Fragments

What happened in 2017?

Prompt:
Mankind has successfully deleted every trace of the year 2017. You, in the year 2416, begin to wonder why there are no records of the year 2016 ever happening. When you begin to investigate, what you uncover, sends chills down your spine.

Answer:
"Mom," Lily followed her around the kitchen while she scraped tomatoes off her cutting board and into the bowl.

"This is serious!"
"I know, I am listening," her mom agreed while she walked back to the sink to wash off the cutting board.
Lilly showed her the holo tablet with some of her research, "look!" She pointed to the multicolored graph, "December 31 of 2017 it was all memes, reality television, and conspiracy theories. But -BOOM! January 1st rolls around and everything is blank. I couldn't find anything on 2017 at all. It was no where on the internet or the cloud Library." She followed her mom to the spice drawer. "Mom, Are you even listening to me?"

"Of course," she said without looking up.

"Mom you haven't even looked at my holo."

Her mom finally glanced over at it for a moment, "it's nice dear, I like the graph. Good color coordination." Then she went back to looking through spices.

Lily groaned in frustration. Stomping over to one of the hover chairs next to the counter, she set her tablet down. She scrolled through her notes.

"Do you want to know what I found?"

Her mother didn't even answer.

Lily rolled her eyes, "I went to the local record house, the one with actual paper files and books and stuff." Her mother probably wasn't even listening at this point but Lily continued. "Anyway, I started searching. Obviously something big happened."

Lily set her holo to full size so that most of her recent conclusions were laid out in front of her. She pointed to the date she had written down and circled.

"October 28th, that's the date where the records stopped. They were sparse to begin with, but I couldn't find a single item after that date." Lily zoomed in on the picture of the record house in Atlanta. It was the biggest one in the state. "Tuesday, John gave me a ride to Atlanta and I spent hours in there just searching for anything post October 28th. And I found it."

With a few taps she brought up the file she had scanned into her tablet. It was a single journal entry labeled 'November 19.'

"It was a diary by a girl named Mary Faller," Lily's mouth went dry as she remembered the words before she read them aloud. "'Everyone thought the apocalypse would be like bomb going off, suddenly killing many and eventually killing us all. People joked Zombies would take us in the end, but no one ever thought it would be the children.

"The power has been off for almost a month now. More people are being deleted everyday. My laptop has been gathering dust for a while now. It ran out of juice a few days into the blackout. My boyfriend and I have barricaded ourselves in our apartment. We are running out of food. All we have left is ketchup, mustard, and some past date flour.

"Tom keeps saying help is on the way, but if they take much longer then we would be better off deleted like the rest of them.'"

Lily looked through the holo towards her mom, expecting her to be distracted. Instead, her mom's wide eyes were on her and the color had drained from her face.

Now she had her mothers attention.