Essim's desk was a monument to exhaustion.
Stacks of unfinished briefs crowded the edges, half-empty coffee cups stood like forgotten sentinels, and his monitor cast a pale blue glow across features drawn tight with fatigue. The ad agency's Berlin office had gone quiet around him—most of the team had left hours ago—but Essim remained hunched over an advertisement video that needed to ship before midnight. His fingers moved across the keyboard in a steady, mechanical rhythm, the only sound in the room besides the low hum of the building's ventilation.
He was twenty-four years old, and already he felt twice that.
A flicker of red light caught the edge of his vision.
Essim blinked, certain his tired eyes were playing tricks. But when he turned, the hallucination refused to dissolve. A vivid crimson panel hung in the air beside his monitor, hovering without support, its surface rippling like a heat mirage. Bold text pulsed across it in a language he could read but had never seen written in light before.
[The Earth's time has ended. All humans will be transferred to the Ascendant Realm in 5 minutes.]
"Hah…?"
His fingers froze above the keyboard. For a long, absurd moment, he simply stared, waiting for the punchline—for the panel to dissolve into some elaborate prank. It didn't.
"Essim." Sam's voice came from behind him, stripped of its usual commanding edge. "Tell me you see this too."
Essim turned in his chair. His boss stood three desks away, his tie loosened, his face drained of colour. Sam Vogt—the man who had spent the last hour pressuring Essim for deliverables—now looked like he'd forgotten what a deliverable was.
"Yeah," Essim said, his voice flat. "It says we're being moved somewhere. Some kind of realm."
"Is this a joke?" Sam asked, though his tone made clear he already knew it wasn't.
"Who could pull off something like this?"
Neither of them had an answer.
Across the office, the handful of remaining employees had risen from their desks. A junior designer was pressing her palm against one of the red panels, watching her hand pass through the light. The floor manager was on the phone, speaking rapidly in German, insisting it was a cyberattack, some kind of mass-projected hologram. His voice cracked on the word "hologram."
But it wasn't just their office.
• • •
Across the world, the same message appeared simultaneously, indifferent to language, time zone, or belief.
In a lecture hall at the Sorbonne in Paris, a philosophy professor paused mid-sentence, the red panel hovering between him and his students like a verdict. In London, a surgeon at Guy's Hospital froze over an open patient, his scalpel trembling as his nurse whispered, "Doctor, what is this?" In a high school in Madrid, students sitting their final exams looked up from their papers to find the same grim announcement. Strangely, children under fifteen saw nothing at all—the panels simply did not appear for them. In homes across every continent, parents stared at the countdown while their younger children played on, oblivious, and that disparity birthed a particular kind of terror.
News channels and social media erupted. Five minutes was enough time to panic but not enough to do anything about it. In those final moments, some people called their loved ones. Others prayed. Many simply stood still, paralysed by the impossibility of what they were reading.
Essim watched the timer tick.
4:12… 4:11… 4:10…
His heart hammered against his ribs. The office had gone deathly silent. The wall clock's ticking, usually inaudible, now seemed to fill the room, each second falling like a stone into deep water.
0:03… 0:02… 0:01…
The last second passed.
And then, without pain, without warning, every human on Earth vanished.
• • •
Essim felt no impact—only a strange weightlessness, as though gravity had politely excused itself. His consciousness flickered, dimmed, and for a heartbeat that might have lasted an eternity, he was nowhere at all.
The world he left behind did not mourn for long.
A bus in Munich careened through an intersection and struck the corner of an apartment building, its driver's seat empty. Somewhere over the Atlantic, a commercial airliner tilted into a slow, spiralling descent, its cockpit abandoned. In a park in Zurich, a woman's empty shoes sat beside a swing that still rocked gently, pushed by the wind. A child's laughter echoed from the playground nearby—the children under fifteen had been left behind, alone on a dying world.
Minutes later, the Earth itself began to collapse. The planet's crust fractured along ancient fault lines. Volcanoes erupted in cascading chains. Oceans boiled and mountains crumbled. The destruction intensified with terrifying speed until the Earth itself broke apart, its remnants scattering into the vast, indifferent universe like the pieces of a shattered marble.
Humanity's cradle was gone.
And somewhere impossibly far away, eight billion souls were waking up.