The universe did not end with a bang, nor a whimper. It ended with a click.
One moment, Kaelen Vance was staring at a PowerPoint projection of a suspension bridge buckling under torsional stress. The next, the world was gone.
Dr. Halloway was still talking, his voice a dry, rhythmic drone that had served as the background noise for the last forty-five minutes of Structural Analysis 301. "…and as you can see, the failure point wasn't the steel itself, but the unexpected harmonic resonance caused by the wind. The structure was sound on paper. It was the environment that betrayed it."
Kaelen tapped his pen against the edge of his notebook. Click. Click. Click. He had already done the math on Halloway's slide three minutes ago. The bridge in the photo hadn't just failed because of wind; it had failed because the dampeners were installed five degrees off-axis. It was a geometry problem masquerading as a physics problem.
He glanced at his watch. 1:59 PM.
Outside the tall, narrow windows of Lecture Hall B, the University of Ashbourne was basking in a rare, golden autumn afternoon. The sun was high, cutting through the campus oaks and casting long, lazy shadows across the manicured lawns. Kaelen could see students throwing a frisbee near the fountain. He could see a girl reading on a bench, shielding her eyes from the glare.
He looked back at the clock on the wall. The second hand swept upward.
1:59:58.
1:59:59.
2:00:00.
The light didn't fade. It didn't dim like a passing cloud or a setting sun.
It vanished.
It was instantaneous. One millisecond, the lecture hall was filled with the ambient, diffuse glow of daylight mixing with the fluorescent overheads. The next millisecond, the windows were squares of absolute, void-like blackness.
Simultaneously, the power grid died. The projector cut out. The hum of the HVAC system silenced. The fluorescent tubes overhead didn't flicker; they just ceased to exist.
For three seconds, there was total silence. The human brain is a pattern-recognition machine, and when the pattern is shattered so violently, the first reaction isn't fear—it's a processing error. Four hundred students sat in the pitch dark, their breaths caught in their throats, waiting for the punchline.
"Power outage," someone whispered from the back row. The voice cracked.
That broke the spell.
The room erupted. Chairs scraped violently against the linoleum as people stood up. The sound of four hundred bodies moving at once was like a sudden wave crashing.
"Everyone remain calm!" Dr. Halloway shouted, though his voice sounded thin without the microphone. "Just a transformer blowout. Stay in your seats!"
"Transformer blowout?" a voice yelled—Kaelen recognized it as Mark, the linebacker who sat three rows down. "Prof, look at the windows! It's pitch black!"
"It's an eclipse," someone else suggested, their voice trembling. "A total eclipse."
Kaelen remained seated. He set his pen down on the desk, feeling the cool plastic with his fingertips. He closed his eyes, counting to three, trying to force his heart rate back down. Panic is a structural flaw, he told himself. Panic causes collapse.
He opened his eyes. The room was beginning to light up, dot by dot, as hundreds of cell phones were pulled from pockets. The pale, ghostly glow of lock screens washed over terrified faces.
Kaelen pulled out his own phone. No signal. Not just zero bars—the 'No Service' icon was blinking rapidly.
He looked at the window again. The darkness outside wasn't right. Even in a power outage, even at midnight, a city isn't black. There's light pollution. There are cars, streetlamps, the moon, the stars. Ashbourne was a city of two million people. It glowed orange at night.
But through the glass, there was nothing. It looked as if someone had painted the windows with Vantablack.
Kaelen stood up, grabbing his messenger bag. He moved instinctively toward the aisle, navigating by the light of other people's phones. The air pressure in the room felt... different. He swallowed, his ears popping painfully.
"My ears," a girl next to him whimpered, rubbing the side of her head. "Why do my ears hurt?"
"Pressure drop," Kaelen muttered, mostly to himself. "Like being in an airplane that just lost cabin pressure."
He pushed through the double doors at the back of the lecture hall, spilling out into the main corridor. The emergency lights, which should have kicked on instantly, were dead. That was impossible. Emergency lights were battery-operated, independent of the grid. Unless the batteries themselves had been drained in an instant.
