CTRL-ALT-DEFECT
The brochure for the island was printed on thick glossy paper that smelled faintly of that bleachy, corporate, smell offices in big cities had. It read:
WELCOME TO AVALON-86!
Where the Hair is Big, the Synth is Heavy, and the Wi-Fi is Absolutely Forbidden!
Below this was a photograph of two performatively-dressed adults wearing neon shell suits, roller-skating beside a payphone.
The premise for Avalon-86 began, as all terrible modern ideas do, with a joke online, and then a meme, and then a “Hey, let’s do it!”
Back in the late 2010s, a swarm of exhausted millennials and Gen-Xers, spiritually pulverized by doomscrolling, algorithmic advertising, subscription fatigue, and refrigerators that emailed them passive-aggressive reminders about yogurt, began fantasizing about escaping. Not a primitive escape, you understand; nobody wanted to die from infected splinters while hand-churning butter. No, they wanted to return to what they considered humanity’s peak. Before social media. Before push notifications. Before your life could be cancelled after one drunken, late night, post. Before your toothbrush needed software updates. They wanted the world that was 1986.
The joke went viral. Then the venture capitalists arrived.
Within eighteen months, several wealthy Silicon Valley defectors and a syndicate of emotionally exhausted British bankers purchased an abandoned temperate island in the North Atlantic. It was remote enough to be sovereign, but close enough for supply ships carrying hairspray, cassette tapes, and cholesterol-heavy breakfast cereal.
They drafted a constitution affectionately known as “The Breakfast Club Treaty”, which laid out the purposefully-archaic rules of Avalon-86. Within five years, they had a population of 15,000.
Gary Jenkins, formerly a digital marketing strategist from Leeds, was now the proud owner of Gaz’s Video Rental on Ramsay Street (Yes, the streets were all named after famous streets from 1980s media!).
He spent most afternoons arguing with his formerly North American neighbour Chad Miller about whether Danger Mouse was superior to He-Man.
“It had nuance, just give it a bit of time!” Gary insisted.
“It had a talking tiger in suspenders you moron,” Chad replied. “That’s not nuance. That’s a drunk writer pushing the boundaries of children’s TV.”
Chad had once written optimization algorithms for a soul-eroding gig-economy startup in Ohio that paid people six dollars to assemble IKEA furniture for divorced dentists. Now he ran a roller rink and wore sleeveless denim jackets with ripped band t-shirts.
“I’m telling you, Gary,” Chad said one afternoon, leaning against his lovingly restored 1985 Ford Bronco, “the mainland waiting list just hit two million.”
Gary nearly dropped his can of Tab.
“Two million?”
“People are desperate to get here. One guy offered three original Kenner Boba Fetts and a mint-condition Nintendo Power glove just for expedited immigration,” Chad laughed.
Gary whistled.
“Bloody hell. That’s basically cryptocurrency for midlife crisis men.”
“Last week customs caught somebody trying to smuggle in an Alexa disguised as a bread maker,” Chad continued.
“What kind of psychopath wants an always-listening robot in their kitchen?”
Chad paused.
“I must admit, the shopping list reminders on them were good…”
“Fair point.”
Life on Avalon-86 was gloriously inconvenient, and the adults adored every second of it. If you wanted to see a friend, you physically walked to their house like a medieval peasant. If they weren’t home, you simply left them a note, if you had a pen of course. Maps were enormous paper nightmares that folded according to principles that defied the laws of relativity. Dating involved eye contact, emotional risk, and the terrifying possibility of immediate rejection via being stood up.
The adults called this world authenticity. The teenagers called it psychological warfare.
Gary’s son Leo was sixteen. He’d been five when his parents dragged him to Avalon-86 during what his father still referred to as “The Great Disconnect”.
Leo’s memories of the mainland felt mythical. He remembered magical flat rectangles that could instantly summon cartoons. He remembered food arriving at houses because someone pressed buttons. He also remembered adults speaking to invisible voices in the ceiling like deeply depressed wizards.
Now he sat in Chad’s basement beside Chad’s daughter Chloe, staring hatefully at a Commodore 64.
“This thing,” Leo said, “if it was any fucking slower, it’d stop.”
“It took twenty-three minutes to load Pac-Man,” Chloe muttered.
“And then it crashed because Toby sneezed near the power strip.”
Toby adjusted his mandatory slap bracelet with the weary expression of a political prisoner.
“My dad caught me trying to build a satellite receiver from scavenged microwave parts,” he told them with a sigh, “He gave me a three-hour lecture about ‘the sanctity of analogue suffering.’”
“Analog suffering sounds like a Radiohead album,” Leo laughed.
