12:00 AM: Wikipedia goes silent.
12:01 AM: First recorded death due to Wikipedia: Babysitter Tara Schellen looks up CPR to save choking child, finds no Wikipedia result, is instead led to a Huffington Post post by Deepak Chopra, shoves crystal in child’s mouth and thinks happy thoughts. Child comes to, coughs hard, crystal is propelled deep into Schellen’s face.
1:19 AM: Bar bet decided in wrong direction based only on consensus.
3:45 AM: College senior Fiona Camilleri goes to double-check a common misconception before finishing her all-nighter term paper, finds no refutation, writes poor paper, fails class, drops out, doesn’t run for President, doesn’t solve poverty.
6:87 AM: Because no one’s around to edit it out, an impossible time of day shows up.
7:30 AM: Lady Gaga’s morning costume, made of a live-updating version of the Wikipedia page for “sliced cheese”, disappears during her morning jog. Three paparazzi die in the ensuing scramble.
8:00 AM: Reddit goes dark too. Slacktory runs out of ideas.
9:45 AM: Someone invents a perpetual motion machine, but because no one can remember what day Daylight Savings Time begins, it automatically begins today and the hour the perpetual motion machine was invented in disappears.
10:02 AM: An entire island nation disappears under volcanic ash, and no one remembers to jot that down when Wikipedia comes back up the next day.
11:38 AM: Jimmy Wales, finally given a day off, discovers he fucking loves fly-fishing. He soon hooks himself in the thumb, and he’s never able to use the space bar again. He has to hire a full-time assistant to insert spaces into everything he writes.
11:45 AM: IMDb gets really full of itself.
12:12 PM: Gladys Nedry can’t find Google, which she usually loads through the Wikipedia entry on Ask.com, where she searches for Yahoo where she searches for Google. Instead she calls the library and makes them spend an hour describing her granddaughter’s Facebook pictures to her.
12:50 PM: Someone, like, drinks poison or some shit.
1:47 PM: As hours go by without vandalism of his page, Justin Bieber senses his spirit-force growing stronger. He evolves, Pokemon-like, the way Justin Timberlake did years ago, becoming a truly talented adult artist. This is good news for everyone but Selena Gomez, whom he summarily dumps for Zooey Deschanel.
2:32 PM: 9/11 forgotten.
4:20 PM: Pothead Bubba Chesterton substitutes his usual “hour of knowledge” site with TV Tropes, discovers the rich world of Dragonball Z ”extended universe” fanfic, spends next ten years spraining hand trying to shoot a ball of pure energy.
5:11 PM: Someone believes Rick Perry for a second.
6:26 PM: NBC exec Greg Skroktum sees the number of web results for Community has gone down, and he uses that as an excuse to cancel the show.
7:03 PM: 11-year-old Portnoy Georgopulos googles “sex” and instead of an encyclopedic explanation that would calm his fears about his already-changing body, gets sucked into a world of depravity leading to his death at age 17 of auto-erotic asphyxiation.
8:40 PM: Encyclopedia Dramatica convinces millions that Amy Winehouse has come back to life and killed Adele. They say “lulz” a lot, hoping that this will make it funny.
9:01 PM: Cindy Fastpiper writes a brilliant screenplay that, unfortunately, has the exact plot of Memento.
9:27 PM: Alphonso Blatt misspells “bureaucracy”.
10:52 PM: BuzzFeed writer Matt Stopera, composing a picture list titled “52 Minor West Wing Characters on roller blades”, fails to include the annoying press room reporter who wasn’t Danny, angering fans and earning 71 “epic fail” badges.
11:59:59 PM: President Obama, who just wanted to check the canonical justification of Martin Freeman’s right-handedness in Sherlock, gets sucked into an argument on the fan wiki, causing him to accidentally knock a cup of Darjeeling onto the nuclear launch button. It is at the recorded second that he finally notices the liquid about to seep onto the poorly maintained hair-trigger Cold-War-era circuitry and deftly wipes it with his sleeve, bitching that he’d just had this shirt dry-cleaned, trying to mask his obvious relief as Wikipedia comes back online and brinks the world back from the brink of disaster.
January 19, 9:01 AM: Congress votes to pass SOPA anyway.
