May 1st
When I woke up on the day the world ended, the sun was high in the sky. I had to blink my eyes several times before the scene around me came into focus. The leather sofa beneath me smelled of vodka, and the lights were still off. Carlos must have still been asleep.
Groaning in discomfort, I pulled myself to a seated position and leaned heavily against the cushion behind my back. My bones and muscles were sore due to my strange sleeping position, but I felt no nausea or dizziness. I silently thanked God that I very rarely suffered from hangovers.
I was sitting on that alcohol-drenched leather sofa when it happened.
[SYSTEM INTEGRATION IN THIRTY MINUTES]
A large blue text box appeared in front of my eyes. When I swiveled my eyes from side to side, it flew through the air to keep its place in the center of my vision as if it was a physical object. I moved my eyes to make the blue text box collide with the sofa, but it stopped moving before it crashed.
Curious, I move my hand forward to touch the blue box. Much to my shock, my hand actually made contact with the floating rectangle. It felt like the smooth wood of a clipboard.
Clearly, I was hallucinating, though the typical markers of my hallucinations were not present. I was not wearing black gloves, and my silver watch was still fastened securely on my left wrist. I wasn’t supposed to hallucinate at times like this. Shaking my head, I closed my eyes tightly.
One… two… three.
When I opened my eyes, the big blue text box was still there. It remained there for a few more seconds before it suddenly shrank in size like it was being minimized into another tab.
Tab? What was I thinking!? I wasn’t a computer.
With fear and worry clouding my mind, I walked to my dark blue sedan parked out on the road in front of Carlos’s house. The car’s lights flashed as I clicked the “unlock” button on my key fob, and I swung open the door leading to the passenger’s seat. I used the car’s key to unlock the glovebox and looked inside.
Inside of the glovebox, there was a small pill bottle marked “Risperidone” and a high-capacity handgun held in a small holster clipped to the interior. I quickly removed the bottle from the glovebox and popped a pill in my mouth. The pills wouldn’t solve my problem in the short term, but the fact that I was suffering from a new hallucination meant that I should really get back on the medication. Sure, the side-effects were bad, but I was clearly losing my grasp on reality.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
I put the pill bottle in my pocket and locked the glovebox. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea for me to flash a gun in the middle of a Chapel Hill suburb. As I looked around at the green pine trees around me, I sighed at the thought that my mental health was so clearly deteriorating. I must have been playing too many video games for my hallucinations to manifest in such a way.
Leaning against my car, I thought about the hallucination. It was so life-like, and my usual technique to disperse the hallucination - which had never failed before - failed to end it. For my own edification, I took my phone out of my pocket and navigated to Reddit. I had little hope that the blue box was anything more than a hallucination, but I had to confirm that I was the only one who saw it.
There was nothing on the front page, so I went to the search box and typed “blue box.” When I filtered the posts by “most recent,” the results shocked me. A minute before, someone had created a post that confirmed my suspicion.
“Did anyone else just see a blue textbox in real life?”
My breath caught in my throat as I scrolled down. With every passing second, another post was created, and dozens of comments were written. I wasn’t the only one who saw the blue textbox. In fact, considering the multiple different languages in the replies, it seemed like everyone in the world saw that message.
I began to take the message much more seriously. From the recesses of my mind, thousands of pages of LitRPGs and GameLit stories appeared. I recalled the subgenre name where such a message was sent to everyone in the world: System Apocalypse.
The novelty of the situation forced me to rely on those stories for information. From what I could recall, “System Integration” could mean many things, but it was never good for the people of Earth. In those stories, the pre-existing power structures never survived, and billions of lives were always lost.
Something was about to go very wrong. I couldn’t even be sure that the Earth would still exist in thirty minutes, but I wanted to be prepared, at least. Checking my watch, I saw that it was 10:35 A.M. The message must have been sent at 10:30 A.M., and System Integration would occur at 11:00 A.M.
I quickly got into the driver’s seat and turned my car on. Certain that the worst would soon come to pass, I floored the accelerator and sped off toward the closest supermarket. There wasn’t nearly enough time for me to get home in twenty-five minutes, and I had no particular desire to do so.
As I drove, I sent several messages to Carlos, Elizabeth, and John through as many forms of media as I could manage. I pinged the Discord and called them all. Liz was the only one to respond to my call.
“What do you want?” Liz said groggily once she picked up.
“Something is going to happen at eleven,” I said. “You’ll probably be attacked by something. Arm yourself with whatever you can find.”
“What!?”
“Sorry, no time. If we lose communication, meet up at Carlos’s place.”
Leaving Liz with that disturbing message, I hung up. I really didn’t have any time to talk. There was only fifteen minutes until 11:00 A.M., and I had just arrived at a supermarket on the edge of Chapel Hill.
I got out of my car and began to carry out an age-old American tradition: panic buying.