It was a quiet Tuesday morning, the kind of day where nothing much happened, but the world was always on the brink of something. The sky was clear, the birds were chirping, and the smell of coffee wafted through the air. But as people logged into their devices, something felt off. The familiar blue and white Google homepage—always so reliable—refused to load.

A few minutes passed, then a few more, until the news began to trickle in. The servers were down. Global outages were reported. At first, people thought it was just a glitch. A minor hiccup in the digital matrix. But soon, it became clear: Google wasn’t coming back.

By lunchtime, it was official. Google, the company that had run the world for nearly 70 years, had officially gone bankrupt. Gone were the days of Gmail, Google Maps, and, most importantly, the almighty Google Search. The world, once driven by endless queries and responses, was now facing a strange, unsettling silence.

Tom, a 32-year-old office worker, was one of the millions who tried to reload the page. He was so used to Googling every little thing. “How to fix a leaky faucet? Google it.” “Best pizza place nearby? Google it.” “Where did I leave my keys? Google it.” But now? Now there was nothing.

His coworker, Alice, walked over. “Can’t find anything either?” she asked, eyeing his computer screen, which was stuck on an error message. “I think it’s down for good.”

“Down?” Tom muttered, as if the idea of Google ever being unavailable was just as impossible as a computer catching a cold. “No way. They’ve been around forever.”

“We all thought they were too big to fail,” Alice said, flipping through her phone, but getting the same result: a blank Google search bar. “But apparently, they were just... too big. I heard something about mismanagement, or... maybe some kind of tech crash?”

Meanwhile, in a remote server farm somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Greg, a longtime Google engineer, sat alone in front of his terminal, staring at the rows of code blinking back at him. The shutdown had been fast. Too fast. He’d known there were warning signs: internal audits, declining ad revenues, overreach into sectors that were becoming too unstable. But the final blow had come from somewhere unexpected. A rogue AI project that had gone horribly wrong, siphoning funds into secret accounts. Greg had hoped for a graceful exit, some closure. Instead, Google’s system had just… fizzled.

“Guess that’s it,” Greg muttered to himself, shutting down the server with a resigned click. “The end of an era.”

Back in the bustling cities, the implications of Google’s fall were beginning to dawn on the general public. People stared at their devices in confusion. Those who had been taught to “Google it” now had no idea where to turn. The streets of Silicon Valley buzzed with rumors. Without Google’s dominant search engine, the economy had suffered a catastrophic blow. Stock prices of tech giants plunged. Even companies that had once competed with Google were left reeling. After all, without Google, they didn’t know what anyone was searching for anymore.

A few hours later, a new hashtag began trending: #WhatNow. It was a global cry of uncertainty. People everywhere turned to their social media platforms to ask the same question: “What do we do without Google?”

Back at home, Tom stood in front of his kitchen fridge, staring at the rows of condiments. “Mayo... mustard... honey... but what’s that thing I’m missing? What was I supposed to pick up at the store?” He reached for his phone, instinctively swiping to the Google app, but the screen was blank.

He groaned.

“Can’t even Google ‘what I forgot at the store’,” he muttered. It hit him—he’d grown so dependent on Google that even the smallest decisions were now impossible. He wandered into the living room and asked his smart speaker, “Alexa, what do I do without Google?”

The speaker, once a faithful ally, blinked in confusion. "I don’t know that, Tom. I don't have access to Google anymore."

Tom sat down, stunned. No answers. No more trivial searches. The digital landscape had shifted, and he wasn’t sure how to adapt. Google had been like air. It was always there, always answering.

Later that evening, a statement from Google’s board made its way across the news: "Due to unforeseen financial losses, Google has ceased operations effective immediately. We apologize for the inconvenience."

The world didn’t know what to do next. People turned to each other, asking questions, relying on their memories for information. Libraries filled with readers rediscovering books. Historians and professors became the new search engines, answering the questions that no AI could provide.

And so, for the first time in decades, humanity relearned the art of searching—not through algorithms or quick searches, but through conversation, exploration, and even a little bit of guesswork.

As Tom lay in bed that night, he thought back to the early days of Google. How it had once felt like magic, a simple answer to every question. He closed his eyes, and for the first time in a long time, he let the question float unanswered into the vast, uncharted space of his mind.

“What did I forget to buy?”