[ WP ] You are the only person left on the planet after everyone disappears for some reason . You spend your days posting pointless status updates to facebook , when one day , a stranger likes your post .

He had never been lonely, despite always being alone. For most of his life he puttered along, eschewing his peers in favor books and later, the internet. It was simply easier to craft a shell of information and entertainment around himself than it was to suffer the agonies of small talk or the burn of rejection. The intensity of those hurts was so much larger and so much more difficult to manage than the low hum of solitude. 
 
 When he woke up on the day he would come to call Rapture Wednesday, he had n't noticed anything was wrong. Not at first, at least, not until he went outside. 
 
 There were cars sitting in the middle of the street or up on the curb while the traffic lights ticked green-yellow-red in an endless cycle. The engines were running but not one driver's seat was occupied. The seat belts were still buckled across the seats, as if the person sitting there had just *poofed* right out of existence. The shops were empty. At the cafe on the corner, mugs of still-hot coffee sat abandoned with purses and laptop bags at tables. That's when he turned heel and ran home. 
 
 The television was no help. The only programs on were re-runs, regularly scheduled programming. Every news channel he flipped to was silent. The desks where the anchors sat were covered in papers, but no one was behind them. 
 
 Feeling more than a little nauseous, he sat down at his computer and shook the mouse. Everything was as he left it. He began to click around, his dread growing like a heavy stone in his gut. Nothing had been updated, not since 11:59PM Tuesday night. The only emails he had received were obviously automatically distributed spam or advertisements. Reddit was quiet. There were no new tweets, no new YouTube uploads, no news bulletins on CNN, NPR, BBC, or Fox News. There was nothing. It was as if the world screeched to a halt. Everyone had disappeared, but Rapture Wednesday had overlooked him; he was forgotten. 
 
 Figures, he thought. 
 
 He logged onto Facebook, something he had n't done for well over a year. What was the point? His mother, his old physics teacher, and a few random acquaintances were his only'friends', and he had never posted anything himself. Facebook was as quiescent as the rest of the internet. After a moment's hesitation, he typed out a status update: *Where is everyone? What happened? * 
 
 Crickets. 
 
 For the next week, he continued to post. Sometimes he posted on the walls of major companies, like Google or McDonald's, sometimes on his own wall. Nothing changed, no one replied, and his anxiety began to grow. The internet would n't stay on forever. Not if he was the only human left. Infrastructure of any kind required human maintenance, servers included. He was n't approaching Mike Ferris levels of freak-out, but he was getting close. Never before had he wanted to connect with someone so badly. Once the internet went down, the age of connectivity would be over and with it, his best chance of finding out if there was even anyone left to connect with. 
 
 The first Wednesday after The Rapture, he pulled up Facebook once again to write another pointless post. *The barrier of loneliness: The palpable, desperate need of the human animal to be with his fellow man. Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting... * He sighed and sat back. He removed his glasses and began to polish the lenses with his tee shirt when a sudden sound byte broke the silence. 
 
 He screamed, dropped his glasses, and stood so quickly his swivel chair keeled over with a clatter. It was a notification. He had gotten a notification. Carefully, he groped around for his glasses, shoved them onto his face, and refreshed the page. Someone had replied to his status update. 
 
 *Look at mister edgelord over here, quoting Twilight Zone. * 
 
 Without bothering to right his chair, he leaned in to feverishly type out a reply. A reply to Madeline Albricht of Chicago, IL, whose sarcasm appeared undaunted by the sudden disappearance of nearly all mankind. Madeline Albright, only a stranger and his only hope. 
 
 *You exist!? You did n't poof off with the rest of them? Is there anyone else? * 
 
 Moments after he clicked'post', the screen went black and the lights went out all at once. He screamed again, his hands flying up to grasp the monitor and shake it. It was no use. The power was out, all down the block. He had been disconnected.
