The sky didn't fall.
It froze.
One moment, I was walking home from another meaningless day at the office, earbuds in, drowning out the city noise. The next, every screen in Times Square went dark simultaneously. My phone died mid-song. Car engines cut out in perfect unison, creating an eerie silence that New York City had never known.
Then the sky... stopped.
I'm not talking about clouds pausing or birds hanging mid-flight—though that happened too. I mean the sky itself became a photograph. The sunset that had been bleeding orange across the horizon locked in place, neither advancing nor retreating. A commercial plane hung motionless above the Hudson, its contrails frozen like white scars against the amber light.
People stopped walking. Pointed. Someone screamed.
That's when it appeared.
Not on screens—those were still dead. Not in the sky. It appeared in my vision, overlaid across reality like some augmented reality filter I couldn't remove.
[PLANETARY ASSESSMENT COMPLETE]
[HUMANITY: UNBALANCED]
[CORRECTION PROTOCOL INITIATED]
The words hovered in translucent blue text, impossible to ignore, impossible to dismiss. I waved my hand through them. Nothing. Blinked hard. They remained.
Around me, thousands of people were doing the same thing—swatting at invisible text, rubbing their eyes, some falling to their knees.
The text changed.
[INITIALIZING LIFE COUNTER SYSTEM]
[EACH HUMAN WILL RECEIVE A PERSONAL COUNTER]
[WHEN YOUR COUNTER REACHES ZERO, CESSATION IS IMMEDIATE AND IRREVERSIBLE]
My heart hammered against my ribs. This couldn't be real. Mass hallucination? Some kind of attack? I looked around desperately for an explanation, for someone who understood what was happening.
An elderly woman beside me clutched her chest, her face pale. A kid, couldn't have been more than ten, read the text aloud with the kind of innocent curiosity that didn't yet grasp the horror.
The words dissolved, replaced by new text.
[TO MAINTAIN YOUR COUNTER, YOU MUST PARTICIPATE IN MONTHLY REBALANCING TRIALS]
[20 TRIALS PER MONTH]
[ADAPTATION REWARDS TIME]
[STAGNATION REDUCES IT]
[FAILURE ENDS IT]
Twenty trials. Every month. My mind raced through the math—that's almost one every day and a half. What kind of trials? How do you fail? What does "adaptation" even mean?
Before I could process any of it, a new sensation crashed through my consciousness—like someone had injected ice water directly into my brain. I gasped, stumbling backward into a stopped taxi.
Numbers appeared in the upper right corner of my vision.
[COUNTER: 2,847]
Twenty-eight hundred and forty-seven... what? Days? Hours? The system didn't specify, and somehow that made it worse. Around me, people were shouting numbers.
"I've got five thousand!"
"Thirty-two hundred here!"
"Oh god, mine says eight hundred—why is mine so low?!"
A businessman in a gray suit stood perfectly still, staring at something only he could see. His lips moved silently, and then he whispered: "Two hundred and fourteen."
The elderly woman beside me made a sound between a sob and a laugh. "Ninety-three," she said to no one in particular. "Ninety-three."
More text appeared, universal, identical for everyone.
[FIRST TRIAL BEGINS IN 72 HOURS]
[LOCATION WILL BE DESIGNATED]
[ATTENDANCE IS MANDATORY]
[PREPARE]
Then, as abruptly as it had frozen, the sky resumed. The sunset continued its descent. The plane in the distance moved forward. Car alarms blared as engines failed to restart. The city erupted into chaos.
People ran in every direction, some screaming, some crying, some standing in shock. I heard glass shatter somewhere. Someone was praying loudly in Spanish. A woman vomited on the sidewalk.
I just stood there, staring at the number in my vision.
[COUNTER: 2,847]
It felt surreal. Like a video game UI had been stapled to reality. Except this game had one rule: when you hit zero, you die.
My phone buzzed back to life. Notifications flooded in—texts from my sister, my mom, coworkers. Social media was exploding. #LifeCounter was already trending worldwide. Videos of the frozen sky from every timezone. Theories ranging from alien invasion to government conspiracy to biblical apocalypse.
None of them were right.
This wasn't an invasion.
It was a judgment.
I walked home in a daze, barely registering the sirens, the accidents, the crowds forming outside churches and bars. My apartment building's lobby was packed with residents arguing, crying, demanding answers that no one had.
I took the stairs. Needed to move, to think.
Inside my studio apartment, I locked the door and sat on the edge of my bed. The number remained, persistent and patient in my peripheral vision.
[COUNTER: 2,847]
I pulled out my laptop, joined the Reddit threads already forming. People were sharing their numbers, trying to find patterns. Athletes had higher counts. Children too. The elderly had lower numbers, but not always—there was an eighty-year-old marathon runner reporting six thousand.
Someone posted a theory: "It's not age. It's potential. How much you can still adapt."
That felt right, somehow. Terrifying, but right.
I clicked through to Twitter. World leaders were making statements. The President was calling for calm. The UN was convening an emergency session. China claimed it was an American weapon. Russia blamed NATO. Everyone was pointing fingers while the clock in their vision counted down.
Because that's what I realized, watching the chaos unfold online: the number wasn't static.
[COUNTER: 2,846]
It had decreased.
My blood ran cold. I'd been home for maybe twenty minutes. The counter was already ticking down. I did the math—if it decreased by one every twenty minutes or so... that was roughly seventy-two per day.
I had about forty days.
Forty days until the first trial. And then I'd have to succeed, to "adapt," or the countdown would accelerate. Fail, and it goes to zero.
