AMINA — Cairo, Egypt (14:22)
The sand beneath Amina's feet was as ancient as the secrets it kept. She knelt in the excavation pit, carefully brushing dust from a pottery fragment, when her phone vibrated for the fourth time in a minute.
First her husband called. Then her eldest daughter. Then a colleague from the university.
"Just five more minutes," she whispered to the shard in her hand, as if it could hear her. This vessel was three thousand years old. It had survived empires, wars, oblivion. It could wait five more minutes.
The phone rang again. Amina sighed and answered without looking at the screen.
"Ahmed, I told you I'd be back by..."
"Mom." Her fifteen-year-old son's voice trembled. "Mom, did you see the news?"
Something in his tone made her stand. Around the excavation site, other archaeologists were also pulling out their phones, their faces turning pale beneath their desert tans.
"Karim? What happened?"
"They're saying... scientists... all over the world..." He couldn't finish the sentence.
Amina was already running toward the tent where the laptop was. The screen lit up, showing a live UN broadcast. The Secretary-General stood at the podium, his face gray as ash.
"...confirmed by independent researchers on all continents. The trajectory is unchangeable. We do not have the technology to alter the planet's course, and we do not have time to develop it..."
The shard slipped from Amina's hand and shattered against a stone.
Three thousand years, she thought, staring at the pieces. And we have three hundred sixty-five days left.
HIROSHI — Tokyo, Japan (22:22)
Hiroshi was making tea when the world ended.
It was his evening ceremony, the only ritual he'd maintained since Yuki died three years ago. Heat water to the precise temperature. Measure the leaves. Pour. Wait. These simple actions kept chaos at bay.
The television was on in the background — news he wasn't listening to, filling the apartment's silence. But suddenly the announcer's tone changed. Hiroshi looked up.
The screen showed a press conference. Scientists from different countries, their faces grave. The translator spoke quickly, stumbling over words like "cosmic anomaly" and "irreversible."
The kettle boiled. Steam rose toward the ceiling.
Hiroshi turned off the heat and sat on the tatami, not taking his eyes from the screen.
"The exact date — January 15, 2027, approximately 03:14 universal time..."
One year. Three hundred sixty-five days.
He had lived sixty-seven years, and how many of those had he truly lived? Worked for a corporation for forty-two years. Retired. Lost his wife. Waited for... what? Death?
Now there was no need to wait.
Hiroshi poured tea into Yuki's cup, which he hadn't touched in three years, and into his own. He raised both to the light.
"Well then," he said to the empty apartment. "It seems I have a bit of time after all."
MARIA — São Paulo, Brazil (10:22)
Nausea hit Maria right in the middle of her shift. She barely made it to the hospital bathroom, where she vomited for the third time that morning.
The pregnancy test had been in her bag for three days. She hadn't dared to take it. Afraid. She was twenty-eight, unmarried, working as a nurse in an overcrowded favela hospital where everything was in short supply — from bandages to hope.
But she was also afraid the test would be negative.
Maria washed her face with cold water and looked at herself in the mirror. Dark circles under her eyes. When was the last time she'd slept properly?
Her pager beeped. Emergency call to the ER.
When she ran in, the chaos was different from usual. Not trauma, not violence. People were just standing there, crowded around the TV mounted on the wall. Patients, nurses, doctors, security guards.
On screen, a female astrophysicist from NASA was explaining something using a computer model of the solar system. Numbers. Trajectories. Probabilities that all equaled zero.
"What's happening?" Maria asked a colleague.
"End of the world," she replied, and there was no irony in her voice. "In a year. Official."
Maria felt her hand instinctively move to her stomach. There, perhaps, was life. Tiny, the size of a grain of rice. Life that now had less than a year.
Or life that had a full twelve months to be loved.
She didn't know what to feel. Didn't know whether to cry or laugh.
So she just stood there, hand on her stomach, watching the world learn about its end.
DAVID — New York, USA (08:22)
David Cohen made two million dollars before breakfast.
Asian markets opened strong, his algorithms worked perfectly, and by the time he sat down in his fifty-second floor office overlooking Manhattan, his portfolio was seven figures heavier.
He was drinking espresso and reviewing morning reports when the trading floor suddenly went silent.
David looked up. All the monitors — hundreds of screens normally showing stock charts — switched to one broadcast. Emergency UN address.
"What the hell?" he muttered, stepping out of his office.
Traders stood frozen at their desks. No one was trading. No one was shouting. They just watched.
On screen, a scientist was explaining the inexplicable. Cosmic anomaly. Collision inevitable. All mathematical models converge. One year.
"Is this some kind of joke?" someone asked.
No one answered.
David returned to his office and looked at his monitor. Markets were starting to fall. Slowly at first, then in an avalanche. Tech stocks. Bonds. Futures. Everything plummeting so fast the numbers blurred.
He watched billions disappear. His billions.
