Excerpt:

The deactivations as they came to be known started with no fanfare in the second half of 2016. At first it was thought that these incidents were a simple case of punctuated evolution—the sudden loss of the magic as a sort of precursor to the metaphorical next thumb. Almost as soon as the patterns began to emerge there were calls for making scape goats of this group or the other. Mages pointed their fingers at Flinks—Flinks blamed the Outskers the Outskers decided to make it everybody’s problem and declared themselves at war with everyone else.
Cooler heads failed to prevail—just as cooler heads almost always do—and before long the whole of the world magic users and non alike were consumed with trying to make it look simultaneously like they were trying to help, while blaming others, and still stay far enough distant as to be free of any possible blame.
The physical aspects of the deactivations were the least interesting aspect of the phenomenon. Always there was the same catatonia—waxen yellow skin and curiously enough a sweet almost peppermint smell coming off the inert magic user. Early on in the crisis it was believed by many that the deactivations were the work of the various monotheistic cults that had been forcing themselves into the national and international scene lately. Eventually somebody realized that the almost pathological need for persecution these people experienced as a part of there day to day life made it almost impossible for them to form the kind of social and financial alliances that the tech would have required to develop.
Sometimes the deactivation came in the middle of road traffic or in an inopportune moment in an operating theatre and there would be collateral loss of life to go along with the paralysis for the victim to deal with when and if they came out of the fuge. The mindscribes always picked up the same images from the minds of these deacts as they came to be known in the news reports. It always started with a small pinpoint of darkness that would slowly iris out into the whole of the victim’s consciousness. When the darkness reached the outer edges of a person’s sense of self they would quite simply shut down—like a broken trip circuit. In fact the only small gains that had been made on bringing these folks back to themselves were made by those scientists and mages who approached the problem from a standpoint of electrical engineering.
“If you are going to go deact I suppose there are worse times it could happen, though I’ll be damned if I could think of any.”
Police inspector Anders Lons grunted a noncommittal acknowledgement and looked around for clues relevant to the crime. He was less concerned with the deact phenomenon than most of the other Outskers who made a life within the society. He was certainly less concerned that the majority of the Outskers who made a point to disengage with others they felt beneath them.