The soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter
- Sophocles
Prologue
3:15PM, October 31st, 2025. Referred to as Day Zero or - depending on where you lived – also
known as D-Day, Year One, A.I.C. (after initial contact), WWLD (the world-wide lockdown),
DFT (Day of Final Transmission), the day the international community sent out an SOS. You get
the point. It was the day they arrived. Nobody had seen it coming. After all, everyone had been busy navigating the onset of another cold war. Russia was supporting Afghanistan in pushing out US troops that had occupied the nation for nearly two decades, and the Middle East was busy organizing arms to support the resistance. Canada was busy trying to get everyone to say sorry to one another and make peace. The overzealous obsession with the race to Mars had long died out, almost immediately after the an experimental spaceship holding botanical life self-imploded on its way to the red planet. If there were any stragglers that were still searching for extra-terrestrial life, they were looking in the netherworlds of the universe, not in our very own solar system.
By four in the afternoon, 45 minutes after a half of the world’s human population disappeared (literally vanished), the world imploded in on itself. Imagine going from 7.6 billion humans, to 3 billion over a TV commercial break. One moment, grandpa Dave was sipping tea in the kitchen, and the next – he was gone, along with the teacup that had been in his hands.
The more peculiar of incidents during Day Zero was that Australia vanished, completely; it was one of two islands that simply ceased to exist. The other one was Hawaii. The second strangest thing to happen was the electricity. It simply stopped working. E=MC2. The world’s most famous equation suddenly became the world’s most irrelevant. The basic laws of physics seemed to stop working within seconds, as if fundamental building bricks of the universe had suddenly altered. Japan went off the grid first. Imagine, Tokyo, the city of lights, completely dark. They were the first to have a power grid shutdown. Textbooks today say that of 192 countries, 42 of them went dark within twenty-four hours.
The third most peculiar incident of Day Zero was their arrival, and what they brought with them. Oceans that hadn’t exist before suddenly filled newfound canyons, and a new continent emerged from the seas. Religious fanatics immediately announced that they were devils’ reincarnations, messengers sent from Hell itself. Word of their arrival spread fast, and so did the fear. There were others. Others on our Earth besides us. Ones we had never met or seen before.
Economists always reference a black swan event, saying that the largest threat to the global economy was the occurrence of an unexpected incidence that could not be forecasted; one so detrimental that it could affect countries around the world. Think the black plague, 9/11, the SARS outbreak – rare, unpredictable events. Well, D-Day did more than hurt the worldwide economy. It completely it shut it down. Stock markets crashed; trade stopped. The US dollar ceased to hold any value overnight.
While some countries stood silent in shock, others jumped into action. An hour hadn’t even passed before the now non-existent United Nations Security Council got word that Pakistan and India had signed a peace treaty and had completely sealed off all their borders to the outside world, with nobody knowing why or for what purpose. A complete lockdown of two nuclear countries, communication being shut off with the outside world completely. Saudi Arabia announced the revocation of their part in a 100- billion-dollar oil deal with the West, and the US responded by lifting sanctions on Iran, with a delegation flying to the Middle East to meet with government officials immediately. The UK and France called for an emergency UNSC meeting, which none of the other permanent members attended. Russia and China immediately began militarization, with Russia retracting any previous bids for denuclearization.
The only country that didn’t do much of anything was North Korea. Apparently, their fiber-optic cable network was so outdated, that it wasn’t equipped to receive the video broadcasts that circulated the entire world before TV’s began to shut down from lack of power generation. The world became so quiet that the constant buzzing that always filled the air stopped for a suspended moment. People said, of that hour, that it was so quiet that your ears itched, aching in the absence of the white noise.
A year after Day Zero happened, Halloween was officially pushed forward a day to November 1st. It was one of those things that was non-negotiable. All the North Americans loved it and considering nobody really practiced it anymore for religious reasons (or even knew that it was connected to the Celtic festival of Samhain), it was moved around without any massive uproar. Someone important in some important government committee renamed November 1st to Halloween to allow October 31st to be a public holiday. No-one really even noticed the change. Anyone born after 1982 was none the wiser, that a new world order was taking shape. October 31st, 1982 was when a whole new power struggle began.