contained some sort of embedded trigger that would create an irreversible mental decline with a few days of encountering it. Healthy people of all ages, genders, races, across the world, were losing the ability to remember their addresses, then their names, were losing their ability to speak in full sentences, then to speak at all, were slipping into vegetative states that meant, if they did not have a caretaker to assist with the basic human functions like eating and going to the bathroom, would slip into as precipitous a physical decline resulting in death.

Having absorbed this with a mounting unease, I then took to Twitter - generally not a platform for reassurance when you have a foreboding that the end of the world is nearing. It did not disappoint. The mood was aggressively alarmed. A sampling:

"this contagion is no joke, people. get ahead of it, go underground, turn off your devices - by the time the liberal media reports it, you'll be a goner" - @quantumleaper

"you thought latest marvel movie was bad? this contagion legit making eyes bleed haha" - @wolverinepack

"my cousin legit can't get up anymore. he's been stuck in the same position for over 20 hours now. we're kinda scared ngl" - @mrchico

I wouldn't trust Twitters on questions of grammar, but I did tend to trust them on being early spotters of meaningful developments. But when I brought it up at dinner that night, Emily reacted to me just as I'd reacted to my mother. Breezy dismissal, quickly redirecting the topic back to our planned weekend getaway to Florida in three weeks.

The getaway never materialized. Things escalated quickly in those three weeks so that by the time we might have been digging our toes into the sand on a St. Petersburg beach, we were instead covering our screens with heavy black drapes and still averting our eyes whenever we walked past them. That was the latest in a long line of several measures we'd taken. It started with ordering the silly protective eyewear, which were being hawked in every pharmacy and then every store, no matter what they sold - from fast food restaurants to electronics stores, you could walk in and buy a protective eyeshield of varying quality. Some were cheap, plastic things that touted dubious claims of protections, while others were more robust, had a heft that promised to shield you from the evils that lurked everywhere in the virtual world.

We bought the cheap plastic ones a first, almost as a lark, still pretending that it wasn't a big deal. But a few days later, as case counts started to rise, we ordered a higher-quality pair that came with medical-grade assurances. We'd also began strictly limiting the websites we visited. Outside of work-related sites, which we got near-daily e-mails assuring us were 100% safe, we limited ourselves to an ever-diminishing set of sites: major news organizations, our personal e-mail, financial portals, a handful of miscellaneous and harmless seeming sites like the library's e-book catalog. But it became stressful even to be on those - the fear of a momentary lapse in judgment, a mistakenly clicked link directing you to a site that within milliseconds would have hatched a destructive tumor in your brain, hovered over our online lives.

And so gradually we reduced our time spent online, with work eventually dorpping off as the global economy, so dependent on our internet superhighway, ground to a screeching halt. While it was technically quite safe to be outside, it seemed precarious - and as more and more people retreated to who knows where, the city emptied out and emboldened people to take advantage of the lack of oversight. Broken-into shops, graffitied walls, closed businesses hollowed out the city to a shell of itself.

It was one week after our derailed Florida plans that we left the city, and it's now been almost three years since then. We drove upstate to Emily's friend's farm, who'd generously extended an invitation to a handful of people, almost all of whom took her up on it around the same time we did. We learned how to do the things that as self-respecting adults our great-grandparents would've expected of us. Make real physical things like chairs and tables, plant and grow food, mend the bodies and souls of each other as we grappled with and came to love the immediate scope of world that our lives encompassed.