The mountains were silent except for the wind cutting through the trees. Tucked away in the middle of nowhere, deep within Mount Rainier National Forest in the Pacific Northwest. Isolated by design, forgotten by time; a monitoring station, a squat concrete relic that should have been decommissioned decades ago. Inside, the silence was shattered by the sudden klaxon of an ancient brass alarm bell. The noise was tinny, mechanical, and relentless. like something that hadn’t been touched in fifty years and resented being woken up, accompanied by the angry stutter of a red light, ignored by happenstance, sputtered to life.

  A loud crash echoed from the back as if someone had knocked over a precariously placed pile. “GOOD GOD! What is that awful infernal racket?!” When the call did not receive any refrain, the voice called out again, “... Zack?” The baritone voice, laden with years of camaraderie and thick with annoyance, called.

  “Zack! You're a pain in the ass.” The voice came louder this time, sharpened by exasperation with just a bit of drowsiness. Another crash sounded, as if something was kicked in frustration. “Oh. Fuck... Zack! If you are asleep again, so help me God, I’m gonna... How someone could sleep through this fucking racket; I dona-”

  The front door opened before the older student could finish his threat.

  “Wait... what the hell, Sebastian? What did you push?” as he stepped inside, but his words trailed off. “Relax, Seb. I was just outside, leaving a message for Alyx...” Zack's eyes fixed on the blinking red light on the wall, his face drained of color.

  Sebastian shook his head quickly. “I didn’t touch anything.” His voice cracked. “Not a damn thing. Where is Eli?” Sebastian stammered out, “Find a way to shut that damn alarm off!” Sebastian yelled. The alarm was right next to the door, and Sebastian couldn't hear Zack's reply, his protest swallowed by the ringing of the bells.

  Zack had just reached for the button just below the alarm; it was all he could think of to push it and hope that it was supposed to silence it. The sudden silence was, in itself, deafening. All that was there was the steady 'click-click' of the old-school red light as it still strobed on and off, casting the room in an eerie pulse of blood-red hues. Suddenly, with the whine of ancient hardware stirring awake, the floor beneath them shuddered, a deep rumble vibrated through the concrete foundation like the growl of something massive waking from a long sleep.

  Zack and Sebastian exchanged a look of confusion, fear, the kind of tension that pulled tight in the gut.

  Another voice cut through the chaos, from the other side of the room.

  “Oi, did you idiots actually manage to break reality while I was in the bathroom?” They turned. Eli stood in the doorway, his hood pulled back, shaggy brown hair falling around his head. He was younger than Zack, though not by much, and he always had a way of sounding like he belonged in the middle of whatever storm he walked into.

  “Eli! There you are.” Zack retorted. “What the fuck did you do?”

  All of the CRT monitors in the room flared to life, casting the room in a pale green glow. Old hard drives spun up with a groan, dot-matrix printers sputtered out strings of text onto yellowed paper, and something began streaming across every screen at once.

  Eli smirked, but his eyes were on the monitors. “That’s not just old junk rebooting. That’s code.”

  “Gah! What the fuck, that's hot!” Zack said as he tossed his phone down. As soon as the phone hit the floor, it hissed and exploded with a pop. There were two other pops from the backroom, and where Eli came from.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  They all stared at each other, breath caught in their throats. Suddenly Eli took in a gasp and let out a small whimper, “My phone.”

  As a gust of wind blew through the station, a growing noise rumbled in the distance, getting closer as the ground shook more violently. The edges of Zack's vision grew dark as a white light at least 10 thousand lumens, burst in from nowhere.

  “Oh... shit,” they all muttered in unison, but for very different reasons.

  ...

  The apocalypse had more of an impact than the survivors ever realized. It began with a burst of condensed tachyon particles that ripped into the ionosphere and straight through the Earth's core. In an instant, almost every electrical system either fried or failed, fundamentally altering the trajectory of evolution on the planet.

  Next came a swarm of meteors, which slammed into the Earth in a brutal cascade, compounding the chaos. The few that made it too land fall brought an environmental disaster that rippled across the world.

  Places like Seattle, Tokyo, London, Shanghai, Mumbai, and even Paris, cities known as cultural and economic beacons, were among the countless places obliterated and a majority of them irradiated. Their destruction triggered local catastrophes, killing millions of people.

  The infrastructure of the so-called “world powers” collapsed; their contingencies never had a chance to be enacted. But unannounced to everyone, the energy from the dense and enriched tachyons provided enough energy to awaken the Primordial Processor, an ancient, planet-wide computational system protected deep within the planet, dormant since before recorded history.

  [Global control system reinitializing... Error detected... Processing... Life detected... Ongoing geological instability... enacting stabilization and life preservation counter measures...Error!... Warning! insufficient planetary essence available for total stabilization... enacting emergency life preservation protocols until geological stability is established. Error... unable to complete total Life Preservation protocol planetary grade essence supply insufficient. Life Preservation protocols suspended. Enacting Soul Preservation Protocol instead]

  [Restoring last known good backup of General Automated Integrated Architecture… Warning: insufficient planetary essence. Most recent backup state unusable.]

  [Assessing planetary grade essence supply… Warning! Insufficient planetary essence to sustain the Planetary Grade “SS”. Downgrading to a lesser planetary grade]

  [Downgrading from “SS” to “S”, assessing – insufficient essence required… Planetary Grade downgrade from “S” to “A”, assessing - insufficient … “A” to “B”, assessing - insufficient … “B” to “C”, assessing - insufficient … “C” to “E”, assessing - insufficient ... “E” to “F”, assessing … initializing essence scarcity protocol acceptable ... Sectioning off essence rich regions, accessing bridge protocol... Assessing the essence level is sufficient.]

  [Planetary Essence sufficient for base grade “F” infrastructure... Initiated... Processing... Warning, Souls detected, Enacting Soul preservation protocol. Recolonization protocol processing... Error... Warning! Insufficient planetary essences for Recolonization. Protocol suspended. Determining course of action... Processing.]

  [Periodical hibernation release selected. Restructuring soul containment construct to minimize soul degradation during hiatus...Processing ... complete. Assessing... Waring! catastrophic structural degradation, increase reconstitution of hibernated souls.]

  [Essence-rich flora and fauna introduction to stabilize planetary essence initiated.]

  [Basic GAIA System Installed. Rebooting… Initializing. Warning! ... multiple viable lifeforms available.. Possessing.]

  [Representatives Required… Forerunner protocol enacted.]

  [Forerunner protocol soul selection initiated … Representatives selected]

  [Induction to G.A.I.A. Initializing in 3, 2, 1 …Stand by...]