And for the first time in fifteen years of his career, David Cohen felt nothing.
Money is future. Investments are bets on tomorrow.
And if there is no tomorrow?
He closed the terminal and looked out the window at the city that suddenly seemed very fragile.
ADWOA — Accra, Ghana (13:22)
Adwoa was in the university library, preparing for an organic chemistry exam, when her phone exploded with notifications.
At first she ignored them. The exam was in three days, and she couldn't afford to be distracted. This scholarship — her family's first chance at higher education — meant everything. Her mother had cleaned rich people's houses for twenty years to give her daughter this opportunity.
But then the library filled with noise. Students pulled out phones, started crying, screaming, hugging.
"What happened?" Adwoa asked her table neighbor.
The girl just handed her the phone.
Video from the UN press conference. English subtitles: "CONFIRMED: COLLISION INEVITABLE. 365 DAYS UNTIL THE END."
Adwoa read it three times.
Her eyes fell on the open textbook. Chemical formulas. Molecular bonds. She was going to become a doctor. Heal people. Save lives.
In a year there would be no lives left to save.
"Why?" she whispered. "Why did I do all this?"
Around her, students were leaving the library. Some sobbing. Some laughing hysterically. Some just walking silently, as if in a trance.
Adwoa remained sitting, staring at her notes, at these carefully written formulas that were supposed to be her future.
Her mother called. Adwoa didn't answer. Didn't know what to say.
Didn't know what it meant to dream when the future was cancelled.
SERGEI — Irkutsk, Russia (20:22)
Sergei Volkov didn't immediately understand what was happening.
There were no TVs in the cells at the colony, only in the common room, and prisoners usually watched football or old movies. But when the convoy brought him back from kitchen duty, everyone was sitting in front of the screen in dead silence.
On screen, the president was addressing the nation. His face was pale.
"...joining the international community in confirming this information. Our best scientists, our military, our allies — all have reached the same conclusion..."
"What's he saying?" Sergei asked a guard.
The guard, usually rough and indifferent, looked at him with something almost like compassion.
"End of the world. In a year."
Sergei slowly sat on a bench. Fifteen years ago in a drunken fight, he'd killed a man. A father of three children. A good man who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Sergei got twenty years. Served five. There were still fifteen years ahead in these gray walls, fifteen years to wake up every day with the weight of guilt.
Now he wouldn't have those fifteen years.
He would have one year.
"What happens to prisoners?" someone asked.
The guard shook his head. "Don't know. Government promises decisions in the coming days."
That night Sergei couldn't sleep. He lay on his bunk staring at the ceiling, thinking about the wife who stopped coming to visits seven years ago. About children he hadn't seen, who had become adults without him.
Thinking about the man he killed. About his children.
One year. Could one year atone for guilt?
Could one year teach you to forgive yourself?
ZARA — Mumbai, India (18:52)
Dr. Zara Patel was holding a dying man's hand when the nurse burst into the room with a phone.
"Doctor, you need to see this. All channels. It's..."
"Not now," Zara said quietly.
The man on the bed — Mr. Kapoor, sixty-two, stage four pancreatic cancer — was squeezing her hand weakly. He'd been dying for several hours. His family was beside him, but they'd asked the doctor to stay.
"Doctor, please," the nurse insisted, her voice trembling.
Zara looked at her, ready to scold, but stopped. The nurse was crying. Not just upset — real tears streaming down her face.
Zara carefully freed her hand from Mr. Kapoor's and stepped into the corridor.
The nurse handed her the phone. On screen, a recording of a press conference that had already circled the world.
Zara listened calmly. She'd been an oncologist for twenty years. She specialized in conversations about death, in helping people face the inevitable with dignity.
But how do you prepare eight billion people for death simultaneously?
"What are we going to do?" the nurse asked.
Zara looked through the open door at Mr. Kapoor, at his family gathered around the bed. They didn't know about the news. In that room, time still flowed as before.
"The same thing we always do," Zara answered. "We help people live until the very end."
She returned to the room, took Mr. Kapoor's hand again, and quietly sang the prayer he'd asked for.
Twenty minutes later he died, surrounded by love, not knowing that the whole world had received the same sentence.
Epilogue of the First Day
By the end of January 15, 2026, every person on the planet knew.
Governments called emergency meetings. Religious leaders addressed the faithful. Scientists checked calculations for the hundredth time, hoping to find an error.
There was no error.
Some people took to the streets. Some locked themselves in their homes. Some prayed. Some looted stores. Some held hands with strangers and wept.
And seven people — an archaeologist in Egypt, a retiree in Japan, a nurse in Brazil, a trader in New York, a student in Ghana, a prisoner in Russia, and a doctor in India — went to bed on the first night of Earth's last year.
And each thought about the same thing:
What will I do with the time I have left?
How do I want to live these three hundred sixty-four days?
Who do I want to be, knowing tomorrow will end?