Chapter 1: Brownout
I was deep in a circuit board when the world ended.
It’s typical. I spend three weeks designing a custom solar array controller and another week sourcing parts that aren’t Chinese knockoffs, and the apocalypse hits right as I finish the final connections. The lights in my garage workshop flickered once or twice, then died completely. My soldering iron went cold in my hand.
“Mo…er.” I set the iron down carefully—still hot enough to burn through the laminate workbench—and reached for my phone. No service. Emergency lights kicked on automatically; I’d wired the whole garage with a backup system last winter after that three-day outage. Another paranoid prepper project my ex-wife had bitched about before she left.
Who’s paranoid now, Karen?
I grabbed the battery-powered radio from the shelf, spinning through static until I found a signal.
“—reports of multiple anomalous objects entering Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific. NORAD has not issued any statements, but amateur astronomers across the western states have confirmed at least seven distinct—”
The broadcast cut to static. I tried other frequencies. Nothing but white noise or panicked voices talking over each other.
Through the small window high on my garage wall, an unnatural glow pulsed across the night sky— ripples of blue-green light like a cosmic aurora borealis over suburban Phoenix.
This wasn’t a normal blackout.
I set down the radio and moved with purpose. Lists formed in my head automatically, an engineer’s habit. The immediate requirements were to inventory supplies, secure the property, establish communications, and assess threats. I’d tackled enough troubleshooting flowcharts to know that you start with what you can control.
My workshop was already a prepper’s wet dream, though I never called myself that. Just a practical guy who understood system redundancies. A gun safe in the corner with a Mossberg 590 and a Glock 19. Six months of freeze-dried food. Water filtration system. First aid supplies that went well beyond Band-Aids and Tylenol. Enough batteries to power a small village. Tools to fix damn near anything.
The house next door erupted with yelling. The Williams family—husband, wife, two kids, one yappy dog—all spilled into their driveway, cramming suitcases into their SUV. Running to somewhere safer, I guessed, though where that might be wasn’t clear. More cars started up and down the street. Mass exodus underway.
I stayed put. Rule one of any emergency: avoid the initial panic.
Two hours later, the sky brightened with false dawn. Not sunrise—something else. I stepped into my backyard, Mossberg in hand, and looked up.
They were massive. Three disk-shaped objects hovering over downtown Phoenix, each one bigger than a stadium, their surfaces rippling with the same blue-green energy I’d seen in the sky. Silent as death but impossible to miss. My analytical brain tried to calculate their size, propulsion method, and the materials they might be made from. My human brain just kept thinking: shit, shit, shit.
Then the pain hit.
Started behind my eyes, like ice picks driving into my brain, then spread outward. A metallic taste flooded my mouth. My vision blurred, doubling the alien ships into six. I staggered back inside, nearly dropping the shotgun.
Never had migraines before. Perfect timing to start.
Back in the garage, the pain subsided slightly. I dry swallowed three Advil and rechecked my emergency radio. Most channels were dead now, but one military frequency crackled with voices:
“—deployed to containment positions but have no effective—” “—weapons systems non-responsive within five hundred meters of the—” “—civilians to remain in their homes until—”
Then silence. Complete communications blackout.
Don't panic! I need to stay busy. Back to planning.
The first forty-eight hours of any crisis are critical. I’d read that somewhere. People make bad decisions when they panic. I wasn’t going to be one of them. I methodically checked my supplies, secured entry points, and set up a monitoring schedule. If these things—whatever they were—wanted a fight, they’d find me ready.
Three days later, I’d learn just how wrong I was.
But that night, as I took stock of canned goods and ammunition, I felt the first tickle of something beyond the headache. A strange sensation, like feeling a storm front approaching before the clouds gather. Something about those ships resonated with me in ways I couldn’t explain—like tuning forks vibrating at just the right frequency to make my skull hum.
I’d spent my life understanding electrical systems and how energy flows through circuits and components. Somehow, I knew what hung over Phoenix wasn’t just advanced technology. It operated on principles our physics hadn’t even discovered yet.
And for some reason, I couldn’t understand; some part of my brain recognized it.
Sleep didn’t come that night. Just the headache, the metallic taste, and the absolute certainty that everything was about to change. Not just the world—me.
