One seemingly normal morning, 16-year-old Ayan steps outside and notices something wrong with the world. The sky above him flickers like a malfunctioning screen. The sunrise jitters forward and backward by a few seconds. Clouds duplicate into pixel-like cubes before snapping back into smooth shapes. Colours bleed into each other as if someone smeared the sky with a digital paintbrush. At first, people laugh and record videos, convinced it's just a massive AR hologram failure or a global prank. But within minutes, the glitches spread across continents.
Planes stall mid-air before resuming. Birds fly in looping patterns like corrupted animations. The temperature jumps from warm to freezing for just a heartbeat. News channels crash one by one. Governments release emergency alerts with the same terrifying message:
"Unknown global anomaly detected. Do not panic."
But panic is exactly what happens.
Ayan, unlike everyone else, notices something that others miss. The glitches aren't random. The distortions form symbols, repeating patterns, and even mathematical sequences. A cluster of pixelated triangles hangs in the sky like a constellation—then shifts into a coordinate sequence only Ayan seems to understand. Every glitch he sees draws him closer to a hidden meaning, almost like someone—or something—is communicating directly with him.
As the world unravels, Ayan's surroundings become more unstable. He watches a bus glitch halfway into a wall, only for reality to correct itself moments later. His neighbourhood flickers to black for a second, revealing a grid-like structure beneath—as if the world is made of code.
Then comes the moment that changes everything.
A massive tear opens in the sky, revealing a shimmering pattern that looks like a giant digital circuit board. From it, a final message appears, burnt across the clouds like fire:
"SYSTEM WARNING. COUNTDOWN INITIATED."