“I’d kill for Radiohead. They’re apparently the best band ever,” Chloe moaned.
The teenagers knew the name of the Radiohead albums from children and teenagers who had arrived on the island much later than they had. But of course, they had never heard their music, only vaguely recalled hums.
Over the past few years, the teenagers of Avalon-86 had mostly agreed that their parents hadn’t created a utopia; they had just created historical cosplay. Every adult on the island was essentially forcing their children to live inside a remastered version of their own childhood memories.
These teens didn’t care about mixtapes. They didn’t want to spend Saturday night at the mall drinking Orange Julius beneath fluorescent lights that made everyone look terminally ill. They wanted memes. They wanted streaming. They wanted to text someone without hearing somebody’s dad yell: “WHO’S USING THE PHONE?” Most of all, they wanted privacy from a society where every adult treated boredom like a sacred religious experience.
Naturally, an underground black market emerged. The most powerful student at Avalon High was a fifteen-year-old girl named Sarah who possessed a smuggled 2021 iPhone. It no longer worked; the battery had died years ago, and it had no internet access. However, teenagers still gathered around it reverently, stroking the smooth black screen like archaeologists discovering alien technology.
“Look how thin it is,” whispered one kid.
“My dad says phones like this destroyed civilization.”
“My dad says scented candles ruined good women.”
“Your dad cries during car commercials.”
“That’s unrelated.”
One rainy night, Leo leaned closer to Chloe.
“I found a magazine that washed ashore last week,” he whispered.
“What kind?” Chloe asked, eyes widening.
“A tech magazine.”
Chloe gasped.
“Like pornography?”
“Worse…”
Leo unfolded several damp pages that he’d been hiding under his shirt.
“Look at this. Cars drive themselves now.”
“That can’t be safe,” Chloe hissed.
“Neither is letting Uncle Dave waterski drunk, but apparently that’s ‘the spirit of the eighties’.”
Leo pointed to another page.
“Virtual reality headsets. Artificial intelligence. Entire libraries online.”
Toby stared at the images.
“We’re basically Amish people with better soundtracks. What are we going to do babes?” Chloe asked.
Leo reached beneath the sofa cushions and pulled out a rolled-up blueprint sketched on the back of a Def Leppard poster.
“We leave,” he said.
The teens couldn’t steal a proper boat because the harbour was patrolled nightly by the Avalon Neighborhood Watch, a volunteer organization composed entirely of middle-aged dads with walkie-talkies that they couldn’t put down.
So, the teenagers built a raft. It was assembled from driftwood, stolen oil drums, partially-melted Rubik’s Cubes, and what Toby confidently described as “nautically relevant rope”. The sail was made from stitched-together parachute pants. Yet against all known laws of engineering, it floated.
At 2:13 AM, beneath a heavy fog, the six teenagers shoved the raft into the freezing Atlantic.
Leo climbed aboard first.
“Row,” he hissed dramatically. “Toward freedom.”
“Toward Wi-Fi,” Chloe corrected.
“For the algorithm,” Toby whispered solemnly.
“For the algorithm,” the others repeated, almost in unison.
They paddled into darkness, and for twenty glorious minutes, they felt invincible. Then the Atlantic Ocean reminded them that it was the Atlantic Ocean, and they were not.
A massive wave rose silently from the fog and smashed into the makeshift raft with biblical fury. The melted Rubik’s Cube sealant exploded apart instantly. The raft flipped, and six teenagers vanished into black freezing water.
Back on Avalon-86, Gary woke suddenly at 3:14 AM.
Years of parenting had evolved his nervous system into a primitive danger radar specifically calibrated to detect teenage stupidity.
He wandered to Leo’s room. The bed was untouched. A note rested on the pillow beneath a pristine Sony Walkman.
Get Rebecca Rose Stanton’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Dad,
I love you. But your nostalgia isn’t my future.
Gary’s stomach dropped through the floor. Within minutes he was hammering on Chad’s front door. Chad answered wearing a shirt that read: “FRANKIE SAYS RELAX”, which felt wildly inappropriate under the circumstances.
“They’re gone,” Gary gasped.
Chad blinked, and then realised that he hadn’t seen Chloe all night.
Within ten minutes, Avalon-86 was fully awake.
The emergency siren wailed across the island while dozens of adults sprinted through the streets dressed like panicked aerobics instructors.
The harbour master confirmed several life jackets were missing.
“No boats stolen,” he said.
Gary stared into the fog.
“They built something.”
Chad closed his eyes.
“…they inherited our confidence without inheriting our common sense.”
“That’s literally parenting.”
They launched Chad’s beloved Boston Whaler into the sea. Its enormous engine shattered the island’s carefully curated analogue tranquillity like a monster truck driving through a farmer’s market.
