The first call
The first sign wasn’t an explosion. It was silence.
The kind that didn’t belong. In rooms where machines never slept, where voices overlapped without pause, something shifted. Not loud enough to be noticed at first—just enough to feel wrong.
A screen flickered. Then another.
Conversations thinned. Someone stopped mid-sentence, as if they had forgotten what they were about to say. Across the room, a phone began to ring. No one reached for it. It kept ringing.
And then every display changed at once.
At first, no one understood what they were looking at. The signals overlapped—too many, too fast, impossible to track.
“This isn’t right,” someone said.
“It’s a system error.”
“It has to be.”
The data kept updating, refreshing, correcting itself. Not random. Not broken. Repeating.
“They’re duplicating,” another voice said. “Ghost signals.”
A pause.
“Or someone wants us to think that.”
The room went still.
“How many?”
“I don’t know. The count keeps changing.”
Somewhere far from the room, people stopped. They looked up. For a moment, it looked like a shooting star.
But it wasn’t.
“Filter the noise,” a voice ordered.
The screens shifted again. Most of the signals flickered, distorted, collapsing into nothing.
Except one.
It was clean. Steady. Real.
“Track that one.”
No one argued.
“If this is real…”
The sentence didn’t finish.
Because if it was—
They were already too late.
No one moved.
The signal didn’t change.
The distance kept closing.
“What is that?” someone asked.
At first, it sounded distant. Faint. Easy to ignore.
“It’s just a bird,” another voice said.
“No…”
The sound didn’t fade. It grew. Sharper. Mechanical.
“That’s not a bird.”
A pause.
“It’s—”
The word never finished.
A sudden burst of light cut through the distance.
Then the impact came—violent, immediate, impossible to mistake.
Fire followed.
And in the silence after, there was no doubt left.
It wasn’t a glitch.
It wasn’t a mistake.
It was a drone.
Phones began to blare.
Not messages. Not calls.
Alerts.
One after another. Then more. Then more.
It spread faster than anyone could react.
It felt like a fallout had already begun.
Supermarkets emptied within minutes. Shelves stripped bare before anyone understood why.
Roads thinned—cars disappearing instead of filling them.
And at the airport, the opposite.
Crowds gathered. Growing. Pressing forward.
It wasn’t a holiday.
It was a collapse.
And somewhere, far above the noise and confusion—
another signal appeared.
