The Reset

It began quietly, almost without notice, like a problem with eyesight or a trick of a tired mind. Colors became slightly less bright, and reds and blues faded into lighter, sickly tones, as if the world was losing its brightness. At first, people ignored it—maybe the autumn sun was less strong this year, or maybe their eyes were just getting used to the shorter days.

Then, as the days drew closer to the election, the change became visible. The skies did not just lose their blueness; they grew dark and oppressively dense, like a great blanket crushing down on the earth. The lively city streets turned into empty boulevards of grey, their letters and shining lights fading into ghostly outlines, as though even light was fighting for existence.

Storefronts dulled, their color draining away to become bleak shades. Fashion transformed into humdrum cloth, indistinguishable from the grime coating the streets. Even the produce on their plates appeared washed out, the deep red of apples now sickly, and green vegetables shriveled to a pale grey shell. Flavor flattened, an insipidity replacing not only the hues of the world but also its essence. They whispered among themselves of something being wrong, something they could not understand. It was not just that color was fading—it was being removed, bit by bit, as if an invisible hand re-authored reality with a growing absence.

Prior to the election of the new president, the world was no longer a painting of vibrant hues but a desolate landscape of gray monochrome. The change did not come progressively; it came suddenly and ruthlessly, as though an invisible hand had robbed life of its vitality in the night. The grass did not simply die—it fell apart into minute, crumbling ash at the slightest touch. Rivers no longer shone with reflections but stood stagnant and dead, their waters dense and still, like veins without blood.

Other people tried to laugh it off as a joke, cracking, “Even fifty shades of grey is more colourful than this,” but the jokes were weak and strained, almost as if they were about to spill over into panic.

Others did not laugh. They whispered—of omens, of something old awakening, of history repeating itself in a cycle. The Cold War was back, they said, but this time there was no one to fear, no bomb to cringe from, no sirens to sound their warning. This time, the fight was against something hidden, something unspoken. The air was not the same—it was denser, thicker, and was tainted by something they could not recognize. Elderly men grasped their war medals, their hands shaking, talking about drills and underground bunkers, moments when fear ravaged society like a disease that could not be cured. But there were no bombs falling, no missiles to dread. Something worse had arrived. Something quiet. Something deadly. Churches were packed, not with piety, but desperation. People got down on their knees in the aisles, their hands clasped together so tightly in prayer that their knuckles were white. They prayed not for salvation, but an answer. For warmth. For the restoration of something as simple and ordinary as color. For the first time in history, the world was united—not by war, not politics, but a firm, shared terror.

Yet the darkness did not merely grow darker—it grew thicker, like tar, spreading over the remaining patches of warmth and hope. It was no longer merely an absence of color; it was an appetite, a void that consumed more than vision. Folks spoke in hushed, fearful tones of shadows that stirred when there was no light, and of whispers that seeped through walls where there could be no sound. The world was quiet and motionless, waiting and hoping, as though something invisible had stirred under the fabric of life, reaching out after a very long while.

As inauguration day drew near, the atmosphere became tense, with an unspoken fear that was like a cold, dense mist on the skin.

The silence was not the lack of sound—it was palpable, stretching through the streets, wrapping around doorframes, pushing into the ears of anyone who would hear. Cities were no longer busy; the rich sounds of life had become a heavy silence, as though the world itself was waiting, holding its breath for something invisible.

Even the birds, who never tire of watching what people do, had disappeared from the air. Not a bird sang in the stillness. There were no distant calls and no wings beating—just an empty sky that seemed to say that the heavens had not noticed the world beneath.

They congregated in Washington, looking hollow and lost, as though they had seen too much but understood nothing. Their eyes, which once burned with hope and ambitions, were now deep and dark like dead stars. They held on to each other, not for comfort, but because of a primitive need, as though their survival depended on the dying warmth of another human being.

Mothers clutched their children close, their hands digging into little arms as though releasing them would cause the children to be snatched away by some unseen threat. The old, frail and trembling, muttered prayers under their breath—words that they once spoke with belief, now tinged with terror, each word a plea to deities who appeared to have abandoned them many years before.

