At exactly 11:47 PM, every phone in the city buzzed at once.
No notification preview.
No app icon.
Just a black screen with six glowing white words:
“It begins in seven minutes.”
That was it.
No sender. No sound after that. Just silence.
At first, people laughed it off. A prank. A glitch. Some new viral marketing stunt. On social media, hashtags exploded within seconds. Videos flooded in. Everyone had received the same message. From teenagers streaming in their bedrooms to late-night taxi drivers stopped at red lights.
Seven minutes.
Then six.
Then five.
The countdown wasn’t visible anywhere—but everyone could feel it ticking.
At 11:50 PM, the power flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then every screen turned on again by itself. TVs. Laptops. Digital billboards. Even smart refrigerators lit up. A single symbol appeared everywhere: a perfect white circle slowly pulsing like a heartbeat.
No one could turn it off.
Emergency lines jammed instantly. News anchors scrambled for explanations, but their teleprompters glitched into static. Satellites? Hacked. Power grid? Stable. Internet? Technically online—but nothing worked except that symbol.
Three minutes.
Outside, something stranger happened.
The wind stopped.
Completely.
Trees froze mid-sway. Flags hung motionless. Even the distant hum of traffic faded into a hollow quiet. It was as if someone had pressed pause on reality itself.
Two minutes.
People stepped outside despite the warnings. Neighbors gathered. Strangers made eye contact in uneasy silence. Somewhere in the distance, a dog howled—then abruptly stopped.
One minute.
The circle on every screen began shrinking.
Pulsing faster.
Faster.
Heartbeats across the city seemed to match it. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
Thirty seconds.
Above the skyline, the clouds started to spiral. Not in a storm pattern. Not in wind. They twisted inward toward a single invisible point directly above the city center.
Twenty seconds.
The ground vibrated—not violently, but gently, like something massive shifting beneath the surface.
Ten seconds.
Every electronic device shut off.
Darkness swallowed everything.
No streetlights.
No headlights.
No moonlight.
Zero.
And then—
Light.
Blinding, white, silent light poured down from the sky in a column miles wide. It didn’t burn. It didn’t explode. It simply was.
People braced for impact.
But instead of destruction, something else happened.
The light passed through buildings, through streets, through every living person.
And in that instant, everyone saw something.
Not with their eyes.
With their minds.
Memories that weren’t theirs.
Cities that didn’t exist.
Stars being born and dying.
Civilizations rising and vanishing.
A voice—calm, ancient, impossibly vast—echoed in every consciousness at once:
