The blast doors groaned as they opened, their hydraulics screaming in protest. The air that rushed in was cold, metallic, and wrong—thick with a taste that made throats tighten.
Lieutenant Sarah Chen stumbled through, her once-pristine uniform torn. Her headset sparked with dying static, its antenna bent at an impossible angle. A faint crimson light blinked from her emergency beacon, strobing against the steel walls in an uneven rhythm.
She collapsed to her knees beneath the atrium's harsh lights, her voice breaking through the silence. "We've lost communication with Global Headquarters!"
The words froze the air.
"Quantum channels… satellites… even emergency bands—everything is dead!" Her tone pitched high, trembling on the edge of panic. "The hyperloop feeds back only static!"
Mothers clutched their children. Engineers exchanged bewildered looks, hands tightening on tablets. Even the security officers—trained to keep their faces neutral—showed cracks in their armor.
Then another figure appeared in the doorway, staggering under his own weight. Captain Marcus Webb. His uniform was shredded, his once-proud frame bent beneath exhaustion. Sweat slicked his face, his eyes wide with something worse than pain: horror.
He swallowed hard, his voice rasping like sandpaper. "The surface…"
The atrium leaned into his words.
"It's gone. Black fog—thicker than oil. Zero visibility." His jaw trembled. "Our drivers…" He faltered, breath shuddering. "They collapsed the instant the hatch opened."
The atrium erupted. One hundred and eighty-nine gasps, sharp and ragged, filled the air as though the entire population had drawn a single breath and lost it together.
Behind the sealed blast doors lay twelve delivery drivers. Alive, but unmoving. Their pulses steady. Their eyes open. Their minds lost in patterns no scanner could interpret.
A nightmare without language.
Elena's hand flew to her mouth. The sound of her own breathing echoed in her ears. She had seen collapse before—radiation exposure, hypoxic trauma—but this? Minds twisted into unrecognizable rhythms? This was something else entirely.
"Get the medics!" someone shouted."They're breathing!" cried another."Don't open the hatch again!" a mother sobbed.
Fear fractured into chaos.
And yet, in the center of the storm—unmoving, slouched on the sofa—sat Tian. His fingers twitched, sketching invisible shapes across the air. His lips moved, words spilling in a whisper, again and again, like a broken prayer.
"Ninety-nine point seven… so close… if I adjust the field harmonics…"
Oblivious. Blind to the catastrophe swallowing the world.
7:35 AM
Elena forced herself to lead. Thirty-four residents followed her into Surveillance Control, their steps a mix of dread and urgency. The room's vast screen dominated the wall, the pulse of the facility's remaining systems casting pale light across their faces.
"Bring up surface feeds."
The screen flared to life—only to show endless black.
"Switch to wide-spectrum," Elena ordered.
The technician's fingers flew across the console. The feed flickered, then steadied. Still black.
The cameras—designed to pierce fifteen kilometers of atmosphere—saw nothing.No haze. No interference.Just absence.
The technician swallowed. "Light sensors… 0.0001 lux. Darker than a cave."
"What about spectral analysis?" Elena pressed.
The numbers scrolled across the screen, their verdict as chilling as silence.
Atmospheric composition: UNKNOWN. Optical data: INCOMPLETE. Result: NULL.
Neo-Singapore's skyline… erased. No sun. No stars. No city lights.
"Try emergency frequencies," Elena said.
The room filled with static—until something else slithered through. Not words. Not noise. A hiss. Low, unnatural, vibrating deep in their bones like the rasp of something alive.
A few clutched their ears. One woman fell to her knees, muttering prayers under her breath.
"Military channels?" Elena asked.
"Silent."
Global networks were gone. Supply lines gone. Their world above—gone.
The silence that followed was heavier than any alarm.
It was Dr. Sarah Kim whose trembling voice finally broke it. "Yesterday at 2:30 PM…" She clutched her notes as though they were lifelines. "Clear skies. I saw fishing boats returning. The director himself visited the lab." Her throat bobbed. "What happened in just eight hours?"
The question rang like a bell through the chamber.
No one answered.
Fear spread like fire. Children sobbed into their parents' arms. Engineers whispered worst-case models. Elderly scientists closed their eyes and prayed to gods long abandoned in the pursuit of science.
Resource projections flickered on secondary monitors. Numbers they had once dismissed as contingency plans now cut like blades: 18 months of survival. If carefully rationed.
And still Tian whispered formulas.
Kai snapped. The dam of his patience shattered. He stormed across the atrium, fury radiating off him, and seized Tian by the shoulders.
"The surface is gone! People are dying! And you're still counting decimals?"
He shook him once, hard.
Tian's head lolled, his eyes lifting. Vacant. Haunted. His lips parted with a hollow voice."The quantum tunnel was stable. If I just… adjust… the frequency—"
"WAKE UP!" Kai roared, shaking him again. "This isn't about numbers! This is about survival!"
The crowd froze, watching the confrontation. For a moment, hope flickered that Kai's fire might pierce the fog of Tian's obsession.
But Tian's gaze slipped past him. His eyes glazed, not seeing Kai, not seeing the atrium, not seeing the fear all around. His focus tunneled inward, lost to equations only he could glimpse.
The brilliance that had once been their beacon now lay shattered, fractured into obsession.
7:47 AM
The truth descended like a hammer blow.
With power reserves at only thirty percent, with no contact, no supply lines, no sun, no world above—PEC1R was no longer a research facility.
It was humanity's last refuge.
Elena climbed the central platform. Her hands shook, but her voice—though strained—did not break.
"From this moment, emergency protocols are permanent," she declared, her voice carrying across the crowd. "Air recycling begins now. Resource conservation—strict enforcement. Medical priority goes to the unconscious drivers. We hold steady until we understand what has happened."
A voice cut from the back, raw with terror."And if we never understand?"
Elena's gaze locked onto the speaker. Her jaw set, eyes burning with grim defiance."Then we survive anyway."
Her words fell like steel.
The atrium stilled. Not into peace, not into comfort—but into the muted heartbeat of 189 souls suspended between hope and annihilation.
Above them, the surface was gone. Outside, the blackness pulsed like a living thing.
Inside, deep in the wounded quantum systems, strange resonances continued their alien song. The echoes of Tian's forbidden experiment whispered into the dark.
The world above had been swallowed whole.
And now… the darkness was listening.