---=Chapter 1: Comeuppance for My Life of Procrastination---=

Humanity has an evolved sense of our own mortality. We're always on high alert, looking for anything that might be dangerous. Ideally, we would then avoid the danger, yet, in a fit of rebellion against the hubris of sentience, we often fling ourselves straight into that danger instead.

The point is, we always thought we'd see our end coming. Even if it was too late and our collective concern was too weak, we believed we'd be able to point at the asteroid or bomb or robot or god or disease and identify our killer. And maybe there were those out there who knew what would happen and didn't share or weren't heard. From what I could tell, nobody had a fucking clue what was going on, and we were all going to die.

For better or worse, Silicon Valley, everything from San Jose to San Francisco, is now an inland ocean extending a hundred miles east. It began with an explosion in some business park; glowing green smoke began to billow up and around the area. The luminous smoke didn't spread quickly, but more kept coming until it rolled forward like a dense cloud bank.

People overtaken by the smoke didn't come back out. Nothing did, not even sound. It spread for a few blocks, then began to rotate and churn, forming a slowly-turning column of ethereal smoke.

The strange vortex was barricaded off, and the surrounding areas were evacuated. Black government vans and people in hazmat suits swooped in to take over quarantine and examination of the site, and the talking heads of the news-media discussed the potentially dangerous chemicals raining down across the area. They spoke of the danger of the silicon elites and their god complexes or the tragedy of the lives lost in those first hours. For them, the danger seemed distant, hypothetical, and contained.

They were wrong.

What went up eventually came down.

Over the course of the day, more and more glowing green smoke rose into the sky and spread out, rotating back west as it reached the mountains. When it came down, it came down slow and dense. Glowing green wisps of smoke or fog swirled together to create a giant vortex a hundred miles wide. The swirling haze that defined the eye of the vortex formed a thin, slowly moving wall only a few meters thick. The currents moved like molasses, and the air was barely disturbed by it. The only sense of danger came from the stillness and silence as it lowered to the ground like some sort of sci-fi barrier. Its slow descent gave people time to evacuate the area, but people were more curious than afraid.

Despite warnings to avoid the glowing green gas, people stood on either side watching as it lowered; some even stood directly beneath it.

Their deaths sparked the panic.

Silent bodies began to collapse to the ground, heads vaporized or eaten by caustic haze in a moment. Some of the smarter dumb-asses only lost hands, but their screams of pain worked just as well to inspire panicked epiphany. Here and there, people dove under the lowering vortex to join family and friends or escape being trapped inside. However, most people backed away from the haze in learned fear. Then the vortex finished lowering, and everyone held their breath—waiting for the other shoe to drop.

For a month, there was nothing from inside the vortex. Zero communication of any kind made it out. For a month, the vortex slowly churned.

With a large perimeter across varied terrain, it wasn't easy to keep secure. So, no one was surprised when people began to find ways around cordons to poke and prod the green haze. This led to more lost limbs, but it also meant that people had a chance to experiment on it, to get measurements and answers, or so was the thought.

After a month, there were still no answers. No one was able to even collect a sample. The vortex haze ignored physics and defied reason as it ate anything it touched in a moment, leaving no trace. Or so they reported. The experts kept saying that it was too early to know what it was with any certainty. Which didn't stop random pundits from chiming in to give their opinions.

Soon a new problem was noticed; green clouds started to expand from the vortex's base, spreading out in the upper atmosphere and beginning to blanket the world. It wasn't just religious zealots crying that the end was near; astrophysicists and climate scientists also sounded urgent alarms. Nations met in open and secret to discuss the quickly closing sky. Fingers were pointed and fists shaken, but there were no new wars, at least.

No one knew if the vortex around Silicon Valley would ever stop, but a week ago, it finally lifted. Raised right back into the sky, every bit as slow as it had lowered. But the green clouds didn't disperse. They churned with eddies of light that flickered and danced like ceaseless and silent lightning. Below the angry sky, ocean water poured in to fill the shallow sea where cities and lives had once been. There was no sign of anything above sea level and no explanation for what happened to everything and everyone that had been there. The turbulence of the newborn sea made it impossible to search at first, so even from the start, there was little hope of finding any survivors among the millions lost. Not so

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much as a single body was found.

Despite the catastrophic loss, the tragedy and shock brought hope as well. Hope that the glowing clouds covering the world would also soon vanish, and we could all go back to living our lives.

They didn't. And we didn't.

A few days later, smaller vortexes, a mile or three across, began to fall on population centers around the world. GPS and Satellite communication had stopped working as the green clouds engulfed the world. As vortexes lowered on cities, transoceanic cables were cut, severing network hubs until the internet could be considered sporadic at best.

With the spread of the green haze overhead, the atmosphere had also stopped reflecting most radio waves. Ham-radios, often relied on in times of emergency, had stopped working beyond a few miles.

