What If Everything Stopped Working?

He used to worry about stuff like that. About what would happen if this stuff stopped working? The medicine. Insulin. It couldn't stop working, but what if it did? Gravity can't stop working either, but what if it did? What if you injected the insulin and nothing happened? And what if your blood sugar was really low, the tide was just out, you were a desert, and you drank all the sugar you could get your hands on, and it just didn't work? A car can stop working. Turn the key and it just grinds and wheezes. Computers stop working. They freeze, they crash. They go insane.

So what if he entered a time and place where it made sense for insulin and sugar to stop working? And when he'd be reading on the bus, his stomach and his head reminding him that this wasn't the best idea, the thought would come to him. It would start with some imagined blurriness, and then he'd be thinking What if my eyes stopped working? What if light passed through the lenses, but the retinas stopped tingling. Or firing. Or whatever they do.

What if everything stopped working? Not just the fragile miracles of his body, held together one pulse to the next, but everything everywhere. Nature. What if trees stopped working? Or the ocean? Or all water everywhere? What if it didn't flow anymore or seek its own level? It rose. Flowed upstream. Froze solid right before it boiled. Life couldn't happen if everything stopped working, because life grew that way. With the assumption inbred, the assumption that things work.

But what about the seconds before it all ended? We'd all feel betrayed. We'd be furious. But revenge wouldn't work either. It would all melt into a solid, a plastic lump molded to the shape of everything that wasn't there anymore.