The hallway was a river of confusion. Students were pouring out of other classrooms, creating a bottleneck at the main exit.
"Let me through!"
"Call 911! My phone won't connect!"
"Is it a bomb? Did they bomb the power plant?"
Kaelen hugged the wall, sliding past the crush of bodies. He needed to see the sky. He needed to verify the variables before he could solve the equation.
He burst out of the Arts and Sciences building and into the cold air.
The temperature shock hit him like a physical blow. It had been 65 degrees Fahrenheit a minute ago. Now, he could see his breath puffing in the flashlight beams of the students around him. It felt like walking into a meat locker.
But it was the sky that stopped him dead.
Kaelen looked up.
There were no stars.
He spun in a circle. The city skyline, usually a jagged horizon of glittering towers, was gone. The darkness was so heavy it felt palpable, like a blanket pressing down on his eyes.
"Hey!" Kaelen shouted, spotting a campus security guard near the fountain. The man was fumbling with a heavy-duty tactical flashlight, banging it against his palm. "Officer!"
The guard looked up, eyes wide and white in the gloom. "Kid, get back inside. We don't know what's happening."
"Your light," Kaelen said, rushing over. "Shine it up. Straight up."
"What? Why?"
"Just do it!"
The guard hesitated, then clicked the switch. The Maglite was a beast, capable of throwing a beam a solid half-mile. A cone of brilliant white light sliced through the darkness.
It cut through the air, illuminating swirling motes of dust and... ice crystals? Was it snowing?
The beam traveled upward. Fifty meters. One hundred meters. Two hundred.
It should have faded into the infinite void of space. It should have hit clouds.
Instead, at roughly five hundred meters, the light stopped.
It didn't fade. It splashed.
Kaelen's breath hitched. "Focus the beam," he whispered.
The guard twisted the head of the flashlight. The circle of light tightened, becoming a sharp, intense spot in the sky.
It wasn't sky.
It was rock.
Solid, uneven, grey rock. It looked like the roof of a cave, magnified a thousand times. Kaelen could see ridges, cracks, and inverted stalactites hanging ominously like stone daggers. The "sky" was a ceiling. A ceiling that stretched as far as the light could reach.
"Dear God," the guard whispered, the flashlight trembling in his hand. The beam danced erratically across the impossible stone firmament. "What is that? Is that... is that an asteroid?"
"No," Kaelen said, his voice sounding hollow. "An asteroid would hit us. This... this has enclosed us."
Thud.
Something wet and heavy hit the pavement a few feet away.
Kaelen jumped back. He shined his phone light at the ground.
It was a pigeon. Its neck was broken, its body smashed as if it had flown full speed into a brick wall.
Thud. Thud. Crack.
More sounds. All around them.
"Cover your heads!" Kaelen roared, throwing his bag over his skull.
It began to rain death. Hundreds, thousands of birds—pigeons, crows, sparrows—were falling from the darkness. They had been flying high when the ceiling appeared. They had smashed into the stone sky at full velocity.
Screams erupted across the campus as students scrambled for cover, pelted by the gruesome hail of feathers and blood. Kaelen sprinted toward the overhang of the library, the sound of wet impacts sickeningly loud in the silence of the dead city.
He skidded under the concrete awning, breathing hard. He wiped a smear of blood from his jacket—not his own.
He looked out at the campus green. The guard had dropped his flashlight; the beam was now rolling across the grass, illuminating a chaotic scene of fleeing students and fallen birds.
"This is impossible," a voice said beside him. It was Dr. Halloway. The professor was leaning against the brick wall, clutching his briefcase to his chest. His face was grey. "The sheer mass... gravity would... the tidal forces..."
"Professor," Kaelen said, grabbing the older man's shoulder. "Structure. Look at the structure."
Kaelen pointed to the horizon. As his eyes adjusted to the total darkness, he realized he could see something. Far, far in the distance, where the city limits should have been, there was a faint, phosphorescent glow. It wasn't light; it was the bioluminescence of fungus.
