It began at 11:54 PM on Christmas Eve. While half the world slept and the other half celebrated, a fracture opened in the silence of the Mariana Trench. It wasn't an earthquake; there was no tremor, only a pulse. A circular wall of iridescent green light erupted from the abyss, surging upward through miles of dark water until it breached the surface and swept across the continents at impossible speeds.
Satellites captured the image of a world momentarily encased in a glass marble of emerald.
The panic was instantaneous, but the light was ghost-like. It passed through skyscrapers, mountains, and ribcages without leaving a scratch. For six hours, the world held its breath, waiting for the radiation sickness or the explosions that never came. By dawn, the "Green Eve" was being hailed as a miracle—a harmless atmospheric anomaly, a celestial gift.
Then, the fever started.
It wasn't a gradual onset. It was a physical assault. By midday on Christmas, the global economy didn't just crash; it stopped. In every city, on every farm, and in every forest, the screaming began.
It was a biological wildfire. No mask could filter it; no vaccine could stop it. A world-class marathoner would collapse in the street, his muscles seizing with the same white-hot agony as a bedridden grandfather. It hit the stray dogs in the alleys and the birds in the sky, which fell like feathered stones.
Hospital waiting rooms became morgues for the living. Doctors, drenched in their own sweat, collapsed over their patients as their skin burned to the touch. The air smelled of salt and ozone. For days, the only sound on Earth was the ragged breathing of a planet in a delirium.
Some drifted in the heat for hours; others were locked in the pain for days. But as the fever broke, a silence deeper than the light returned.
Primo opened his eyes, his vision blurred by crusty salt and the remnants of a nightmare he couldn't remember. He expected to see the ceiling of his apartment. Instead, he saw a flickering, translucent pane of light hovering in the air, defiant of physics and the laws of the world he once knew. It pulsed with a soft, mechanical rhythm.
[ System Reconnection Complete ]