Saturday morning didn't break; it buffered.
I woke up feeling off. Not hungover—I hadn't drunk enough of Josh's "jungle juice" for that—but heavy. The air in the dorm room felt pressurized, like the moments before a massive thunderstorm back in Lagos when the humidity choked the sky and turned everything sepia-toned.
But when I pulled the blind, the Cambridge sky was aggressively, painfully blue. Not a cloud in sight. It looked fake. Highly saturated, like someone had cranked the contrast setting on a monitor way too high.
I checked my phone. 0800 hours. No new notifications.
That was the first red flag. Josh was awake—I could hear him shifting in his bed, groaning at the ceiling—which meant he hadn't been spamming the group chat with memes since dawn.
I tapped the screen. Dead air. No Wi-Fi icon. The cellular bars were showing an 'x'.
I felt a tight knot form in my stomach. Not fear, exactly. Irritation. Inefficiency annoyed me. I paid an obscene amount of tuition money for fiber-optic speeds and ninety-nine percent uptime. This was sloppy.
I sat at my desk and booted up the laptop. If the campus network was down, I'd tether to my phone's data plan. I needed the ritual. I needed a quick match to calibrate my brain before facing the actual day.
The laptop connected to the dorm Wi-Fi, but with the dreaded yellow caution triangle. No Internet Access.
I tried my phone hotspot. It connected, then immediately dropped.
I stared at the screen, my fingers hovering over the WASD keys. The urge to play, to dive into that clean, predictable world of hit markers and recoil patterns, was a physical itch under my skin.
"Guy, what is going on?" I muttered, hitting refresh on the browser. Connection Timed Out.
Josh groaned and rolled over, cocooned in his duvet. "Femi? Why are you awake? It's the weekend. Go back to sleep."
"The internet is down," I said. It felt like announcing a death.
"So? Read a book. Do some pushups. Touch grass." He buried his head under a pillow.
He didn't get it. It wasn't about boredom. It was about the sudden, illogical removal of a constant variable. The silence was absolute. No pings, no updates, no stream of data.
I needed to get out of the room. The air was too still. It felt dead.
I threw on a hoodie and headed out. The hallway was eerily quiet for a Saturday morning. Usually, there was the sound of doors slamming, music blasting, people laughing too loudly on their way to brunch. Today, silence.
I took the stairs down and pushed open the heavy side door leading out toward the quad.
The heat hit me first.
It wasn't the crisp autumn chill it should have been. It was warm, stagnant, and carried a faint, metallic scent, like ozone right after a lightning strike, but sweeter.
I stepped onto the pavement and stopped.
The world looked… filtered.
That was the only word for it. The light hitting the brick buildings wasn't normal sunlight. It had a subtle, amber tint to it, making the shadows look deeper, sharper. It felt like walking inside a high-definition photograph where the HDR had been pushed to the limit.
I walked toward the dining hall, keeping my head down, trying to ignore the growing unease in my gut. My tactical brain was scanning for threats, but there was nothing to lock onto. Just a wrongness in the environment.
My phone buzzed in my pocket—a phantom vibration. I pulled it out. Still dead. No signal.
I tried to load a news site. The loading bar crawled a millimeter, froze, then timed out.
Connection Error.
"It's not just you."
I flinched, my hand dropping to my side.
Hailey was standing a few feet away, near the edge of the path. I hadn't heard her approach. She wasn't wearing her usual chaotic mix of patterns today. Just jeans and a dark, oversized jacket that looked like it belonged to someone twice her size. Her hair was pulled back tightly, emphasizing the sharp lines of her face.
She wasn't looking at me. She was staring up at the sky, her amber eyes narrowed, reflecting the strange, saturated light.
"Your phone," she clarified, finally looking down at me. "It's bricked. Mine too. Everyone's is."
"It's a network outage," I said, my voice tighter than I intended. "Probably a localized infrastructure failure. A blown transformer or a fiber cut."
She let out a short, humorless laugh. "Infrastructure failure. Right. You think this feeling is a cut wire?"
