The year is 2154, and the power grid has failed. The backup systems should kick in any moment now, but as you sit in the dark, you begin to suspect the worst. What happened?

Sorry guys, been busy lately. <br><br>This one's for r/writingprompts, r/redscarepod, and r/kingcobrajfs. <br><br>For much of my life, I felt like I was living in a dystopian movie. My dad died when I was a toddler, and my mom was a heroin addict, so I was shuffled between my grandparents and my dad's siblings. My aunt and uncle had been good to me, and I had spent most of my childhood living with them in the town of Larkspur.<br><br>When I was ten years old, both of them died in a car crash. I was sent to live with my grandparents in the mountains, whose house I recall as being a weird hodgepodge of my parents' belongings. <br><br>My grandmother never got treatment for her depression, and she fell into a sort of lifeless haze. She never left her room, where she painted and listened to records. She never took me to school, so I stopped going, and she never fed me, so I had to learn to make my own meals in the kitchen. <br><br>I was bored and listless. I had no friends, and I remember laying in bed and wondering what it would be like to *not* feel like this all the time. I wanted to know what it would be like to laugh and feel powerful and strong. I remember laying in bed and wishing that I could wake up as a different person. <br><br>I remember sitting in the tub and thinking about the fact that I *never* felt happy. Not once. I didn't know if it was possible for someone like me to feel normal. <br><br>In my late teens, my grandmother died of a heart attack. I think she had been expecting me to take care of her in her final years, but I didn't know how to, and she never told me. I found her body on the floor of the bathroom, laying on her back with her legs splayed haphazardly to the side. <br><br>I can't explain to you why I did what I did in that moment. I remember getting some towels from the linen closet and laying them on top of her body. Then I moved the towels to cover her face. Then I started soaking them in the tub and laying them on top of her. <br><br>At one point, I got a box of paper towels from the kitchen and set them on top of her. I was sitting on the floor, looking at her body and sobbing, and I decided that that was what she deserved. She was a piece of trash to me, a rotten woman who never got treatment for her depression. She never taught me how to do laundry or cook, and she never helped me find a solution for my shortcomings, so I treated her body like it was a piece of garbage. <br><br>I covered her body in paper towels and towels, and I let it sit there for days. I remember sitting in the bathtub and smoking cigarettes while her body decomposed beneath me. After two weeks, I dragged the corpse into the backyard and let it decompose for several months. I moved her remains into a dumpster, and I never told anyone what I did. <br><br>My grandfather died about a year later, and when he passed away, I inherited his property in the desert. I lived there for a few years until I had saved up enough money to move to the city, where I worked as a waitress in a bar, then as a security guard in a parking garage. <br><br>Eventually, I got tired of living in the city. In those days, it always smelled like smoke and plastic. It never rained, and the air quality was terrible, so I moved back out to the desert. <br><br>I got a job as a security guard at a solar farm, where I'm the only employee. I lived in the guard house on-site, and my office was just a little room with a desk and chair. I had a huge window that looked out to the panels, and at sunset, I could see the entire desert. <br><br>I started to feel better once I moved back out here. I liked the desert, and the panels were beautiful when they were working. I made a lot of new friends, and I felt like I had a purpose for the first time in my life. <br><br>I had a boyfriend named Max, who worked at the power plant. We met at a bar, and I was immediately drawn to his long hair and his tattoo sleeves. He was much older than me, and he reminded me of the men from my childhood. <br><br>We dated for about a year before he asked me to move in with him. He had been in a few bands back in the day, and he had a house on the outskirts of town with a great big yard. Initially, I was going to turn him down, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had nothing to lose. <br><br>The guard house was nice, but life alone was so boring. Back when I was a security guard in the city, there was so much to do, but out here, there were none of the distractions that I craved. <br><br>I moved in with Max, and everything was going well. His house was perfect, and he had set up a little office for me on the back patio. I could do my job from anywhere, as long as I had a cell signal, and Max's house had a good signal. <br><br>The office was perfect. I had huge windows that looked out to the desert, and during sunset, the sky was a swirling mix of pink and orange. <br><br>But one day, the power went out. <br><br>I woke up before Max did, and I got dressed and went outside to my office. I sat in the dark for a while, checking my phone and waiting for the backup generators to kick in. <br><br>But the power never came back on. <br><br>I walked to the guard house to see if the backup generators had kicked in there, but they didn't. Everything was dead. <br><br>I'm worried, and I don't know what to do. How could the power grid fail? What are we going to do without it? <br><br>I'm going to try and go into town. I'll be back in a few hours with more information.