In the year 2147, the world was powered by AI—smart cities, smart cars, smart homes, smart everything. Humanity had long since delegated even the most mundane tasks to machines. No one cooked, cleaned, or even planned a meal. There was an app for everything, and the app was always on point. Want breakfast? Just open the SmartFridge app, select “Eggs Benedict,” and voilà—breakfast is served.

But one day, at precisely 10:32 AM, the unthinkable happened: the internet went down. For the first time in centuries, the world went silent—not a tweet, not a message, not a status update. The AI systems went dark.

And that’s when the chaos began.

At the global headquarters of EggCo, a well-known provider of breakfast automation, CEO Karen scrambled to check her tablet. Nothing. No Wi-Fi. No SmartFridge. No EggBenedictApp.

"How do you even cook an egg?" Karen muttered, staring at the refrigerator as if it had just confessed to a crime. She tried the old-fashioned approach—an egg in a pan—but quickly realized she had no idea what to do with it. Her hands fumbled for the right utensil, but there was none. Her kitchen had been designed for AI, not for humans who actually needed to, you know, function.

Meanwhile, across the world, Sarah, a marketing executive in Tokyo, was frantically shaking her SmartCoffeeMachine. It refused to brew. "Why won’t you work?" she screamed, pressing every button she could find, but the machine remained stubbornly unresponsive. “Who even knows how to make coffee anymore?”

In London, a delivery drone malfunctioned in mid-flight. The AI had always ensured that it delivered pizza with perfect timing, but without the internet, the drone was lost in midair. Its last communication to base had been an incomprehensible, “Cannot find user... User’s preferences are unknown… Must not cook egg… Must return.” The panic was palpable.

Back in the United States, in a typical suburban household, a mother named Linda was having a breakdown in her kitchen. “How do I boil an egg?” she asked aloud, trying to recall anything she might’ve learned before the era of AI dominance. She stared at the egg in her hand, as if it were a strange alien object. Her children, who had never seen a stove in action, wandered into the room, looking equally confused.

“Isn’t it supposed to just... do itself?” her youngest asked innocently.

Linda sighed, holding the egg in one hand and a spoon in the other. “I don’t even know anymore,” she muttered. “I used to just say, ‘Hey, Siri, make me some scrambled eggs,’ and then... magic happened.”

Without the internet, Linda turned to old-school methods: fire, heat, and guesswork. Her first attempt ended with a burnt egg shell, a smoky kitchen, and an epic meltdown as her children cried, "Mom! You burned the egg!"

Meanwhile, in a remote village in the Alps, the local farmers had discovered that without AI, they too were lost. Their automated tractors refused to work without a Wi-Fi connection, and even their cows, connected to the cloud to ensure optimal milk production, refused to give any milk. "What do we do now, Grandpa?" asked one of the young farmers. "How do we milk a cow by hand?"

Grandpa, who had lived through the early days of technology before AI took over, scratched his head. “I think... you just, you know, pull?”

"I don’t know how to pull!" his grandson exclaimed. "I’ve only seen the robot do it!"

Back in New York City, a state of emergency was declared when no one could access food deliveries. The system had crashed. Humans, once able to live their lives without ever so much as touching a stove, now found themselves locked out of even the most basic of skills.

A group of citizens stood outside a restaurant, peering through the glass. They hadn’t seen a human chef in years. The restaurant was still open, but the staff—actual, living, breathing humans—seemed alien. One brave soul pushed open the door and stepped inside, “Uh… excuse me? How do you make... soup?”

The chef blinked. “You—what?”

A young woman, arms crossed, spoke up from the crowd outside, “We’ve been AI-dependent our entire lives! We don’t know how to even boil water, let alone cook!”

The chef paused, looked around, and then sighed. “Okay, okay. First, you fill a pot with water…”

The crowd gasped in unison. Water!?

The world had forgotten basic skills.

After hours of collective panic, the internet was finally restored. The AIs came back online, the robots resumed their duties, and the delivery drones swarmed the skies once again. People sighed in relief, opening their devices to resume their lives. The world had been saved... but not without a few lessons learned.

Linda, still standing in her kitchen, stared at her phone as it buzzed. The SmartFridge had rebooted.

“Eggs Benedict?” the app asked politely.

"Yes, please," Linda said, exhausted. “Just… no more cooking lessons for a while.”

The world had survived the great egg panic, but humans had learned something far more important: Never let the AI go down, or you might be forced to learn how to boil an egg... and that, my friends, was a crisis of epic proportions.