Sawyer's assertion was right. Alan was, in fact, a fucking idiot; and also rapidly approaching terminal velocity. While no objective statements can be made about the feeling of falling to one's imminent death, due to the inherently subjective nature of the experience, it was probably quite normal and reasonable for Alan to be completely overwhelmed by it all. With each passing window, his consciousness faded more and more to black, the chemicals and hormones in his brain flooding his system in full emergency preparation for the inevitable unknown.
That was a funny thing to Alan - the biochemical realities of existence. What was it like to be decapitated? To be fully removed from the body and its necessities? Except that wasn't quite there - Maybe something more like the Matrix, where the mind floated on its own through an infinite expanse of simulation.
This was, of course, Two Thousand and Eight, and so, Alan, as a denizen of the nascent Internet, felt like that most of the time. That was the ideal, right? The internet was a place where you shouldn't reveal your name, your location, any relevant and actionable details about yourself. Part of it was escapism, part of it was the security and safety measures drilled into him from computer science classes and lessons about "stranger danger", the kind of shit that made Young Alan terrified to go outside, to go outside of his little suburban hernia of a cul-de-sac. He'd already been terrified to go outside within said cul-de-sac, considering that he'd been quickly identified as the village weirdo by the neighborhood kids, dared into a few stupid activities, and faced countless embarrassments. Delving into video games and television was safer. Even psychologically, it was better for him. Developing outside of sociality may have protected him, but it instilled in him a hell of a thirst for something more. For social contact, despite being absolutely terrified of it. Jealousy of everyone who lived "normally", but no real desire to try and be like "them".
The internet had swept in, and swept him off his feet.
Finally, he had an opportunity to be social. To make friends. To make enemies. All without exposing himself, all from the safety of his own home. It came into his house slowly. At first, it was through a 28.8k dial-up modem and America On-Line. The internet existed from when he got home from school to 5:30PM, when his mother got home, and demanded that the phone-line be open. Now, he understood that she had her own social life, that hers was conducted mainly over the phone, and that having the line busy would be damaging to her, but at the time, he'd resented it. As a kid, he'd tried to snatch, and hold on to, as much of the internet as he could get his grubby little hands on. He'd save guides to video games he didn't even play off of GameFAQs, he'd copy entire synopses of seasons of anime into Microsoft Works documents, and print out low-rez JPEGs of Robotech mecha designs, feeling like he was getting his hands on secret knowledge beyond the bounds of Mechwarrior games he stole from his mom's boyfriends.
It was like there was a conversation, larger than he could comprehend, made of so many people as to be objective, existing on this place he could only access for a few short hours each day. He never dared to speak up, to contribute to the debates carried out across primitive message boards, but he took sides, he rooted for people, he wanted public opinion, even if it was just a public of a couple hundred people, to sway one way or another.
There was, these days, a certain attitude about the internet, espoused on places like 4chan, SomethingAwful, LUElinks, the cultural centers of the people who felt like they made the internet what it was, who invented memes back in the days after 9/11, back when it was all called "fads", like Vin Diesel jokes and De-Motivational Posters, and felt like they were conquering the world when Metal Gear Solid 2, the brainchild of Hideo Kojima, took a term from Richard Dawkins and introduced them to the idea of "memes": concepts that spread and reproduced and mutated across culture, and realized both that this concept was both already the primary defining force in human life, and something whose wave they were riding. That attitude was that the internet was an un-real place.
What happened there mattered only to the internet. There was a barrier, infinitely tall and infinitely wide, between who you were and what you did on the Internet, and who you were and what you did in "the real world". Hell, everyone laughed their asses off when FOX News ran a piece about "the terrorists known as 4chan", complete with stock footage of an exploding panel van, at the absurd suggestion that any of "this" was "real". The closest reality had come to making an incursion on Alan's life was in the weeks leading up to the release of the seventh and last Harry Potter book, where LUElinks, his preferred message board, had gotten their hands on a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from a member working in a shipping warehouse, and the leak of the plot spread wide enough that they had to blame it on 4chan, lest the heat get to their corner of the internet. From there, 4chan deflected, and all was forgotten once a week or two had passed and the book was officially released.