They found the teenagers half an hour later. Leo was clinging desperately to an oil drum while Chloe drifted beside him holding onto Toby, both barely conscious. Strong hands hauled them and the other three freezing teens aboard.
For several minutes nobody spoke. There was only coughing, shivering, and the roar of the engine.
Gary wrapped Leo in a thermal blanket so tightly he looked gift-wrapped.
“You absolute moron,” Gary whispered tearfully, kissing his son on the forehead.
“Yeah.” Leo nodded weakly.
“That was honestly very brave though.”
“Thanks.”
“Still unbelievably stupid.”
“Also fair.”
Three days later, Avalon-86 held an emergency town meeting in the high school gymnasium. The atmosphere felt less like civic debate and more like a hostage negotiation conducted inside a retro arcade.
Gary stood at centre court. He looked across the crowd of mullets, perms, shoulder pads, and mustaches powerful enough to alter weather systems.
“We came here,” he began, “because we thought the world had become unhealthy.”
Nods and murmurs of agreement rippled through the audience.
“We wanted slower lives. Real conversations. Community.”
More nods.
“But somewhere along the way…”
He sighed.
“We accidentally turned nostalgia into a religion, or maybe even a cult. We became the exact adults we hated when we were young.”
Several parents visibly recoiled.
“We became every villain from every eighties movie. I mean, we are Mr. Rooney, the principal from Ferris Bueller!”
“My God. He’s right.” a woman near the back whispered.
Gary pointed towards the teenagers on the front row.
“We gave them our childhood instead of allowing them to have their own.”
The gym fell quiet.
Then Chad stood slowly.
“So what now?” he asked. “We just install TikTok and watch civilization collapse in real time?”
“No,” Gary replied. “But maybe pretending technology doesn’t exist is just another form of addiction.”
That line hit hard enough to silence the room.
The subsequent debate lasted eleven hours. There was shouting, crying, three near fistfights over whether Billy Joel counted as “real music”, and one divorce.
Eventually, Avalon-86 reached a compromise.
They built “The Embassy” on the island’s southern edge. It was a modern complex with broadband internet, computers, smartphones, and unrestricted access to the outside world.
Teenagers could visit freely. And upon turning eighteen, every resident would have two options. Do you stay on Avalon-86 or do you leave for the mainland with enough money to start a new life?
There was no guilt, no shame, and absolutely no lectures about “the good old days.”
One year later, Leo sat inside The Embassy scrolling endlessly through short-form videos on a brand-new smartphone.
Cat video. Swipe. Dance trend. Swipe. 5G Conspiracy theory. Swipe. Pizza review by a man screaming at mozzarella. Swipe. Dance trend. Swipe. Advertisement disguised as activism. Swipe. Advertisement disguised as friendship. Swipe. Dance trend. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.
After three hours, Leo realized something horrifying: he felt exactly the way his parents used to look before they fled the mainland. His eyes hurt. His chest buzzed with vague anxiety. His brain felt like microwaved soup.
Across the room, Chloe sat silently staring into her own screen like a Victorian child possessed by a small glowing demon.
Leo locked his phone. Outside the Embassy window, neon lights glowed from the roller rink below. He could hear laughter drifting uphill. A Queen song blasted somewhere in the distance. Someone was almost certainly arguing about Top Gun.
For the first time in months, the sound of the 1980s felt… nice.
Leo nudged Chloe. She looked up slowly, blinking like someone returning from deep space.
“You wanna get out of here?” he asked.
“Where?”
“I heard Toby finally beat the Donkey Kong high score down the arcade.”
Chloe smiled immediately.
“Only if we get Orange Julius.”
“Deal.”
As they walked out of The Embassy and back toward the neon-lit streets below, Leo finally understood something neither generation had fully grasped: the problem was never the technology. It was the human tendency to disappear inside whatever era made us feel safest.
The adults disappeared into nostalgia. The kids disappeared into screens.
Either way, people stopped noticing the world directly in front of them.
Also, he had to admit that The Goonies absolutely slapped.
Photo Credits
Photo 1 by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Photo 2 by Josh Chiodo on Unsplash
Photo 3 by Stephen Monroe on Unsplash
Photo 4 by Documerica on Unsplash
Photo 5 by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Photo 6 by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
Photo 7 by Marlon Medau on Unsplash
Photo 8 by Lukas Robertson on Unsplash
Photo 9 by Mathias Reding on Unsplash
Photo 10 by Kurt Liebhaeuser on Unsplash
Photo 11 by Luke Madziwa on Unsplash
Photo 12 by Eric Nopanen on Unsplash