Somewhere, just beyond the crowd, a man in ruined clothes crouched over the sidewalk, writing strange symbols on the concrete in bloody fingers. He muttered quickly, his voice tangled, his breath ragged—he spoke about endings, beginnings, and doors that were never intended to be opened. His eyes flicked quickly around, seeing nothing but sensing something that was beyond the understanding of mortals.

No one moved to halt him because they also felt something weighty pressing against reality. It was an unseen but definite thing, surrounding them like a noose that constricted with every breath.

Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the stage where the new leader was supposed to appear. The countdown started.

Ten.

Nine.

Eight.

The wind whipped loudly through the empty streets.

Seven.

Six.

Five.

A child whimpered.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

Zero.

Nothing.

The President did not appear on stage. The loudspeakers made no announcement. The podium remained empty, and the air was heavy with a silence that threw the crowd into a frenzy of nervous expectation. For a moment, it felt as if time itself had paused, holding its breath for something worse to happen.

And then, suddenly, the sky tore apart—not as glass breaks softly, but with a rending of reality. A blinding white flash swept along the horizon, not lighting, but devouring everything with a burning brightness. The air screamed, quivering with a strange sound, a wail that human ears cannot detect. Those who dared to look were seared from the inside out, their pupils boiling, their minds overwhelmed by something beyond mortal comprehension. Shadows stretched impossibly long, twisting like anguished specters before they, too, were devoured by the void. Structures did not collapse—they ceased to exist, their atoms unmade in an instant. The world was no longer burning—it was being unwritten. Shrieks erupted, shrill and agonized, as individuals dropped to their knees, their hands clutching at their faces, their mouths open in wordless agony. Eyes seared in their sockets, wounded by a light that human eyes were not meant to behold. The air vibrated, humming with power, like something invisible crawling beneath the skin like a horde of invisible insects.

Phone screens flickered wildly, showing strange symbols prior to going completely black, their glass exploding in slow, tortured cracks that bit into shaking fingertips. Streetlights burst individually, their bulbs burning out in vicious sparks that settled on the empty ground. Car alarms yelped like injured beasts, screaming their last cries before throttling into unnatural quiet. All electronic gear in the flash’s reach released one final, panicky hiss before exploding into cascades of sparks, their circuits burning up, their plastic shells melting into pits of noxious, smoking wreckage. The hum of civilization didn’t merely stop—it was ripped from them, leaving instead something deeper, something ancient, something hungry. A silence that was not so much the absence of sound, but a thing in and of itself, a void, a consuming entity that pulsed like a dead heart through the empty streets, waiting for something. or someone. to answer.

While the world struggled to comprehend what had occurred, fragmented reports filtered in via faint radio transmissions, voices hardly more audible than whispers filled with incredulity. Entire cities had lost power, their skyscrapers reduced to vacant shells, dark monoliths to progress that would never again behold light.

No communication—telephone lines cut as if by ghostly hands, screens blanked out like voids, and satellites fading one by one like dying stars consumed by an endless blackness. No light—streets once ablaze with bright lights and cars moving at night were now shrouded in a profound darkness that was oppressive. No activity—houses left vacant, chairs still pushed back from meals that would never be completed, doors ajar as if expecting someone to return, coffee cups still warm but not touched by lips that would never take a sip again.

Then there was silence.

Not only an absence of noise, but silence that consumes, that digs into the bone with its claws and festers as a parasitic rot.

It didn’t just exist—instead, it grew, squirming in the air like a living thing, crawling into ears, looping around necks, weighing the chest down with an invisible load.

It wasn’t just silent—it was emptiness, a void where sound, thought, and logic did not exist. The silence was so dense, so total, it was as if the world was being pressed down by some invisible hand, humbled by something enormous and cruel.

The silence didn’t spread; it took hold, an endless void creeping like black ink on a map. Borders weren’t relevant. Oceans, mountains, continents—were gone, erased, taken. The earth where billions had lived was an empty graveyard, the sounds of its final moments hanging in the air like the final, unspoken words of a species that had simply. stopped.

