I had forgotten how many phones there are in the world. How many sit on nightstands, on kitchen tables, plugged into the walls, buzzing and pinging and lighting up in a rhythm we all used to ignore. Seven days ago I barely noticed my own. Now every one of them feels like a tiny scream in the dark.
It started yesterday morning. I was walking past a row of houses and heard a sound I thought was a cat at first — a thin, rising wail from somewhere inside. I went in through the back door. The kitchen was cold. A bowl of cereal had gone soft on the counter. The wailing wasn’t an animal. It was a baby monitor on the table, the tiny speaker hissing and choking with static, just long enough between bursts to let you wonder if the crying was real or just memory.
Then my phone vibrated. A video call. The number was local. I answered it.
A toddler’s face filled the screen. Red cheeks, runny nose, eyes puffy from hours of panic. He didn’t say a word. He was too young to understand how to. He just held the phone wrong-side-up and cried into it.
That was the moment I knew the world wasn’t dying — it was crying.
The calls haven’t stopped. House phones. Cell phones. Tablets still connected to whatever battery was left. Every device that survived the network crash is now a distress beacon, all of them reaching out to the only person who answers.
I’ve stopped keeping track of how many I’ve answered. Dozens? Hundreds? Sometimes it’s a roomful of toddlers screaming together. Sometimes it’s a single baby, silent but breathing, the camera pointed at a ceiling fan that will never spin again. Sometimes the screen shows nothing but darkness — a phone inside a crib or under a bed — and you only hear soft hiccuping sobs.
I try to talk to them. I tell them I’m coming. I lie constantly. I tell them everything will be okay. None of them understand the words, but they know the tone. They calm down for a few seconds. Then the panic comes back.
I can’t go everywhere. I can’t reach everyone. I keep telling myself that any help is better than none, but the truth is colder: I’m not saving them. I’m just hearing them die slower.
Tonight I turned my own phone off for an hour. Just one hour. I sat on the floor in the dark and stared at my hands and listened to the vast silence press against the windows. When I turned the phone back on, thirty-seven new calls came in at once.
All from numbers that will never grow old enough to remember me.