When the world ended, I was leaving the library.
It was around 9:30 in the morning—I say 'around' because I overslept and left my apartment in too much of a hurry to remember my watch and I wasn't going to remove my mittens in order to check my phone. I stopped in at the university's library to return a biography on Monet that I had been using as research for my next book. I was focused on fixing my scarf, the twilled gift of my mother's radio-play evenings, which had slipped and left my neck exposed. The back of my mind was wringing its hands about how far behind I was on the book and how was I going to make deadline and also I didn't really have enough time to grab breakfast before I needed to get to class and did I remember to bring my lecture notes—
The library and every other building around the quad vanished into the ground. They were there one moment and then they were gone, leaving only a churned and broken footprint.
I stared stupidly.
After a few seconds the callous wind, uncaring of my despair, chomped at the exposed bit of skin around my eyes. I am an Icelandic winter, it whispered in metaphor. You shall not ignore me.
The buildings' vanishment was so strange, so bizarre, so horrifying, that it simply bounced off my brain. My thoughts were calm, even detached.
I went back up to where the library had been and inspected the wreckage. It was a pit six meters deep, the bottom tumbled dirt with no trace of concrete or paint or any evidence of humanity's efforts. The edges of the pit were rough and semi-collapsed dirt. There should have been severed water lines spraying everywhere, but there weren't; had the pipes been collapsed too?
I scanned carefully, looking for survivors (as ridiculous as the idea was), or bodies, or blood, or anything. There were none, nor was there anywhere that a person might conceivably have been buried but still accessible.
There had been dozens of people in that building. They were all dead. Instantly and without a trace. No blood, no fuss, just...gone. Mrs Olafsdóttir, the eighty-year-old great-grandmother who worked at the information desk and always wore sweaters knitted by hand. Professor Hauksson who taught political science...he had been reading at one of the tables as I walked out. We had chatted for a minute but I had hurried off because I needed to get to class.
What should I do? There was no one to rescue, no fires to extinguish, nothing to be done to mitigate the disaster. I needed to find people, see who had survived and plan our next steps.
I walked around the undisturbed quad, sticking to the shoveled-out sidewalks instead of cutting across like I would have when there wasn't a meter of snow on the ground. The sidewalk dipped down a hill and through a screen of trees to the parking lot where my trusty, rusty, aging Skoda patiently waited. I would crank the heater up and head back to—
I came through the trees and looked down on an empty lot. There had been half a dozen cars there when I pulled in twenty minutes earlier. Now there were half a dozen rectangles of bare ground scattered amongst the steadily-accumulating snow. One of those rectangles was where my Skoda had been.
I raised my eyes, looking out over the winding road that led back into town. Or, rather, where town had absented itself.
In disaster movies there is always smoke rising, small fires flickering amongst the rubble. Not here. Here there was simply an absence of human structures. The roads were there, and the parking lots, but not one single building.
A voice spiked into my brain, robotic yet somehow masculine.
It wasn't speaking Icelandic, yet I was able to understand it. Also, if the sourceless voice that wasn't coming through my ears hadn't been enough evidence of a hallucinatory experience, the words it spoke appeared floating in front of me.
Surviving humans, take note.
Per Syndicate rules, subsection 543 of the Precious Elemental Reserves Code, having failed to file a proper appeal for the mineral and elemental rights within 50 Solars of first contact, your planet has been successfully seized and is currently being mined of all requested elemental deposits by the assigned planetary regent.
Every interior of your world has been crushed and all raw materials—organic and inanimate—are in the process of being mined for the requested elements.
Per the Mined Material Reclamation act along with subsection 35 of the Indigenous Planetary Species Protection Act, any surviving humans will be given the opportunity to reclaim their lost matter. The Borant Corporation, having been assigned regency over this solar system, is allowed to choose the manner of this reclamation, and they have chosen option 3, also known as the 18-Level World Dungeon. The Borant Corporation retains all rights to broadcast, exploit, and otherwise control all aspects of the World Dungeon and will remain in control as long as they adhere to Syndicate regulations regarding world resource reclamation.
Upon successful completion of level 18 of the World Dungeon, regency of this planet will revert to the successor.
A Syndicate neutral observer AI—myself—has been created and dispatched to this planet to supervise the creation of the World Dungeon and to ensure all the rules and regulations are properly followed.
Please pay careful attention to the following information as it will not be repeated.
Per the Indigenous Planetary Species Protection Act, all remaining materials—estimated to be 99.999999% of the sifted matter—is currently being repurposed for the subterranean World Dungeon. The first level of this dungeon will open approximately 18 seconds after the end of this announcement. The first-level entrances will be open for exactly one human hour and one hour only. Once the entrances are closed, you may no longer enter. If you enter, you may not leave until you have either completed all 18 levels of the World Dungeon or if you meet certain other requirements.
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If you choose not to enter the World Dungeon, you will have to sustain yourself upon the surface of your planet, and this may be the last communication you receive during your lifetime. All previously-processed matter and elements are forfeit. However, you are free to mine and utilize any remaining and naturally-occurring resources for your own benefit. The Borant Corporation wishes you luck and thanks you for the opportunity.
For those who wish to exercise their right of resource reclamation, please take note.
There will be 150,000 level-one entrances added to the world. These entrances will be marked and easy to spot. If you so choose to enter the first level of the dungeon, you will have five rotations of your planet to find the next level down. There will be 75,000 entrances to level two. There will be 37,500 entrances to level three. 18,750 to level 4. 9,375 entrances to level 5 and 4,688 entrances to level 6. The number of available entrances to the next lower level will continue to decrease by half, rounding up until the 18th level, which will only have two entrances and a single exit.
