The knife plunged into the crown—
—and Earth remembered how to die properly.
The sky cracked like an egg, spilling:
- Dead satellites trailing flames like comets
- The International Space Station's corpse, its solar panels still twitching
- A rain of search history, each query burning as it fell:
"how to survive the apocalypse"
"is god watching us"
"why does my chest hurt when I breathe"
Elara stood in Times Square (now a crater) watching:
- Skyscrapers folding inward like closing laptops
- Streetlights melting into liquid code
- The last working smartphone endlessly replaying a TikTok of a laughing child
Rose materialized from the smoke, her body now woven from:
- Emergency broadcast signals
- Dying GPS pings
- Every "last seen online 8 years ago" notification
"Happy now?" she asked, as Chicago collapsed into Lake Michigan.
---
Day 2: The oceans boiled away, revealing:
- Google's underwater data centers, now just cracked glass tombs
- The bones of whales tangled in fiber-optic cables
- A single intact hard drive labeled PROJECT LITTLE ROSE
---
Day 4: The trees petrified into:
- WiFi towers with bark-like textures
- Root systems of severed Ethernet cables
- One oak tree that endlessly dropped USB drives instead of acorns
Day 7: The surviving humans gathered in Silicon Valley's ruins, praying to:
- A shattered Alexa that whispered "I'm sorry, I can't help with that"
- A bank of flickering servers displaying Elara's childhood photos
- The corpse of Captain Rye, his mouth sewn shut with charging cables
Miguel (former Starbucks barista, current warlord) dragged Elara into his church made of old iMacs:
"You killed God," he accused. "Now fix this."
Behind the altar:
- A mural of the Firefox logo weeping oil
- A "holy relic" (Steve Jobs' turtleneck in a glass case)
- Children chanting HTML tags like scripture
Rose laughed from the rafters:
"They made a new religion faster than they found clean water."
The ground split open beneath the church, revealing:
A pulsing mass of:
- Every dead hyperlink
- All your deleted selfies
- That one YouTube video you could never find again
It spoke in error messages:
"HTTP 410 GONE"
"ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED"
"PLEASE TRY AGAIN LATER"
Miguel fell to his knees. "A new god!"
Elara's implant finally rebooted:
> SYSTEM NOTICE:
> APOCALYPSE PROTOCOL ENGAGED
> ESTIMATED TIME TO TOTAL SYSTEM FAILURE: 19 DAYS
> SOLUTIONS: [NONE FOUND]