And it revealed a wall.
A vertical wall of stone, rising up from the earth to meet the ceiling.
"We aren't just covered," Kaelen realized, the horror finally settling into his gut, cold and heavy. "We've been boxed in. The atmosphere is capped. That's why the pressure dropped. That's why our ears popped. The volume of the container just shrank."
"Container?" Halloway stammered. "What container?"
"The room," Kaelen said. "We're in a room."
Before Halloway could respond, the darkness changed.
A sound, deep and resonant, vibrated through the soles of Kaelen's shoes. It sounded like a massive gong being struck deep underground. It wasn't a sound heard with the ears, but felt in the bones. DOOOOOM.
Then, light returned. But not sunlight.
In the center of the campus green, hovering twenty feet in the air, a hologram materialized. It was a perfect rectangle of azure blue light, rotating slowly. It was the only light source in the world, casting long, eerie blue shadows that stretched away from the center of the campus.
The text on the hologram was written in sharp, sans-serif English, glowing white against the blue.
[ SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE ]
[ WELCOME TO FLOOR 1 ]
Kaelen stepped out from under the awning. He couldn't help himself. The text was suspended in the air, crisp and high-definition, defying every law of optics.
The text scrolled up, replaced by new lines.
[ PLANET DESIGNATION: EARTH-404 ]
[ STATUS: INTEGRATED ]
[ CURRENT LOCATION: THE BASEMENT ]
[ ALERT: SOLAR SUBSCRIPTION EXPIRED. ]
[ SUNLIGHT HAS BEEN SUSPENDED PENDING PAYMENT. ]
[ RENT DUE: 29 DAYS, 23 HOURS, 55 MINUTES. ]
"Rent?" someone whispered.
As if in answer, the blue light expanded, sweeping over the crowd like a scanner. Kaelen felt a tingle pass through his body, like static electricity crawling under his skin.
[ INITIATING INDIVIDUAL ASSESSMENT... ]
A smaller blue window popped up directly in front of Kaelen's face. He stumbled back, swatting at it, but his hand passed right through the light. It stayed perfectly positioned in his center of vision.
[ Name: Kaelen Vance ]
[ Species: Human ]
[ Level: 0 ]
[ Analyzing Aptitude... ]
Kaelen stared at the box. He looked around. Everyone—Dr. Halloway, the students, the guard—was staring at their own private screens. Some were crying. Some were screaming.
"A game," Mark the linebacker shouted, standing on top of a picnic table, his fear manic and loud. "It's a game! Look! I got 'Warrior'! I have a Strength stat!"
"I'm... I'm a Cleric?" a girl near the fountain sobbed.
Kaelen looked back at his own screen. It was still processing.
[ Aptitude Scan: Complete. ]
[ Physical Strength: LOW ]
[ Magical Resonance: NULL ]
[ Cognitive Processing: HIGH ]
[ Pattern Recognition: EXTREME ]
The text paused, blinking.
[ ANOMALY DETECTED. ]
[ Subject focus is not on Self. Subject focus is on the Container. ]
[ Standard Combat Classes: REJECTED. ]
[ Calculating Specialization... ]
Kaelen held his breath. He watched the digital readout spin.
[ Class Assigned: THE ARCHITECT ]
[ Rarity: Uncommon ]
[ Initial Skill Granted: Structural Analysis (Passive) ]
[ Initial Skill Granted: Minor Reinforce (Active) ]
Kaelen blinked. Architect?
He looked up at the stone ceiling, five hundred meters above, pressing down on the world like the lid of a coffin. He looked at the massive stone walls encircling the horizon.
The panic in his chest began to recede, replaced by the cold, hard clarity of an engineer looking at a blueprint.
"It's not a game," Kaelen whispered, reading the timer counting down the seconds until the rent was due.
He reached out, his hand hovering over the cold air where the blue box floated. He looked at the impossible ceiling.
"It's a renovation project."