The metallic door of the shelter had closed with a sm that resonated beyond the brick walls, a definitive door shut in the face of my remaining humanity. I had walked away from the building, from the Ganut corpse, and the flickering candlelight, wandering aimlessly toward the enveloping darkness of the dead city.
Sadness was a cold weight on Orion's chest, a sticky, dense sensation that contrasted with the icy efficiency of my Era body. It wasn't just rejection; I was used to that. It was the confirmation of my new nature. To that terrified man, I was a monster. And my operating system had been a millimeter away from proving him right, calcuting the pressure needed to crush his skull as the most logical solution to a tactical problem.
I walked for hours. My body knew no fatigue. My alloy and polymer legs moved with a tireless rhythm, devouring kilometers of broken asphalt and gss-strewn sidewalks. The freezing wind blew through my thin blue shirt and loose pants, but the -7^\circ\text{C} temperature was just another data point in my peripheral vision, irrelevant to my comfort.
The need for a purpose, or at least a temporary refuge to organize my fractured thoughts, began to outweigh the self-pity. I couldn't wander eternally. I needed a base, and I needed more information.
My visual interface continuously scanned the environment, identifying structures. <[RESIDENTIAL BUILDING: UNSTABLE]>, <[RETAIL STORE: LOOTED]>.
Finally, the silhouette of a low, robust concrete and brick building appeared in my field of vision. A shattered sign above the main entrance still retained legible letters: "POLICE STATION - DISTRICT 4."
A police station. Logical. Orion's mind thought of security; Era's mind thought of the armory.
I approached cautiously. The double gss doors of the entrance were shattered, the fragments crunching under my heavy boots. I entered the main lobby, my golden eyes automatically shifting to low-light mode, painting the interior in spectral tones of green and gray.
The pce was chaos frozen in time. It didn't look like the scene of a battle, but rather one of sudden and absolute panic. Overturned desks, office chairs lying on the floor, papers scattered like dry leaves covering every surface. There were half-finished coffee mugs, with mold growing inside, and jackets forgotten on coat racks.
But there were no bodies. No blood.
I advanced deeper, past the reception desk toward the back offices and temporary holding cells. The silence was deathly, broken only by my own footsteps.
"Where is everyone?" I whispered. The synthetic voice sounded strangely loud in the empty space.
The question gnawed at me. The man in the shelter couldn't be the only survivor in a city of millions. Had everyone fled? Were they hiding in underground bunkers? The absence of corpses in the streets and buildings was the most disturbing enigma. If there had been an open war against the invaders, the streets should be paved with the fallen. But this... this looked like a mass evaporation.
I reached what appeared to be the captain's office or a higher administrative area. It was slightly more organized than the rest, as if it had been locked when the Event occurred.
My eyes scanned the room: filing cabinets, a whiteboard with half-erased tactical notes, and a rge wooden desk.
And there it was.
On the desk, amidst the accumuted dust, y a rugged, police-grade ptop. It was open, the bck screen covered by a thin yer of grime. Unlike the shattered desktop computers I had seen in the main area, this one seemed intact.
I approached, driven by intense curiosity. In my former life, my world revolved around screens. They were windows to information, to escape. Now, this dead machine seemed like an artifact of a lost civilization.
I extended my white, perfect hand and carefully wiped the dust from the lid. I touched the trackpad and the keyboard with the absurd hope that it would turn on. Nothing. It was cold and dead, with no power.
I sighed, human frustration bubbling up. I was about to turn around to continue searching, perhaps in the basement armory, when my own internal interface sprang to life with an unexpected alert.
<[COMPATIBLE ELECTRONIC DEVICE DETECTED.]>
<[TYPE: LAPTOP COMPUTER. STATUS: CRITICAL/DEPLETED BATTERY.]>
<[INITIATING UNIVERSAL INTERFACE PROTOCOL.]>
<[DO YOU WISH TO SUPPLY POWER AND ESTABLISH DATA CONNECTION?]>
<[OPTIONS: YES / NO]>
I froze, staring at the blue letters floating in my vision. Supply power? Me?
I knew my new body had an incredibly powerful internal energy source—I hadn't tired once—but the idea of sharing it with an external device was... alien. And slightly terrifying. It was another confirmation that I was no longer human. I was a walking battery charger.
But the need to know, the hunger for information about what had happened while I was in that capsule, overcame the fear.
"Yes," I said aloud, and at the same time, I thought the command forcefully. Yes. Connect.
My body's response was immediate and visceral.
I felt a slight tingling in my right forearm, just below the wrist. It didn't hurt, but it was a strange sensation of internal movement, as if muscles and tendons that shouldn't be there were reconfiguring.
I watched, fascinated and horrified, as a small rectangur section of my smooth, white skin slid back with an almost inaudible whisper. Beneath it, there was no red flesh. There was a complex port of metal and bluish light.
From that port emerged a cable. It was thin, flexible, covered in a dark gray braided material. It extended about thirty centimeters from my wrist, ending in a universal multi-pronged connector that seemed capable of adapting to anything.
The cable moved with a kind of semi-consciousness, like an insect's proboscis searching for nectar, and directed itself straight to the ptop's side charging port. The connector plugged in with a satisfying click.