I tried to sleep that night. Failed. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that number.
[COUNTER: 2,821]
By dawn, it had dropped to 2,779.
The world didn't end that night, but it changed. Irreversibly.
Governments collapsed within forty-eight hours. Not from war or revolution, but from simple abandonment. Why follow laws when you're racing against a cosmic death sentence? Why go to work when you might have less than a month to live?
Some people partied. Others prayed. Many just waited, watching their numbers drop, helpless.
I spent those seventy-two hours preparing. I didn't know what the trials would be, but I could get in shape, gather supplies, learn what I could from the desperate online communities forming.
That's when I saw the first post that changed everything.
It was buried in a conspiracy subreddit, posted by someone with a throwaway account:
"This isn't the first time. I remember dying. I remember the trials. This is my second loop. And my counter started lower this time."
The post was downvoted to oblivion. People called them crazy, attention-seeking.
But I couldn't stop thinking about it.
Because I had dreams. Strange, vivid dreams of falling from impossible heights, of drowning in endless oceans, of standing in arenas facing things that shouldn't exist.
Dreams... or memories?
I shook it off. Stress-induced hallucinations. Had to be.
On the third day, at exactly 72 hours after the sky froze, new text appeared.
[FIRST TRIAL COMMENCING]
[DESIGNATION: CENTRAL PARK, NEW YORK CITY]
[ALL PARTICIPANTS WITHIN 50-MILE RADIUS MUST ATTEND]
[TRANSPORTATION PROVIDED]
"Transportation provided." The words were almost funny.
I felt it then—a pulling sensation, like someone had hooked a fishing line through my sternum and yanked. The world blurred, twisted, and suddenly I was standing in Central Park with thousands of others, all of us materializing out of thin air.
The trees were different. Wrong. They pulsed with bioluminescent veins, and the grass beneath our feet had turned a deep crimson.
In the center of the Sheep Meadow, a massive obsidian pillar had erupted from the ground, covered in those same blue symbols from the initial announcement.
Text appeared for everyone.
[TRIAL 1: THE CULLING]
[SURVIVE 60 MINUTES]
[RULES: NONE]
That's when the screaming started.
Because at the edge of the park, emerging from the mutated trees, came things that looked like they'd been drawn by someone who'd only heard humans described but never seen one. Twisted, wrong proportions, too many joints, mouths that opened in impossible angles.
And they were fast.
The crowd scattered. People ran, trampled each other, some froze in terror. I ran too, pure instinct, no thought.
A businessman in a suit went down beside me, one of those creatures on his back. I didn't stop. Couldn't stop.
That's when it happened.
Time... stuttered.
Just for a second, I saw the creature's attack trajectory before it moved. Knew where it would strike. I sidestepped on pure instinct, and it sailed past me, crashing into someone else.
How did I know that?
No time to think. I ran toward the densest part of the crowd, reasoning that the creatures would get distracted, pick off the stragglers.
I was right.
Sixty minutes of hell. Screaming. Blood. The counter in my vision never changed, but I watched other people's numbers hit zero. Watched them collapse mid-stride, dead before they hit the ground.
When it ended, the creatures simply... vanished. The park returned to normal. The trees, the grass, all back to how they should be.
Bodies remained.
So many bodies.
[TRIAL 1 COMPLETE]
[SURVIVORS: 47,329 / 156,847]
[ADAPTATION ASSESSED]
[COUNTER ADJUSTED]
I held my breath.
[COUNTER: 2,891]
I'd gained time. Sixty-seven units. I'd started the trial at 2,824, and now I had 2,891.
Others around me were crying in relief or horror. Some gained time. Many lost it. A woman nearby sobbed as her counter displayed 43.
I stumbled home through streets filled with emergency vehicles, news crews, people searching for loved ones.
In my apartment, I collapsed on my bed and stared at the ceiling.
That's when the dreams came again.
Except they weren't dreams.
They were memories.
I'd done this before. Not once. Not twice.
Seventy-three times.
I'd died in trials like this seventy-three times, and each time I came back, I came back to this moment. The announcement. The first trial.
But every time I died, my counter started lower.
First time: 8,000.
Tenth time: 6,200.
Fiftieth time: 3,100.
This time: 2,847.
And I remembered now. All of it. Every death. Every failure.
I sat up, breathing hard, as the full weight of it crushed down on me.
I wasn't supposed to remember. The system was supposed to wipe my memory each reset.
But something had broken. Or changed.
I pulled up my sleeve, and there it was—a mark I'd never noticed before. A small symbol, like a glitch in reality, burned into my inner wrist.
[ANOMALY DETECTED]
New text appeared, for my eyes only.
[OBSERVER ASSIGNED]
[CONTINUE]
I felt it then. Something watching. Not the system. Something else. Something curious.
My hands shook as I processed what this meant.
I had seventy-three lifetimes of knowledge. Every trial. Every trap. Every pattern.
But I also had the lowest starting counter I'd ever had.
[COUNTER: 2,891]
One mistake. One failure. And this time, there might not be a seventy-fourth chance.
I looked at my reflection in the darkened window.
"Alright," I whispered to myself, to the Observer, to whatever was listening. "Let's see if seventy-three deaths taught me anything."
The counter ticked down.
[COUNTER: 2,890]
Time was already running out.
But this time, I wasn't going in blind.
This time, I was going to break their game.
[END CHAPTER 1]
[NEXT TRIAL IN 29 DAYS, 23 HOURS, 47 MINUTES]