Just as the riots threatened to consume the colonies like a brush fire, all lights were snuffed out. On one tragic day in May 2022, unidentified terrorists detonated an EMP in the LA stratosphere. The west coast was abruptly plunged into darkness. Cities were devastated as powerless spinners, blimps, and airborne vessels crashed into the buildings and streets below. For ten disastrous days, all machines were inoperable. Communications were down. Cities were deaf and blind.
When the grid was restored, society was shocked to learn that the worldwide datalink had been erased. During the power outage, a coordinated attack was staged against all secure data centers on Earth, destroying all digital and magnetic back-ups for the storage cloud long standing as the sole depository of all data. Bank accounts. Medical records. Libraries. Family photos. The DNA of the digital world, deleted.
Finance and trade markets crashed overnight. All infrastructures collapsed. As society struggled to rebuild, no group took credit for the atrocity now known as The Blackout. Yet as the attack erased the Replicant Registration Database and made all Nexuses virtually untraceable, Replicants were blamed.
Society was forever changed by The Blackout. Mass distrust of digital technology inspired a new age of more simplistic yet reliable analog technology, machinery, and data keeping.
Many industry titans based on Earth also pulled up stakes and headed for safer grounds off-world, drastically reducing the economy and job market. Even airborne transportation became unpopular, relegated only for government use and select citizens with authorization. Most importantly, the UN declared the indefinite Prohibition of Replicant technology. Megacities heavily invested in rejuvenated Rep-Detect units with new Retirement divisions solely dedicated to retiring any and all Replicants.
Not just the Nexus-6 model that habitually demonstrated violent tendencies, but all Nexus models including the compliant N-8s were now forced to run.With one sweeping judgment, it only took a few years for everything to change. Tyrell Corp quickly fell into infamy, then bankruptcy. The Underground imploded after the UN founded the Replicant Underground Task Force, expanding the Blade Runner’s jurisdiction to police any Replicant related crimes, including humans violating Prohibition or obstructing justice. The remaining N-8s either died or disappeared into obscurity, and society soon sighed in relief as the four-year lifespans of the last remaining Nexus-6 Replicants naturally ran out.
And with that, humankind’s greatest era of innovation came to a somber and unceremonious end.