The Day Everything Stopped
By 2035, Springfield felt like a city that had finally caught its stride. Three new smart manufacturing districts buzzed with autonomous assembly lines. The local logistics AI—OzarkOps—had quietly made the 417 Region one of the most efficient mid-sized economies in the country. National business commentators began calling Springfield "the Midwest's best-kept economic secret."
Most people didn't understand how it all worked. They just knew it did.
At 2:06 PM on October 9th, it stopped.
I was at Patton Alley Pub when my old CB crackled to life. Hadn't heard that kind of chatter in years. Every kiosk at the hospital was frozen. Autonomous vehicles were pulling onto highway shoulders in synchronized rows, hazard lights blinking. The problem wasn't mechanical - it was trust. The digital kind.
Down at Cox South, nurses stood in med rooms debating whether to override dispensing cabinets. The cabinets still held the medication—perfectly stocked, powered, functional. But they demanded a verification loop that had no endpoint. One nurse, Carrie, grabbed paper binders—dusty emergency protocols written ten years earlier. They were clunky, outdated, and maddeningly vague. But they were human.
Meanwhile, us old dispatchers—workers replaced by routing algorithms years earlier—gathered at the Kearney Street depot. Nobody asked us to. We just saw the silence on the highways and showed up. Pen, paper, and CB radios. That's what saved the day.
"The computers didn't know what to do. But I did. Because I've been doing this job since before they were born."
As the sun set, Mayor Hartman watched us old-timers spread paper maps on folding tables, talking through contingencies. Most of us hadn't been needed in years. That night, the city needed only us.
She whispered to herself, "We built a future no one can operate by hand."