The colossal roar vanished. One moment, the air was screaming with the sound of shifting earth and shattering glass, and the next, there was nothing. The only sound left was the fine dust settling back down onto the pavement and the faint, wrong echo of an impossible silence.
Ajibade Street looked as though a giant hand had squeezed it. The streetlights were burst casings, but there was no smoke, only a shimmering residual heat. Buildings still stood, yet the concrete had strange metallic gleams, and some corners were subtly warped, displaying a new geometry that hurt the eyes. A black car nearby, the same one Julian had been in, was hovering an inch or two above the ground, gently rocking before the pull of gravity slowly and reluctantly returned it to the asphalt with a soft, final sigh.
Victry woke first. Her head felt hollow, and the pulse in her throat was too loud, a frantic, isolated drumbeat. She realized she was pressed against the rough texture of the pavement, and the ground beneath her palms felt strangely soft, almost yielding, as though the earth itself was breathing a slow, deep breath.
She sat up slowly, her muscles protesting the sudden stop. The sachet water she had bought was gone, lost somewhere in the dust. Around her, people were motionless, scattered like fallen dominoes—some unconscious, others simply blinking in stunned disbelief, their faces streaked with dust. The air was thick with glowing motes of dust, drifting like embers in slow motion under the fading orange afterlight, creating a haunting, eerie beauty.
Julian moved next, pushing himself up on one elbow. He checked his own body, surprised that the blinding pain he had expected never arrived. His limbs felt unnaturally light, like he was still floating slightly above the ground. He looked over at Victry, the stranger who had fallen into his arms only moments ago, and who now seemed to glow faintly under the last vestiges of the impossible light.
Their voices were hushed, fragile things in the overwhelming stillness.
"Are you hurt" Julian asked, his voice rough and low.
"I I don't know" Victry replied. She raised her hands, turning them over in the soft, fading glow. A network of faint light traced her veins beneath her skin, a soft, golden lattice work that quickly vanished.
Julian watched her, his professional instincts warring with the awe in his chest. "You were in the center of it. Whatever it was."
"Was" she whispered.
She slowly took in the city around them. It was utterly unrecognizable. The few remaining trees shimmered faintly with residual energy. The streetlights pulsed like strange, new veins in the urban crust. The sharp smell of metal and ozone hung heavy in the atmosphere.
The laws of physics were clearly gone on vacation. The dust hung in the air far longer than it should have, and small pieces of debris drifted gently before finally settling. In the distance, the scattered city lights began to flicker with a strange, regular rhythm, as if the city itself was trying to take a hesitant breath.
Then, an anomaly: a cracked billboard for a mobile phone company on the corner slowly, almost imperceptibly, folded back together along its split seam, the metal whining softly for a moment before freezing again. It was as if the underlying system of the world was quickly repairing its immediate damage.
People were beginning to stir now. A few cried out in hushed fear, some instinctively fell to their knees in prayer, and others fumbled for their phones. But the phones were dead, their screens refusing to light up. Then, one screen blinked to life, displaying not a battery icon, but a line of alien symbols.
Victry looked up at the immense, orange-tinted sky. There, stretched across the distant horizon, she saw a colossal translucent digital text. It was faint but undeniable:
"World Reconfiguration: 3% Complete."
Julian's eyes, trained to recognize patterns and data, narrowed. He instantly grasped the terrifying scale of the event. This was no natural quake, no explosion. This was an engineered event.
They both began to hear faint, cold mechanical voices in their minds, sounds that bypassed their ears and vibrated directly against their thoughts. At first, they both thought it must be a terrible hallucination brought on by shock.
Victry heard a voice, calm and detached, echo in the silence of her skull:
"System calibration active… Child of Destiny, synchronization pending."
Julian heard a similar, equally cold voice:
"Gravity field expansion detected. New parameter: stabilizer class candidate."
Their eyes briefly glowed—Victry's a brilliant, fierce gold, Julian's a deep, contemplative violet—before the light faded again.
They didn't speak of the voices, but they knew, instinctively, that they were linked. Julian felt a powerful, stabilizing pull toward Victry, a certainty that her presence was the only thing keeping his suddenly lighter body grounded.
The stillness was shattered by a sound they recognized: Sean, Julian's driver, groaning and then shouting from behind the black car. He was terrified, his voice thin and high. The sound of human panic broke the eerie peace that had settled over the street.
Then, from the horizon, a spectacular orange aurora formed, running like fire across the darkening sky—a global pulse circling the entire world.
Everywhere across the city, faint grids of light streamed upward from the earth, creating enormous geometric patterns that pulsed like vast data paths. The voice, the same vast voice from before, echoed faintly and calmly:
"System calibration initiated. Remain still. Harmonic alignment in progress."
Some people screamed again and began to run wildly through the dust. Others simply stood or fell to their knees, weeping softly. As the air thrummed again with the quiet, overwhelming power of the reconfiguration, Victry unconsciously gripped Julian's arm, her fingers tightening on his sleeve.
The pulse faded entirely. The fierce orange hue softened, yielding to a deep, natural twilight blue.
The city looked fragile, almost impossibly delicate, but it was profoundly alive. Above them, the stars were far too bright, seeming closer, as if the entire dome of the sky had descended to watch them.
For the first time since the transformation, Victry and Julian truly looked at each other—dust-streaked, exhausted, two people half glowing under the ordinary starlight. Their breathing slowly synced, and the sharp edge of adrenaline finally began to recede.
She whispered, her voice barely a breath of air, "What just happened to us"
He looked at her, his expression a mixture of fear and profound, scholarly awe.
"I think… the world woke up."