“Rabbit Hole”
Kira’s eyelids were getting heavy as she hit the refresh button once more. She was scrolling through her favorite Reddit thread but she had already read all the most interesting posts. She thought if she kept refreshing maybe she’d come across some new posts she hadn’t read, something to entertain her so she didn’t just end up going to sleep before 10:00 PM again another night.
Lately every day felt exactly like the day that came before it. Get up. Log on. Do some work. Log off. Eat dinner. Scroll scroll scroll. Go to sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. Life couldn’t go on like this forever, but for now that seemed likely. So Kira tried to find some excitement in the virtual world, doing deep dives into mysteries of the universe, spending hours researching conspiracies, glitches in the matrix, and the unknown. It didn’t change the humdrum of everyday life, but it made her think about how massive and strange this world can be. It gave her a renewed sense of self and a heightened awareness of all the strange and beautiful things this world has to over. And, at very least, something to look forward to every night.
But tonight the usual routine wasn’t working. Kira felt like she read everything the Internet had to offer. There were no rabbit holes for her to go down that she hadn’t already studied before. Kira checked her watch, it was 9:58. She tried to will herself to at least stay awake for another two minutes, but each passing second made that harder to do.
Kira slumped forward, her finger pressing the T key, she started to nod off when a loud BING came from her computer. Startled, she sat upright and squinted her eyes to steady her focus on the screen.
Kira was confused. She hadn’t seen a pop-up like that in decades. Figuring it was just some scam advertisement, she tried to X out, but it was to no avail. She could only go with one option, and that was clicking OK.
Nothing happened.
She tried clicking again but, nothing. Her whole screen had frozen.
And that’s when it started. Her screen began to twist and twirl, like a cyclone pulling her in. Suddenly she was inundated with words, with stories, with not only mysteries she had never read before, but answers and solutions to all those she had spent hours researching. She was exposed to truths beyond her comprehension. Some she didn’t even want to know about. Suddenly, the world was in the palm of her hand. She went down the rabbit hole and reached its core, where the mysteries of the universe were all revealed to her.
There was only one problem: now that she had gone all the way down the rabbit hole, she had no way of getting back out.