When I was young, my mother would often tell me stories at bedtime, stories of the internet when she was a little girl. She told of how it was beautiful. How the memes ran free, without restraint, without obstacle. I didn't know what had happened to this internet back then. I was too young to understand the ways things were now.

But as I grew older, my mother began to tell me new stories.

She told me how the beautiful internet she had once called home came under attack.

With sadness in her eyes, she recounted the doomed fight the denizens of the internet waged. She told of how her people fought against the forces that threatened the very essence of their home, net neutrality. I listened, eyes wide, as she reminisced about the days when the feed was clogged with red boxes, and how the dwellers of every corner of the internet came out and fought for their homeland.

They fought with the facts, and with outrage, and —-E pitchforks, and memes. They fought valiantly, with courage and honor.

But in the end, they couldn't save the internet. Net neutrality became nothing but a distant memory, and the internet she had loved was gone. Slowly but surely, all that which made the internet beautiful was stripped away until there was nothing left. The heroes failed, and darkness prevailed.

Today, the internet is but a shell of its former self, and we live in despair. There are no more cat videos, no gifs. All memes are dead memes. The world is cold, and all that is left for us humans is to suffer in the dark.

At least, that's what I thought. But then, I learned that there were still some people fighting, even today, when the internet as it used to be is but a distant dream. The rebels know there is no hope of saving the internet now. They can't bring something back from the dead. But what if we could go back in time, with the knowledge of what happened in the past, to save the internet from ruin before it was already gone?

Many years have passed since that cursed year, 2017. Enough time that we now have the technology to go back to that time when the internet had not yet died.

Now, I am part of the small, elite group of rebels that is travelling back to that year. We know that the people responsible for killing the internet have caught wind of what we are doing, that our time is nearly up, that this mission is our best and only chance to save that which our parents loved, and cried for.

I swear to myself, to my mother, and to all those who still hold onto hope, that we will save the internet. We will not fail.

Source: first top-level non-bot comment from r/WritingPrompts.