But that now, and this was then. In a few short years, 24-hour news stations would be citing social media for public opinion on current events, as Facebook and Twitter consolidated the internet, offering their services to the average citizen - "normies", as Alan would have classified them. That future would have horrified him. Luckily, if gravity had anything to say about it, he wouldn't have to confront that future. Falling to his death was, of course, his past, present, and future, so long as the radius of measurement was kept short enough.
While the "real" world of his life could only really be divided into two halves - "before 9/11" and "after 9/11", as it was for every American at the time, much to the delight of Gary Condit, Alan had lived through three distinct eras of the internet. There had been that strange, disorganized time when the internet had come into his home, when it was just full of wonder. There had been his high school life, where the internet had grown into a land of personal expression - GeoCities and AngelFire websites, Blogspot and MySpace, LiveJournal and PHPBB2, an infinitude of little corners where you could find yourself, and find your tribe. To even be a part of the social conversation, you had to understand enough to speak. You had to know how to make a website, how to join a webring, how to appear not as an outsider, but as one of the gang.
If Alan could live enough to know what he was about to lose, he would have mourned deeply for it. For the isolated communities, for the independent nations of the internet, with their own cultures and languages. With their own literary history, references to events and jokes that they all knew, to protocol and etiquette.
Perhaps, to best convey what was had, and what was lost, we need to go back to Henry's generation. Those who'd measure the final day of the convention, which Alan would hopefully survive into, as the 5317th of September, 1993. You see, the Internet, not just as a technology, but as a social construct, dates back much further than most people expect. Alan, for example, once found a UseNet post from 1981, complaining about a magazine spoiling the ending of Empire Strikes Back, and through that entire early history, from the 70s to the 90s, internet culture remained largely the same. The sorts of things that would be later known as memes were passed on, learned, and passed to the next generation. Rules of etiquette were learned, enforced, and propagated. But in September of 1993, the end came.
Like most apocalypses, no one saw it coming, but it was obvious in retrospect. UseNet, the primary social interaction vector of the internet, was suddenly included in subscription packages to CompuServe, one of the early mass-market internet service providers. As such, there was a massive influx of users, all of whom reverted the state of discourse on UseNet. They all had to be educated on how things worked - brought up to speed, made culturally fluent. It was a massive project, but for a time, it seemed like internet culture could handle the sudden influx. This was, unfortunately, overly optimistic. Other ISPs started including UseNet in their service packages, and spaces that once held discussions where everyone could be reasonably assumed to be operating with the same information and a shared background turned into mandatory educational spaces. And it never stopped.
Of course, Alan wasn't Henry, and he was too young to see this go down.
But.
He came into an internet that had adapted - to a degree. While the entire internet had been niches before, that period of market saturation, of chatrooms and the Yahoo Recommended Sites page had blown through, and new niches had been carved out. New places asserted cultural dominance, and through gatekeeping, a sense of belonging and camaraderie had reasserted itself. Created, in effect, Alan's new home.
But unbeknownst to him and his, another Eternal September had begun. The Henrys of the world knew, but most hadn't recognized the effect that the introduction of the smartphone, through the Blackberry and iPhone, would have on the culture of the internet. The world was coming. With the internet now accessible at any time, from any place, no longer something you had to do, those who weren't already knowledgeable about computers, about the internet and its subcultures, were arriving. Charlatans had already started to manipulate the latent fear of "normalcy", claiming that they could make those in the know into Casanovas, into "gurus", into successes.
But few wanted that.
Most just wanted their home back.
Maybe that was part of what dragged the world down in a fascist spiral of chasing some idealized past, with the promise of returning to safety by rejecting everyone and everything they could be convinced to fear. While Alan might not have recognized it, so many of those he knew had already begun to fall.
He, however, was ahead of the pack.
He'd finish falling in a few fractions of a second.