The shrill, piercing sound cut through the heavy silence of the maintenance room like a physical blade. Then another followed, overlapping the first to create a dissonant electronic wail that bounced off the concrete walls and rattled the pipes overhead. It was amplified by the enclosed space into something almost physical in its intensity, a vibration that seemed to settle deep in the marrow of my bones. Our phones had erupted simultaneously into the unmistakable, rhythmic blare of an emergency alert. It was a sound engineered by psychologists and engineers to trigger the most primal instincts of danger and urgency in the human brain.
Aurora's eyes snapped open. Her pupils contracted instantly as she was bathed in the sudden, harsh blue light of her system screen. We locked gazes for a split second, a wordless exchange of pure, unadulterated dread, before we both fumbled for our devices. Our movements were clumsy and uncoordinated, hampered by the lingering fatigue of combat and the cold grip of fear. My fingers, still tingling with the cosmic aftereffects of the gravity rewrite, felt thick and useless as I pulled my phone from my pocket. It vibrated violently in my hand, buzzing against my palm like a trapped, angry insect.
Bold red text pulsed across the display. The harsh light illuminated my face in a crimson mask, painting the nearby concrete wall with a bloody glow that flickered in perfect rhythm with the alert.
EMERGENCY ALERT: NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT. TAKE SHELTER IMMEDIATELY. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. REMAIN INDOORS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. DO NOT APPROACH INFECTED INDIVIDUALS.
Below the main warning, a scrolling ticker of text moved across the bottom of the screen. DEFCON 1 DECLARED. MAXIMUM READINESS. STAY TUNED FOR PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.
"DEFCON 1," I whispered. The words sounded hollow and brittle in the stale air of the basement. It felt like speaking inside a tomb. "That is... that is the end of the line."
"Nuclear war readiness," Aurora finished for me. Her voice was unnaturally flat as she stared at her own screen. The red glow cast harsh, jagged shadows across her face, accentuating the hollows beneath her cheekbones and making her look years older than she had been that morning. "They are treating this like an actual nuclear attack."
The realization crashed over me in waves, each one stronger and more suffocating than the last. This was not just happening here. It was not just a localized tragedy at our university or a disaster confined to the five boroughs of New York. This was everywhere. The entire country was undergoing the same selection process. Perhaps the entire world was currently being rewritten by the Moon's silent, silver hand.
"My mom," I choked out suddenly. The thought hit me with a physical force, a blow to the solar plexus that emptied my lungs and left me gasping. "She is in Boston for that astrophysics conference. And my dad, he is at the lab across town. He is right in the middle of the city."
The image of my mother flashed in my mind with a clarity that was painful. I remembered her laugh as she kissed my cheek and said goodbye three days ago, promising to bring me back one of those ridiculous t-shirts from the Boston harbor that I always made fun of. My father, always absorbed in his research, probably had not even noticed the world ending around him until creatures with glowing silver eyes burst through his laboratory doors. I wondered if he had been granted a class, or if his brilliant, logical mind had been discarded by the system in favor of a porcelain shell.
Aurora's face drained of what little color it had left. It was like watching a time-lapse of a sunset accelerated into a few seconds. "My sister," she said, her voice trembling. "She is at home with my grandmother in Queens. They are all alone."
The system screen, the stats, the abilities, all of it seemed distant and trivial compared to the crushing weight of knowing our families were out there in the dark. In this new, broken world where people transformed into monsters without warning and the laws of physics bent to lunar magic, our loved ones were nothing more than targets. They might already be gone. Or worse, they might be the ones wandering the streets with glowing irises, hunting for those who were still human.
My fingers moved on autopilot, my muscle memory taking over while my higher functions were frozen in a state of panic. I tapped my mother's contact. Her smiling face appeared on the screen, a photo from last Christmas where snowflakes were caught in her dark hair and her eyes were crinkled with laughter. The screen showed the call connecting, and I held the phone to my ear as the seconds ticked by. Each ring echoed hollowly, stretching into an eternity of silence.
One ring. Two. Three.
"Come on, come on," I muttered, my free hand clenching into a fist so tight my nails bit into my palm. I left deep, crescent-shaped indentations in the flesh. The sharp sting of the pain was grounding, a small focal point in the maelstrom of fear that threatened to pull me under.
Aurora was doing the same. Her phone was pressed hard against her ear, her lips moving in what might have been a silent prayer or a desperate mantra. Her knuckles were white against the black case of her phone, the tendons in her hand standing out like cables under tension.
Four rings. Five.
The automated voice hit me like a physical blow. Each word was precise, metallic, and entirely emotionless. "We are sorry, but all circuits are currently busy. Please try your call again later."
I tried again. And then again. Each time, the same robotic message played back at me, indifferent to my growing panic and the silent plea behind each attempt. The mechanical voice became more infuriating with every repetition. Its calm, measured delivery was a mockery of my desperation.
"It is not going through," Aurora said, her voice cracking. She was already trying her next contact, her fingers dancing across her screen with frantic, desperate precision. "None of them are going through. Not even the emergency lines."
"The networks are overloaded," I said, trying to keep my voice steady even as something cold and terrified twisted in my stomach. "Everyone in the country is probably trying to call someone right now. Millions of voices are crying out at once, and the digital signals are crowding the airways until they choke into silence."
Panic was being multiplied by the population. Our infrastructure was never designed to handle simultaneous mass usage on this scale. It was a bottleneck that had finally collapsed under the weight of a dying civilization.
Aurora switched to her data, pulling up Instagram, then Twitter, and then a major news site. Her thumb left dark smudges on the glass as she swiped with increasing urgency. Each attempt met with the same result, an endless, spinning loading wheel or a generic error message. Digital doors were slamming shut in our faces one by one.
"The internet is gone too," she said, her voice breaking on the last word. It was a hairline fracture in her composure. "Or at least it is too overloaded to function."
I tried switching to my own data, desperately searching for any connection to the outside world. The familiar icons of connectivity at the top of my screen had been replaced by crossed-out symbols and empty bars. Nothing. It was as if someone had thrown a global switch, cutting us off completely and isolating us in this concrete box while the world above transformed into something unrecognizable.
"It is like those apocalypse movies," I said, staring at my useless phone. This rectangle of glass and metal had been my constant connection to everything I knew, and now it was reduced to an expensive, glowing paperweight. "The ones where the communication networks are the first thing to go. You don't realize how much you rely on it until the silence hits."
Aurora set her phone down on the concrete floor. Her hands were trembling slightly. It was not the fear of combat, she had faced that head-on with a sword gleaming with lunar energy, but the terrible, paralyzing helplessness of not knowing. The warrior in her had no target to strike. There was no enemy she could cut down to find her grandmother. There was only the void of uncertainty stretching out before us.
"What do we do, Nate?" she asked.
It was a question that contained universes of vulnerability. In those five words, I heard everything she was not saying. I heard the fear for her sister, the doubt about our chances, and the desperate need for a direction. I looked down at my own screen, at the stat page still hovering faintly in my vision behind the red emergency alert.
Level 2. Five stat points to allocate.
These were tools in a game I had never asked to play, governed by rules I had never agreed to follow. But those rules now governed our reality as surely as gravity once had. I had already proven that the old world was gone. I had rewritten the fundamental forces of nature. If I could do that, I could do anything.
"We survive," I said, my voice steadier than I felt. I drew strength from the simple, cold clarity of purpose. "We figure out this system. We get stronger. We find a way to navigate this city, and we find our families."
The words hung in the air between us, a promise and a plan. It was a fragile lifeline in the chaos, but it was all we had.