She hugged herself, rubbing her arms as if she were cold, despite the weird heat.
"Look at the sky, Femi. Really look at it."
I looked up. The blue was too deep. It felt heavy, like a physical weight pressing down on the atmosphere.
"It's atmospheric pressure," I said, trying to sound dismissive. "Maybe a thermal inversion trapping heat and pollutants. It alters light refraction."
"You don't believe that," she said quietly. She wasn't challenging me this time. She just sounded tired, and scared. "You're just trying to put it into a box so you don't have to freak out."
She was reading my code again. It was infuriating.
"I do not 'freak out'," I replied, adjusting my glasses. "I analyze variables. Currently, the variables are irregular, but not inexplicable."
"Sure. Keep telling yourself that." She stepped closer, her voice dropping to a whisper. "Don't you feel it? It's like… the volume turned down on the world. Where are the birds?"
I paused. I hadn't noticed, but she was right.
The usual background noise of campus wildlife—the squirrels chattering, the sparrows fighting over crumbs—was gone. The trees were still.
The silence felt heavy. Pressurized. Like the moment in a lobby before the match countdown hits zero.
"It's quiet," I admitted.
"It's holding its breath," she said. She looked at me, her gaze intense. "Something is coming. Something huge. I felt it at the party last night, but this is… this is the drop before the beat kicks in. And it's going to be a heavy drop."
"Your intuition is not data," I said, but the words felt hollow. My instincts—the ones that won me tournaments—were screaming that the map was about to change.
"Data isn't going to help you right now, Robot Boy," she whispered.
Just then, the heavy door behind me slammed open. Josh came jogging out, looking disheveled and confused. He was blinking against the harsh amber light, holding his phone up in the air like he was trying to catch a radio signal from the 1990s.
"Yo! What is going on?" he shouted when he saw us. "Is it the Russians? Aliens? My mom is gonna kill me if I don't check in. I have zero bars. Zero!"
He joined us, looking from me to Hailey, sensing the tension. He lowered his phone, looking around. "And why does everything look like a Mexico filter in a Hollywood movie? Why is it yellow?"
"We don't know," Hailey said.
"Femi knows," Josh said, grinning nervously and clapping a hand on my shoulder. It was heavy, grounding. "Femi always knows. What's the play, strategy man? Tactical retreat to the dining hall before the zombie apocalypse starts?"
He was trying to normalize the situation, using noise and humor to fill the void. It was inefficient, but for a second, I was grateful for it.
"The dining hall seems like a viable objective," I said. "We need to gather intel. Maybe the landlines are working."
"Landlines? Who uses landlines?" Josh scoffed, but he started walking with us.
We moved together toward the center of campus. The three of us, a mismatched squad navigating a map that felt like it was glitching out.
As we walked, the feeling of pressure intensified. It wasn't just the heat anymore. It was a vibration. A low, sub-bass hum that I could feel in the soles of my sneakers.
We reached the center of the quad.
It was fuller than usual. Students had wandered out of their dorms, drawn by the internet blackout and the weird weather. But nobody was playing frisbee. Nobody was reading on the grass.
They were standing in clusters, looking at their dead phones, then at the sky. The laughter was sparse, replaced by uneasy murmurs. Fear was starting to ripple through the crowd like lag spikes in a bad server.
I looked at Hailey. She was pale, her jaw clenched.
I looked at Josh. He'd stopped making jokes. He was just staring up, his mouth slightly open.
"Guys," Josh said, his voice dropping. "Is it just me, or is the sky... moving?"
I looked up.
The deep, unnatural blue wasn't static anymore. High up, way beyond cloud level, the atmosphere seemed to be shivering. Rippling. Like a stone thrown into a still pond, but the pond was the sky itself.
The hum in the ground got louder.
I checked my phone one last time. Still dead.
And I knew, with the cold certainty of a final circle closing in, that whatever game we had been playi
ng was over. A new one was about to start, and I didn't know the rules.