“My apologies,” Blake said, then froze.

His eyes widened, and he stared blankly ahead. His mouth opened, but no words came out.

“Is everything alright?” his colleague asked, a hint of concern in her voice.

“Yes, just give me a minute “. Then he simply stood there, a ghost in his own body.

A stone’s throw away, a similar situation unfolded.

“Tell me about the new book of the series,” the interviewer prompted.

Toni smiled uneasily.

“It’s about…”Her voice trailed off. She looked around the room, a deer in headlights.

“Yes?” the interviewer repeated, his brow furrowed.

“I… Well, It’s…” Toni whispered, her brilliant mind a blank slate.This wasn’t just a few individuals.

The odd moments of absence of mind that had been explained away as stress or fatigue were now a universal epidemic. In boardrooms, classrooms, and homes, people suddenly found themselves stumped.

“What’s the next step again?”

“I’ve… I’ve forgotten.”

“What’s your name again?”

“I… I erhm..”

The world, having become a well-oiled machine humming with perfect efficiency, strangely also regularly ground to a halt.

As an outsider, you would have been forgiven for being baffled by this new turn of events.After all, everybody seemed so sharp, so articulate, so utterly competent. The new generation ran every major corporation, innovated at a pace that made their predecessors green with envy. They navigated complex social dynamics with an ease that was almost unnerving. The world was a utopia of clean streets, revived ecosystems, stabilised economies, and universal contentment.

But this utopia didn’t stand close scrutiny. The rising star CEO, barely out of his teens, would occasionally stare blankly into space, like Blake. The brilliant novelist would sound like she had just learned to speak, like Toni. Social gatherings, usually fluid and witty, would devolve into awkward silences as if the participants’ brains had short-circuited.

Those fleeting moments left a lingering feeling that something was fundamentally broken.

And broken it was.

It had all started that fateful Tuesday morning, when all the servers went down. A massive, cascading failure across the major tech companies that provided Augmenting services. The world went silent. The screens in the glasses flickered and died. The endless stream of information people based their every move on, stopped.

For a moment, nothing happened. People simply stood still, like statues in a museum. They used all the excuses they could think of while they waited for a system reboot.

As time elapsed, the illusion which had been perfectly maintained for so long, shattered.It felt like people’s IQ had dramatically dropped overnight.They started acting like zombies, moved by basic instincts, incapable of relying on their now atrophied cognitive functions.

But a few were different. They had maintained their thinking ability and competence. They were the cautious.

Amidst all the disaster, the cautious saw opportunity.

“Let’s move” one said, a glint in his eyes.

“We’ll be the gatekeepers of everything.”

As the majority faltered, the cautious collectively seized control of the means of production. Some became the gatekeepers of the food supply, others of water, electricity, communication. Others built a back door into some data centers.

The servers eventually came back on, and the collective sigh of relief was palpable.

The world rejoiced, and the people thanked their lucky stars. They went back to being totally dependent on their Augmenting devices.

“I’m so glad to be back!,” a woman said, looking at the screens on her glasses.

“I feel whole again.””Thank goodness,” another replied. “I thought we were done for.”

The utopia of the past returned, but it was clearly a gilded cage, built and maintained by a few for the willing dependency of the many.

The cautious had clandestinely become the new masters. Benevolent when it suited them, but predatory whenever they could get away with it.

The world had found its utopia, but it had been made to forget a fundamental truth: Knowledge is power, but an outsourced mind possesses neither.