Some websites still worked, depending on where you lived, but broken links were everywhere, and whole sites kept failing. There were forums dedicated to tracking the fall of internet titans.

Between doom-scrolling through one of the last working internet forums and downloading as many survival how-to's as I could find, I was also packing. My roommate and I were joining his parents at a cabin "until it all blows over." It seemed pretty unlikely any of this would simply "blow over." Even if nothing else were to be destroyed, some of the most populous and consequential cities were already gone. Jon's Parents weren't my favorite people, but they had the cabin in the dense and food-rich forest, so I'd have to remember to hold my tongue.

The truth was, things would never blow over. The world would never again be the one I knew. Shitty as it could be, I didn't want to watch society eat itself to survive. So I'd go live in a cabin with people who acted like it was their job to judge my life. They may not have been my parents, but I'd known them since I was ten, and they had always acted like they needed to be—they thought my real parents were fucking it up.

They weren't especially wrong.

In reality, the only one I actually considered family was Jon. We'd been brothers in all but blood since we met. When we started hanging out all the time, his parents teased him for having a "girlfriend." Even back then, I already knew who I was, and Jon didn't question it when I told him I couldn't be his girlfriend because I wasn't a girl. There was some hormone-driven confusion on his part during high school that required me to kick his ass, but other than that, we'd always been brothers.

"Dammit-Sam, put down your phone and look out a window. We gotta go." Jon said as he walked into the apartment.

In my room, I lowered my phone in exasperation. "I'm packing. Why? What's going on outside?" I really was packing too, but I'd also just found a pdf titled "Stone Age to Industrial Age, a Survivalist How-To."

"There's a vortex circling the town; we gotta go," Jon said, poking his head into my room. "Come on, grab what you can't live without, and let's go."

"Shit," I said, scrambling to my feet and stuffing things haphazardly into my bags. We'd been planning on heading out tonight after Jon's last shift. Now my timetable, such as it was, had been scrapped.

Jon looked at me with confusion. "Okay, I need to grab my stuff real quick; it'll take 2 seconds, but first, what are you wearing?"

I snorted despite myself. I'd forgotten that I was wearing a tinfoil hat. "Look, I've been downloading a lot of survivalist literature, and the overlap between that and conspiracy shit is not small, so it fit my mood. And yeah, grab your stuff; I'll meet you at your car."

"It's still at the station, so we're taking my patrol car; it's parked out front."

"Uh, isn't that kind of stealing?"

"Technically, I'm still on duty. Besides, I'm basically saving taxpayer property. Now, chop-chop."

I shrugged. "Works for me."

I hoisted up my bags a minute later and glanced around, searching for anything I'd missed. There was a lot I wanted to take, but time was limited, and there was no way I wouldn't find things to regret about this moment anyway. My world was shattering, and my heart was desperate to sink, but my world had shattered before, and I was still here. I took a breath and blanked my mind, refusing to acknowledge the coming heartache. It was time to go.

Jon came down the stairs of the apartment behind me. He had three bags draped over his person and a box of what looked like random shit he'd scooped off counters and tables. "One of us isn't taking this seriously," He said, looking at my two bags.

"I had only just started packing. I guess I finally got some comeuppance for my life of procrastination." I sighed dramatically.

The green vortex was hard to make out against the matching green of the clouds, but squinting, I could barely see the barrier's edge. It was still high up in the air, but it was hard to tell how high. Above any of the local 10 and 20-story high-rises by far. But beyond that was hard to gauge. The vortexes ranged in size, and I couldn't tell if it was close or large.

"I can't help wondering what we're forgetting," Jon said.

"It's the end of the world. I imagine we'll run out of everything eventually anyway—if we aren't destroyed by the haze first."

Jon made a face. "We can't just give up, though."

"Sure, but that doesn't mean we can't accept there are things beyond our control. Sometimes all you can do is grin and give life the finger while it fucks you over."

"Good Lord, Sam."

"Just 'Sam' is fine," I quipped.

"When my parents end up killing you, I'm the one that'll get stuck burying your body, just so you know."

"I'd have it no other way. Have you heard from them?" Jon was close with his parents despite their judgmental attitude, maybe because of it. He was pretty much their perfect son, what he let them see anyway.

"No, not since yesterday. My phone didn't have great service even before the haze; at this point, it's basically just a solitaire game."

"You wanna try mine?" I asked.

Jon shook his head. "They're probably already at the cabin; almost no chance they have service either. Besides, we'll be there in a few hours." Jon closed the trunk of the car after loading up most of the bags. He handed me a plastic bag he'd kept out.

"Can't have a road trip without snacks," he said as if I would argue.

I snorted and held up the backpack I'd kept out, "Dude, who do you think you're talking to?"