Prologue: Firewall of illusion

It's been a wild ride, this final semester of my Master's in Data Science. I’ve been neck-deep in algorithms, machine learning models, and more data sets than I care to remember. But the one thing that’s kept me sane—or so I thought—was the online discussion forum hosted by Professor Claire. We’re four weeks into the remote learning course, and oddly enough, it’s been just me, another student in Sydney, and Prof Claire keeping the conversation alive. The rest of the class? Dead silent.

The Prof and the admin staff have been on our case, sending reminders to the remaining 30 international students to chip in. But, despite their efforts, it was like shouting into the void—radio silence.

Fast forward to today, I’m doing a routine grocery run. I don’t know if I was just too distracted with coursework before, but today something felt off. The shelves were half-empty, and a lot of our usual imports from the Middle East, India, Europe, and the US were either gone or replaced by stuff from Asia. Weird, right? But hey, I’m deep in my studies; maybe I just hadn’t noticed.

So I get home, still puzzled, and decide to check in on the Uni forum. As I’m logging in, an email pops up on Outlook. And this is where things go off the rails. The email, from a friend who’s a bit more…shall we say, “resourceful” than most, reveals something that’s straight out of a dystopian novel.

Turns out, the rest of the students who’ve been ghosting the forum? They’re not slacking—they’re gone. Wiped out in a nuclear exchange that’s turned everything westward of Central Asia into a radioactive wasteland. Alaska? Same story. And here I am, like many others in Singapore and Australia, living inside a carefully constructed bubble of disinformation.

Our governments, in their infinite wisdom, have created a digital firewall to keep us blissfully unaware, plugging away at our studies, jobs, and lives as if everything were fine. We’ve been living inside a Matrix-like illusion of normalcy while the real world burns outside our borders.

How do I know this? My friend—let’s call him a black hat hacker with a conscience—managed to hack through the digital curtain. He got the real story from his counterpart in Thailand, someone still plugged into what’s left of the global grid.

So here I am, about to dive down the rabbit hole. There’s a world beyond the firewall, and I need to know what’s really happening. Because if this is the new normal, I’m not content to just be another line of code in someone else’s simulation.

*Note: This is a fictional story.*