<[CONNECTION ESTABLISHED.]>
<[TRANSFERRING ENERGY...]>
I felt a subtle drain, a minimal decrease in the hum of power I felt in my core, like opening a small spigot on a giant dam.
Almost instantaneously, a small orange LED on the side of the ptop flickered and then turned solid green. The hard drive emitted a starting whir that sounded like celestial music in the silence of the station. The screen flickered once, twice, and then came to life with the operating system's startup logo.
My phantom heart raced. It worked. I was making it work.
The computer had no password, probably an emergency measure activated before the end. The desktop appeared, full of icons for police reports and administrative tools.
But what interested me was the lower right corner. The network icon.
It was disconnected, of course. The global internet infrastructure must be destroyed. But computers save things. Caches. Histories. Temporary files from the st pages visited before everything shut down.
My alloy fingers flew over the keyboard with inhuman speed, driven by urgency. I opened the browser. I went straight to the history.
The st entries were from the date of the Event. The times coincided with the moment I was in the cssroom with Sora.
I clicked on the first entry: a major global news portal. The page loaded from the computer's cache. It was a snapshot of the panic.
Headlines screamed in red and bck letters:
"UNKNOWN OBJECT IN LOW ORBIT."
"GLOBAL PANIC: GOVERNMENTS CALL FOR CALM AS CITIES DESCEND INTO CHAOS."
"FIRST CONTACT OR JUDGMENT DAY?"
I scrolled down, reading the frantic reports, the blurry photos of the Dark Sky I had seen myself. I already knew all of that.
I went to the next entry in the history, a few minutes ter than the first. It was a discussion forum, one of those sites where information moves faster than official media.
The main thread had thousands of comments in the st seconds before the server stopped responding. The title was simply: "THEY ARE FALLING. EVERYONE IS FALLING."
I started reading the comments, feeling a coldness that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature.
I clicked on a video link someone had posted. Miraculously, the small video file was in the cache. It pyed in a small, grainy window.
It was a shaky recording from a tall building's window. The sky was dark due to the main Object. But beneath it, descending from the bck clouds like a swarm of metallic insects, were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of smaller craft.
They were bck, sleek, with shapes that defied aerodynamics, moving with an ominous silence. They didn't shoot. They didn't bomb.
The video zoomed in on a street full of fainted bodies. One of the small craft descended slowly, hovering over the avenue.
From the underside of the craft, no troops emerged. Lights emerged. Beams of bluish, dense, tractor light that swept the ground.
Where the light touched an unconscious human body, it began to float. Slowly, inexorably, the bodies were lifted toward the open maw of the bck craft. Dozens of people at once, ascending in a horrific silence, like a reversed, macabre rapture.
The person recording the video was sobbing, their ragged breathing audible near the device's microphone. "They're taking them... My God, they're taking everyone."
The video ended abruptly.
I stared at the bck ptop screen, although my visual interface continued to project the st image of the video in my mind like an afterburn.
It hadn't been a war of extermination. Not at first.
The "silent wave" that had knocked me down in the hallway, that paralyzing headache I felt before losing consciousness, wasn't meant to kill us. It was a global neutralization mechanism. A pnetary anesthetic.
The world wasn't empty because everyone had died in a bombing. It was empty because they had been collected.
It was a harvest.
A harvest of billions of human beings. Men, women, children, the elderly... all sucked skyward by those bck crafts while they slept an induced sleep from which they might never wake.
For what? Svery? Biomass? Large-scale experimentation, like the one performed on me in that capsule? The magnitude of the event was so overwhelming that my human mind staggered, unable to process the scale of the horror.
I disconnected the cable from my wrist with a sharp tug, almost as if contact with that truth burned me. The ptop flickered and shut down instantly, its small battery unable to sustain it without my help. The cable retracted back into my forearm with a mechanical whisper, the white skin sealing perfectly, leaving no trace of the connection.
I stood in the dark office of the police station, surrounded by the silence of a plundered world.
But then, while my human mind drowned in the horror of the harvest, Era's cold, analytical mind detected an inconsistency. A piece of data that didn't fit the pattern.
I repyed the video in my internal memory. The sobs. The trembling hand holding the camera. The terrified voice narrating the event in real-time.
<[LOGICAL ANOMALY DETECTED.]>
The forum reports said it was instantaneous. "Switched off like puppets." I remembered it myself: the pain, the mental fog, the inability to resist. Orion Winst had fallen in a matter of seconds.
So... who recorded that video?
Why was that person awake? Why didn't the "silent wave" that brought down billions affect them? They were conscious, terrified, but functional. Functional enough to record and upload a video while the rest of their species was abducted.
A chill, this time unreted to temperature, ran through my circuits.
Not everyone had fallen. The harvest had not been perfect.
Was it natural immunity? Was it a fw in the invaders' technology? Or had that person been deliberately left behind... like me?
I looked at my white, perfect hands in the gloom. The idea of being a "mistake" suddenly seemed less pusible. Perhaps there was a purpose for those who remained.
The mystery of the apocalypse had just become much deeper. Not only did I have to survive in a dead world; now I had to find out why some pieces on the board, including myself and the unknown cameraperson, had not been removed from the game. And that question was, suddenly, more urgent than anything else.