Even after the flash had passed, he kept his ears, his nose, and his eyes shut for a long while.

  By acquired instinct, by convention, by inertia—by any standard—things that should never have been mixed were tangled together without order. Yellowed teeth clamped around a nipple torn along its grain, plaster hardened while holding blood—things like that. The scene was impossible to believe even when seen, yet paradoxically vivid enough that one could imagine its materiality without seeing it at all. Swept up by the storm and cast out, some were driven up the cliff, while others slammed directly into it and shattered. A strange sound followed—something he had never seen, and never heard. Trying to remain calm, he rolled his breath up from the deepest part of his body.

  —

  Was it the first—and last—time that the entire human species experienced something like a collective flash of life? Minds and anxieties, contracted to the point where they could no longer shrink, instinctively arrived at the idea of “the end.” As always, the world moved according to the will of the majority, and by that rule the “end” reached the human world in an instant. But whatever it meant for others, for him that moment was not the last. It was purely the result of chance—that he happened to be Wilson’s assigned watch. From the rocks on the hill, he felt annihilation. Everything collided with everything else at full force, again and again, until suddenly it all stopped.

  —

  Cold water burst over the crown of his head with a rushing sound. He inhaled seawater caught along his nostrils together with his breath. The acrid density of mucus burned. He gagged, hacking phlegm loose, and used his hand to wipe what clung deep at the base of his tongue. As he retched, his plank position collapsed. Scattered across the beach were things like clock springs, rusted batteries, broken loudspeakers, shattered display devices. More than those, what caught his eye were the things connecting them—the grotesque unions of organic and inorganic matter. Disguised bone marrow, with its own viscosity, acted as an adhesive binding the inorganic together, while charred organs fluttered about, decorating the shore like contemporary art. Stepping backward with a dry retch, his gaze snagged on an eyeball impaled at the tip of something sharp. He fled at full speed toward Wilson and locked the double bolts shut for months.

  —

  The beginning of annihilation amounted to little more than volatile stock prices and the sharpening of national borders. People responded with indifference, and in their own way, accepted it. Crisis never arrived all at once; it allowed ample time for adaptation. And true to the human capacity to build civilization through adaptation, people gradually came to regard such crises as little more than congenital underlying conditions. If this had been someone’s design, might this period not have been precisely calibrated—so that anxiety would not strike all at once, so that the prey would not awaken immediately at the signal of danger and flee? As layers of “adaptation” accumulated and sedimented, people ceased to take the crisis seriously. Those adaptations numbed any signals that might have reminded them of danger—any warnings, any formal notices. The end was simply an explosion. An explosion.

  The explosion was hasty and simple. The pressure caused by the first explosion, and another explosion slipping into the spaces between those pressures, joining countless others, expanding again—and into that gap yet another explosion wedged itself. This cycle repeated endlessly. Until then, it had seemed as though there were time to adapt, but in the final moment, there was not even a second to react. The confused scene of the first moment—when cliffs turned into beach—stood as proof that the villagers had prepared for nothing. It was then that he first truly felt that people were connected, in one way or another.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  A hundred years ago, people thought of the internet as “nothing more than a pastime for a handful of elite university students.” By the early years of the new century, however, it was hailed as “a revolution in which everything connects to everything.” Just as revolutions once symbolized by the guillotine eventually slowed, and railways compressed the world, people—almost as if commanded—succeeded in completely erasing the constraints of space. They even adapted to reckless, excessive connections with others.

  Perhaps because of that, at some point—almost as if testing the threshold of adaptation—the more endlessly people were entangled, the more acutely they felt difference. Tormented by not being the same, they formed groups to mock and hate one another. That hatred, too, was distorted, amplified, and spread contagiously through the network. Throughout history, humans had sensed, adapted, and perceived at an arithmetic rate. But after passing the singularity, connection and development repeated at a geometric pace—far beyond what human senses and adaptations, shaped by genetics and education, could follow. Those who hated difference erased it and faded into gray. A small number who rejected hatred chose isolation of their own.

  So for him, at that “final moment,” it never occurred to him that so many people had been living intertwined, filling each other’s gaps, in streets where he had scarcely seen a single person for years. He had never seen anyone install or repair a smelter or a heater. Manufacturers sent update files periodically; Wilson or other AIs received them and carried out maintenance and repairs on their own, choosing the deepest hours of his sleep. By his generation, the internet and AI had existed since the beginning, and thanks to the labor they replaced, people rarely encountered actual crowds. Only when someone died did people gather—for processing, for ritual. So when people were gathered in the village, he sensed a death. There was no fall. That day, he decided not to go down.

  He remembered faces from the group that had emerged into the bright streets, consumed by anxiety—wearing anarchism T-shirts, wielding baseball bats, playing at being vigilantes. If someone were to call that scene sufficiently anarchistic, he could hardly find an argument against it. Still, he found it genuinely strange, even now, that someone had deliberately chosen to wear a T-shirt with the word “ANARCHISM” boldly printed across the chest.

  His algorithm was spinning in place.

  On the brink of the final moment, countless people lay strewn across the streets in disarray. At the same time, they were scattered so densely that it would be impossible to describe them as gathered at all. If sex were to be defined as one person thrusting abruptly into another at a fixed rhythm, only to be endlessly expelled, then the sight of that flesh was the totality of all such deprivation.

  Even as the anarchism T-shirts smashed signposts and heating units in the alleys, no one paid them any attention. Under normal circumstances, the appearance of vigilantes would have sent people fleeing into their homes or at least pretending to hide in dark, damp alleys. That way, the vigilantes might have salvaged some sense of success in their rebellion. Unfortunately, no one did. People merely turned their heads briefly, then faced forward again as if it meant nothing at all, continuing their immediate violations. At first, the anarchism T-shirts were confused, but soon they scattered and joined in, one by one. No eyes met. Only blurred gazes, vacant expressions, mouths hanging open.

  Replaying the memory of that mass—interwoven into a single body with no room to stand—he recalled one anarchism T-shirt caught in a narrow, poorly lit alley where foot traffic was scarce. In retrospect, even the anarchism T-shirts had needed to band together just to posture, and individually they were nothing more than frightened cats. No matter how they bared their teeth and displayed hostility, anxiety only became clearer the more one tried to hide it. Inevitably, the anarchism T-shirts were fully absorbed into the mass, while the torn-away remnants rotted at the edge of the beach.

  He was bewildered by this algorithm, projected in sequence. Independent of his will, the algorithm—anchored in his numbness—cranked itself chaotically inside his head.

  “Here we go again.”

  But he could not refuse.