The silence was the first thing that broke him. Not the screams of a world ending, but the absolute, profound absence of them. From his twelfth-story window, Kai watched the city breathe without a pulse. Cars sat in the middle of intersections, their lights off, doors hanging open like mouths frozen mid-sentence. People, thousands of them, drifted along the sidewalks and streets, a tide of ghosts in broad daylight. They didn't run. They didn't cry. They just… were. Blank.
His own memory was a razor-sharp curse in this fog. He remembered the date: Tuesday, October 19th. He remembered the precise shade of amber in the morning light just two hours ago, the taste of stale coffee on his tongue, the 7,342 lines of archived code he'd planned to debug today. He remembered everything. They, apparently, remembered nothing.
A knot of ice formed in his gut. He had to be wrong. This was a dream, a city-wide prank, anything but the truth his senses were screaming at him. He wrenched his door open and stumbled into the hallway. The air was still, thick with the scent of unmade breakfasts and abandoned lives. He knocked on 4B. Mrs. Gable's apartment. She baked him oatmeal raisin cookies every third Sunday. The last batch, two days ago, had a little too much cinnamon, just how her late husband used to like it.
The door creaked open. She stood there, a kind-faced woman in her late sixties, her floral housecoat slightly askew. Her grey eyes, usually so full of warmth and second-hand stories, were vacant. Utterly, terrifyingly empty.
"Mrs. Gable?" Kai's voice was a dry rasp. "It's Kai. From 4D. Are you… are you okay?"
She stared at a point just past his shoulder. Her brow furrowed in a shallow, animal confusion, the way one might look at a strange pattern on the wall. There was no recognition. No spark. She wasn't seeing him; she was just seeing a shape that was making noise. She slowly, deliberately, closed the door in his face. The soft click of the latch echoed in the hallway like a gunshot.
The ice in his gut shattered, flooding his veins with cold dread. It was real. All of it. He was alone, a library of a forgotten world, and the rest of humanity were just empty pages. Logic, his only anchor, took over. The world hadn't ended, but society had. That meant services were gone. Water. Power. Food. He was on his own. He needed supplies.
His apartment offered little. Half a bag of coffee beans, some protein bars, and a lingering sense of yesterday. He grabbed a backpack, stuffing it with the bars and a few bottles of water before heading out. The silence of the building was a physical weight. On the second floor, a toddler was crying, a raw, repetitive wail with no parent to soothe it. Kai flinched but kept moving. He couldn't stop. He was a data recovery specialist, not a hero. He recovered things that were lost, but how could he recover a person?
The street was even worse up close. A man in a tailored suit stood motionless, staring at his own hands as if they were foreign objects. A woman in jogging clothes walked in a slow, tight circle, her expression utterly placid. They were bodies without pilots, vessels without memories to guide them. And he was an anomaly. A glitch in the Great Blank.
The convenience store on the corner was his goal. Its glass door was shattered, the floor littered with discarded snacks and trampled goods. He stepped inside, the crunch of broken glass under his worn sneakers deafeningly loud. He moved quickly, methodically. More water. Canned goods—tuna, beans, anything with a long shelf life. His hands, usually so steady when handling delicate server components, trembled as he worked. He was physically unimposing, built for long hours in a climate-controlled room, not for scavenging in the ruins of civilization. Every shadow felt like a threat.
He had just zipped his bulging backpack halfway when a shape filled the doorway, blocking the afternoon light. It was a man, big and broad-shouldered, in a grease-stained mechanic's uniform. His face was a mask of primal need, his eyes narrowed not with malice, but with the pure, simple focus of a predator. He saw Kai. He saw the backpack full of food. And in his world, stripped of everything but instinct, that made Kai his problem.
The man grunted, a low, guttural sound, and took a heavy step into the store.
Kai's heart hammered against his ribs. He backed away, his mind racing. "Look," he said, his voice shaking. "There's enough for both of us. We don't have to do this."
The man didn't respond. He didn't understand. The words were just noise. His gaze was locked on the bag. He took another step.
Kai was trapped. The aisles were a cage, and this man was the keeper. Panic, cold and sharp, pierced through his logical shell. He was going to die here, bludgeoned for a few cans of beans by a man who wouldn't even remember doing it an hour from now. The sheer, pointless tragedy of it was suffocating.
As the man lunged, adrenaline flooded Kai's system like a lightning strike. The world fractured. The light from the broken doorway seemed to bend, splitting into a thousand sharp needles. A high-pitched whine, like a failing hard drive, screamed in his ears. His senses, already overloaded, broke.
And then he saw it.
It wasn't a physical thing. It hovered over a discarded security baton on the floor near a toppled display of potato chips. A faint, shimmering distortion in the air, like heat haze but laced with a pale, electric blue. It pulsed with a silent, rhythmic energy. It felt… full. While everything and everyone around him was empty, this strange light was dense with something he couldn't name. A presence. An echo.
The mechanic's fist, the size of a small brick, swung toward his head. Time seemed to crawl. Kai saw the cracked skin on the man's knuckles, the dark hair on his arm, the grim set of his jaw. He had only two choices. Let the blow land, and be erased. Or dive for the impossible, shimmering ghost on the floor.
It wasn't a choice. It was an instinct he didn't know he had.
He didn't think. He didn't plan. He threw himself forward, not away from the attack, but down, his hand outstretched, his fingers reaching for the ethereal light that promised either salvation or ruin. The world narrowed to a single point: the phantom glow of a forgotten skill, with the shadow of a fist descending right behind it.