Crawlers who choose to enter the World Dungeon must find a staircase and descend to the next level down before the allotted time is up for that level. Once the time has passed, the level will be reclaimed and all remaining matter in the level, organic and inanimate, will be forfeit. Generated loot and other matter that is not gathered and claimed may be placed in the Syndicate market.
Each lower level will have a longer period of reclamation. Additional rules come into play once any crawlers descend to level 10. These rules will be explained when and if any crawlers reach this level.
If you so choose to enter the World Dungeon, it is highly recommended you immediately find and utilize a tutorial guild. Multiple tutorial guilds will be seeded throughout the dungeon on levels 1 through 3.
If you have any additional questions, or you wish to file an appeal, such requests must be submitted in writing directly to the closest Syndicate office.
Thank you for being a part of the Syndicate. Have a great day.
What.
I stood, staring dumbly out at the desolation of my world, for what must have been eighteen seconds although it felt like an eternity. Suddenly there was a column of light, so bright that it shamed the hesitant and watery morning sunlight that oozed through overcast and snow-shedding skies. It speared out of the sky, striking the ground perhaps two or three kilometers away and standing there, as constant a beacon as any lighthouse of stone and brick.
I looked around, I wasn't sure for what. For the world to make sense again? For someone to appear who understood all this? For the joke to end?
None of that happened, so I set off towards the light. It was the most likely place to find other people and I very badly needed to find other people right now.
The snow was piling up and the miseries with it. My breath had soaked the wool of my scarf, leaving my face clammy. My nose had a little icicle of snot hanging off it no matter how many times I brushed it away. On top of that, it had been a while since I did any serious walking during heavy snow; I jogged five mornings a week, but I didn't go in weather this bad and I didn't weigh myself down with coat and hat and scarf and mittens and snowboots when I went. Soon enough I was sweating under my heavy clothes, but loosening them let the wind bite into now-damp skin and left me shivering until I buttoned up again, at which point the cycle started over. I ignored it all as best I could and hurried. The voice had been clear that the light would only be there for an hour and I didn't know if people would stay in the area after the hour was up and the beacon shut off.
It was still on when I arrived and sure enough, there were a handful of people gathered around it. Thankfully, I knew one of them.
"Eva!" I called out, waving as I stumbled up. "You're here!"
Eva was a professor at the university, like me. She wasn't much like me in any other way. She was only 153 centimeters to my 166 yet she had a presence that made me feel like the short one. I taught art history, she taught economics, and despite having a year of seniority on her I was always assigned to the intro classes for new students while she taught almost exclusively upper-level classes. We had lunch occasionally and whenever she was required to teach the intro class she would wax angrily on about the students and their first-year foolishness—under the table awkward hand-holding and footsie with new sweethearts, late to class, falling asleep during lectures because they hadn't learned not to stay up all night drinking. The usual things that young people did when given their first taste of independence.
She looked up when I called to her, breaking off the argument she'd been having with a much taller man who was wearing a green apron over his coat, with a nametag that said he was Lars. A teenage couple stood nearby, listening but not speaking.
"Katia! What are you doing here?" Eva demanded.
That pulled me up short. I gestured vaguely around, taking in the churned-up earth of what had previously been a block of shops. The light tower stood guard over the site of a bakery/cafe I drove past every day on the way to work. I should have been able to smell fresh bread and seen the welcoming door to the seating area. Instead, I smelled only snow and saw only a massive hole in the ground with an enormous staircase leading down.
"I...I figured there would be people here?"
"Well, you're not wrong. I'm explaining to these idiots that we need to go down into the dungeon before it closes in..." She glanced at her wrist. "Seventeen minutes." She looked over at Lars, the man in the apron. "Unless you think that somehow you can survive up here with no shelter, no food, and no tools? Brilliant outdoorsman and wilderness expert, are you?"
"We have a duty," Lars snapped. "There must be other survivors, probably some who need our help. Even if there aren't, you heard the voice. It said that there would only be 75,000 entrances to level two and that we would have only five days to find one. If it was telling the truth about this..." He gestured around, clearly trying to find a word vast enough to encompass what had happened. "This destruction being a world-wide event then 75,000 stairwells spread across the surface of the earth means there almost certainly won't be any near here."
"There's an entrance!" Eva shouted, stamping her foot and pointing at the column of light. "Right there! An entrance! Whoever did this, they obviously want us to go through this dungeon of theirs. The stairs down will be near the stairs in."
"You don't know that!" Lars said, his voice rising in turn. "Besides, they said that there were additional rules that would be explained if anyone made it to the tenth level. That means they expect no one will."
"Listen—" Eva stopped, biting her words off short and shaking her head in annoyance. "Fine. Stay here and die in the cold. You two, are you coming?" She tossed her chin towards the young couple who had been standing to the side listening silently to the shouting match. They stood together, arms around each other and hugging tight so that they touched at shoulder and hip and thigh.
They looked at one another hesitantly, then back at Eva. The boy shook his head, speaking for both of them when he said, "No, we'll stay h—"
"Fine!" Eva threw her hands in the air. "Katia, let's go." She strode off towards the light-bathed stairs.
I looked at Lars and the unnamed couple, shrugged apologetically, and followed Eva down the stairs into the world dungeon.