The blackout was a few months ago, but Marie Joyce remembered it like it was yesterday. She was in the system, something that everyone was prone to doing at that time. Her work day was done and the weekend was coming and she was ready to do what she loved to do most, play the piano. She sat down in the fluorescent green room that she called her studio and started playing. She could feel the weight of the keys on her fingers, could feel them spring up in that ever so delicate way as she took them up into the air. The piano itself was a worn upright from an obscure Japanese brand, something that her father gifted her when the system was still a giant box worn on the head. Marie’s father has been known to have a hunch since those days, but still logged in on a regular basis.

Then, it happened. Not gradually, but in the blink of an eye, gray noise came into every single one of Marie’s senses, like pins and needles only for every inch of the body and every sensation, including vision and hearing. She screamed. Her screams only punctuated the gray noise. It was like this for three hours, by the count of the analog clock in her bedroom. Then the system lost power, everything went black in her vision, there was only silence in her hearing, but fortunately she could feel the sensors on her skin. She pulled down her system mask and looked around her drab and small apartment. There was, in fact, a genuine leather piano bench she was sitting on, though the thing that she was playing so delicately earlier was her desk.

The apartment itself was nothing special, on an eight story walk-up just outside of what used to be Washington, D.C. Marie lived and worked in this apartment, living as a woman in her late twenties and working as a customer service representative. For what company she works for and what service they provide is unimportant and uninteresting, but I’ll tell you anyway. She works for Daedalus Incorporated, which provides the service of shipping packages internationally for a much larger, much more successful company. Marie’s job was to accept calls from angry customers who wouldn’t receive packages from the much more successful company and would blame Daedalus Incorporated. The much more successful company will remain unnamed to clear my name of any charges of defamation or slander. Marie’s apartment was filled with useless, novel trinkets that she had ordered from the much more successful company, even before she worked for its subsidiary. That being said, she would order items into the tenure of her career as well. One of these items was her system.

The system was exactly that, an intricate system of computers that connected the entirety of the human race in a digital reality. When the system, and the reality therein, was turned into a gray noise, people were, rightfully, pretty annoyed. After a few hours without the system, Marie found herself passing a stress ball in between her hands when her phone rang. When she answered it was another customer service representative. This one worked at the much more successful company, and informed Marie that she should expect the system up by the end of the night, at the very latest the next morning.

That was two months ago.

Marie still had her drab apartment and her drab job, the only thing that kept her slightly connected to the meatspace her body inhabited. During the first few weeks, the much more successful company gave an ordinance, with the help of the Pan-American Alliance and the city of Greater Columbia, that all citizens should remain inside. It only took a few murders and several heart attacks for the three parties to agree to let people out of their apartment buildings, despite the fact that the air had been deemed uninhabitable, barring filtration, years prior.

Marie took the trek down the eight flights of stairs that led into her lobby, surrounded by the people she knew as neighbors and not much more. “Geez.” Marie said, upon exiting the complex for the first time in a very long time. “What a shithole.” There were murmurs about the courtyard that seemed to echo her sentiment. The sky, despite not being run by a shoddy computer, had been a gray noise ever since Marie could remember. Towers of drab apartments cascaded into the gray noise, the sun poking down onto the civilian populace like a street lamp in fog.

A delivery truck came into the courtyard, bearing the logo of the much more successful company on its side. The radio was playing a song by an artist long dead that Marie had learned to play on her system piano, and this provided a small sense of comfort to her before a crowd stormed the truck and the hazmat suited driver who was operating it.

“When will the system be back online?” asked one of the tenants.

“What does (the much more successful company’s CEO) have to say about this?” said another. The hazmat suited driver paid no attention to them, simply loading packages, also bearing the logo of the much more successful company on their side, into the loading dock of the complex to be sorted later. When the hazmat suited driver came back to his truck, an eldery man, made sinew by ages within his apartment, attempted to strike a punch. The driver, who was the only strong and healthy man among the crowd, took this in stride, got back in his truck, and left the tenants to explore the courtyard.

And explore, they did, only stopping when they came to the fenced in yard that separated the complex from the rest of Greater Columbia. Marie came across a small calico cat, balding and crusty and wheezing like on life support. Maggots were crawling and biting around its feet. Marie picked up the cat, swaddled it in her thin sweatshirt and brought it up the eight flights of stairs into her drab apartment. The cat screamed and hollered the whole way up. At one point, a neighbor asked what was in the swaddled sweatshirt and was promptly taken aback by the anguished cries of the calico.

When arriving back to her apartment, she laid a small bowl of water on the floor for the cat, who didn’t dare to escape from its comfortable home of polyester and cotton. There were two phone calls on her answering machine; one from the much more successful company, promising that the system would be up within the week, and one from her father. Marie’s father, Carl Joyce, lived in a rusty two-story shack on the outskirts of Delaware. In his last few years of retirement, senility had gotten the best of him. During his rambling message, he spoke of Marie’s mother, who had been dead and gone for a decade or more. He said that her lung cancer, the thing that had taken its toll on her in the later years of her life, was getting worse. She promptly deleted each message and walked into the kitchen to check on the condition of the calico, whose screams and hollers had died down a bit. The little thing had fallen asleep, raspy snores coming from its deviated septum.

This incident with the calico happened one month into the blackout. After the second month, the much more successful company no longer gave the courtesy call to each of their customers, lying that the system would be back online soon, leaving said customers pretty annoyed. After that, hazmat suited delivery drivers brought packages to the complex on a regular basis, sometimes three or four times a day, unloading the whole truck each time. At the end of the second month without the system, Marie ordered a keyboard from the much more successful company, which arrived within the guaranteed three days. It was a large, thin box, being that the keyboard had the full 88 keys that Marie was used to playing. She opened it gingerly and laid it equally gingerly onto the desk where she would practice within the system.

When she put her hands on the keys, her foot on the small plastic sustain pedal, the sound was almost offensive to her ears. She laid a fifth chord on the middle C that just sounded different from the luminous and warm tone of the off-brand Japanese upright that she was so used to playing. The calico, now considerably more furry and with considerably less maggots, approached curiously, hopped up onto the desk and rubbed her head on the edge of the keyboard.

Marie had found out after a few days of having the cat that it was female and she gave it a name; Regina. After Regina rubbed the edge of her jaw on the felt speaker of the keyboard, Marie stopped. She looked around her living room, which also happened to be her bedroom and kitchen, and finally felt isolation, the kind that seeps deeply into one’s soul. She realized that the room was mostly empty, say for the desk, the piano bench, the newly ordered keyboard, an assortment of useless and novel trinkets, and an assortment of molding dishes piled up in her sink. This isolation led to a scorned, painful face, which led to tears. For three hours she sobbed until there were no more tears to cry, and then sobbed a bit more. At this point, a knock came to her door.