Except for one location. Deep below ground, in a bunker secured behind steel and paranoia, the newly sworn-in President sat by himself, his fists balled on the cold armrests of his chair. The air was thick with the hum of life support, the only indication that anything still functioned in this barren world. The dim glow of emergency lights sent long, ethereal shadows dancing across the walls, making it seem as if he were not alone. And then the silence was broken—not by noise, but by his screen trembling violently, jerking as if it were choking, its glow throwing strange, twisted shadows across his hollow face.

The interference crackled in the bunker, like an invisible force was clawing at the edges of reality. His blank eyes reflected the frenzied tangle of fractured data, moving like a cyberdisease, curving and unwinding in disorienting forms before settling at last. And there, in the middle of the dark screen, shone one message. A message that emerged through the blackness like a whispered word from something waiting and watching.

A message intended for him alone, intended to be read here in the darkness of this make-believe tomb, where he was sitting as a ghost presiding over the burial of the world.

“The reset is complete.”

He caught his breath, and a momentary look of something hard to understand crossed his rough countenance, like a shadow of a hidden fire.

Deep in the bunker, a machine began to move, making a sharp, mechanical sound—like a breath of something old, something that had been waiting. The slow turning of gears filled the air, each turn pulling reality closer to an unavoidable end. It was not just noise; it was the end of a door closing, a destiny carving itself into the world’s foundation.

The air grew thick and choking, pressing down upon the bunker like unseen fingers tightening at the throat of being itself. The gravity of the irrevocable descended upon the bunker like the blade of an executioner’s axe, poised halfway to falling.

A thin smile ghosted his lips, a fleeting trace of something far colder than satisfaction. He exhaled slowly, deliberately, watching as the screen pulsed again, its glow staining his hollowed features like an unholy beacon in the abyss. The ominous flicker of data danced in his pupils, but his gaze remained unreadable, distant, as if staring into something beyond the walls of this bunker—beyond even the fragile remnants of existence itself.

The reset wasn’t just finished—it had been perfected, carved into a grotesque work of art of destruction.

A world lost, not through fire and ruin, but through something far, far worse: a deliberate, calculated dismantling of reality itself. Not ruin, but erasure. The ache of its loss was difficult to endure, pressing against the bunker walls, dense and heavy like the breath of something lurking just beyond the metal fences.

Even there, even with tight security on all sides, the emptiness was there, lurking through secret openings and creeping through air vents, as if to remind them that it was not yet done.

He spoke to his intimate friend, a shadowy form that remained still in the dim, chill light. “Now,” he breathed, his voice little more than a whisper, yet cutting through the motionless air like a keen blade. “It is time to start the second stage of our scheme.”

Another click. Then another. The sound of latches releasing, the creaking of opening locks, as if breathing after millennia of stillness. There was a low, deep groan that shook the walls. Not the crash of broken machinery or the grind of shifting steel; something deeper, something alive, something stirring. The sound shuddered through the bunker like a minor earthquake, buzzing in the bones and getting under the skin. It was not just a sound; it was a presence, a harbinger of something that had been lurking just beneath the surface of things, coiled in the darkness, waiting, patient, inexorable. The President did not react. His face was expressionless, impassive, and unresponsive to the strange sounds of objects awakening. His silent aide was also motionless, a statue in the faint light of the bunker. They had always known this moment was going to happen. The plan had always included this moment. The world above was done. What was next to come—what had always been intended—was finally beginning. Beyond the bunker, in the barren ruins of what had once been civilization, something else stirred. Not humankind—humankind was dead, their existence scarcely more than a recollection in the emptiness. What manifested instead was something strange, something calculated. It did not come from being born, but from being made. It did not breathe, hunger, or fear. It was created by powers far greater than body and bones. It was forged with brutal precision, with no weakness or pity. It moved in perfect synchronicity, a cold and unwavering machine of purpose. Silent, absolute, inescapable. The world had been wiped clean, and in the absence of life, something else had taken its place. Something engineered. Something merciless. Something inevitable. The second stage had begun.