2025
After surrendering the journal along with the rest of his belongings: his phone, his keys, his wallet, and every other small possession that proved he had once belonged to the old version of his life, Arden was escorted through another corridor. The heavy security door closed behind him with a muted finality, and the sound of his footsteps slowly faded into the depths of the building.
Dr. Varga remained at the intake desk, her attention fixed on the notebook lying among his possessions. After a moment, she reached for it. “I’m his therapist,” she said to the clerks behind the desk. “I need to read this before his treatment begins. I hope you can understand.”
Neither of them appeared surprised by the request. Personal journals were often surrendered during intake, and doctors occasionally asked to examine them. In a place like this, the secrets people carried inside were frequently considered more dangerous than the objects in their pockets.
“That won’t be a problem, Dr. Varga,” one of the clerks replied. He drew the notebook toward him and opened the intake ledger. “I’ll need to register it first. After that, you may keep it for a few days. Just make sure it’s returned as soon as you’re finished.”
Dr. Varga thanked him, though impatience had already begun to tighten in her chest. She waited as he recorded the notebook, attached a small identification label to the inside cover, and finally placed it back into her hands. She made her way to her office as quickly as she could without appearing hurried. The building seemed unusually quiet at that hour. Lights hummed above her as she passed through its pale corridors.
Once inside her office, she closed the door and lowered the blinds. Then she sat behind her desk and placed the notebook beneath the warm circle of light cast by her reading lamp.
For several seconds, she merely looked at it.
Daniel .... She read the first few pages carefully, resisting the urge to skim. When she reached the final sentence, she turned the page. The handwriting changed. Dr. Varga leaned closer and continued reading.
2023
I scrolled down the feed, my thumb growing numb. The screen was a mosaic of global panic. There were frantic video dispatches from Tokyo, São Paulo, Johannesburg, Paris, New York, Bucharest, Mumbai. People captured in glass office towers. People trapped in highway traffic. People kneeling in crowded cathedrals. People lying on gurneys in sterile hospital bays. The countdown kept ticking in the corner of every frame.
A girl standing near the college gates clutched her coat to her chest. “My mam just texted. She says we need to go straight to the shops and buy whatever food is left.”
That was the exact moment the collective consciousness shifted from cosmic terror to basic, primal survival. Food. Water. Petrol. Hard cash. Prescription medication. AA batteries. Maybe humanity’s first reaction to cosmic admission was terror. Its second was shopping. Rory’s phone vibrated again; his dad warned him that the rural roads outside their village were already choking with traffic. Two seconds later, my own phone lit up with my mother’s name. I swiped to answer. “Mam?”
“Where are you?” Her voice exploded through the speaker, sharp and brittle. In the background, the television news lady was still speaking in a frantic, rapid-fire cadence.
“I’m outside the college campus. I’m fine.”
“Come home. Right now.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Don’t be lingering about, Arden. Your father is glued to the telly. The radio is telling everyone to get indoors and stay put. People are already going absolutely mental inside Tesco.”
“Already?”
“Yes, already. Your sister got through to us—she’s safe at her flat. Your brother hasn’t picked up his phone yet.”
I turned away from Rory, blocking the ambient noise of the street. “I’ll try his mobile.”
“Just get yourself back here, Arden.”
“I will.”
“And don't be doing anything stupid.”
That sentence was my mother’s closest approximation of I love you.
“I won’t,” I said, and the line went dead.
Rory looked at me, pocketing his device. “Are you heading for the shops?”
“Probably have to grab a few bits, what about you?”
“Straight home.”
For a lingering moment, neither of us made a move to leave. It felt deeply unnatural to just split up. We had sat in the same lecture hall. We had run into the same chaotic corridor and we had collapsed onto the linoleum together, clutching our skulls while an alien entity carved a countdown directly into our grey matter. By all cinematic rules, that shared trauma should have bonded us forever. But we weren't characters in a Hollywood blockbuster. There was no grand fellowship formed by destiny. We were just two college mates who lived in different estates, with different parents panicking in different kitchens, and we both needed to beat the incoming traffic. Rory suddenly held out a clenched fist.
I stared at it. “What’s that for?”
“Fist bump, man. Official end-of-the-world protocol.”
I extended my arm and bumped his knuckles.
“Text me the second you get through the front door,” he said, backing away.
“You too.”
He hesitated, a faint trace of his usual grin fighting through the terror. “And look, if the aliens land in your back garden first, do me a favor and ask them if they have any advanced tractor parts.”
“I'll make it my absolute top priority.”
Rory turned and jogged heavily toward the bus stop, already dialing his father back. I set off down the pavement toward the village shops, pressing my phone to my ear as I called my brother. No answer. I tried calling again immediately. Still nothing. On the third consecutive attempt, the line clicked open.
“What?” his voice barked.
“You alive?”
“Unfortunately, yeah.”
“Did you get the... the thing?”
“No, Arden. I completely missed the global announcement broadcast directly into the meat of my brain. Of course I bleeding got it.”
He sounded incredibly irritated, which instantly lowered my heart rate. If he was still a cynical bastard, then the fabric of reality hadn't completely unraveled.
“Mam’s frantic,” I said.
“Mam is permanently frantic. I’m on a shift.”
“Are you mental? You’re staying at work?”
“We’re locking up the shutters now, relax. I’ll head back as soon as the manager lets us clear out.” He paused, the background noise of his retail shop filtering through. “Are you alright?” The sudden question caught me entirely off guard. “Yeah,” I swallowed. “I am. You?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
An awkward, heavy silence stretched between us for a beat. “Listen,” he added, his tone dropping. “Be safe okay? I'll give you a call when I get home.”
The local supermarket was already a circus by the time I pushed through the automatic glass doors. Calling it busy didn't do the scene justice. It looked like the frantic desperation of Christmas Eve crossed with a catastrophic run on a failing bank. Terrified shoppers lunged through the narrow aisles with overflowing baskets and heavy wire trolleys, aggressively grabbing bags of pasta, sacks of rice, canned goods, bottled water, and toilet paper. Always toilet paper. Even when the universe opened, people apparently wanted to be prepared to wipe their asses.
I grabbed what I could carry. Pasta. Rice. Tins. Bread. Peanut butter. Batteries. A few bottles of water even though tap water was probably still working. Tea, because my mother would consider civilisation truly over without it. The queue stretched halfway down an aisle. There was a man behind me that kept refreshing conspiracy videos. Two girls ahead of me were crying while laughing at memes that had already started appearing. Someone had edited the countdown over a picture of a landlord saying rent was still due.
I left the store and outside, it looked like the sky had gone darker and the rain started again, heavier now. I walked toward the bus stop carrying two bags that dug into my fingers and made me regret every tin. Buses were still running, somehow. The one home was packed. I stood near the front, one hand gripping a pole, the shopping bags between my feet.
The countdown sat in the corner of my phone now. It did not take over the screen anymore. It had become smaller, like a widget. The end of humanity’s isolation had become part of the interface, tucked beside the weather and battery percentage.
6 days. 21 hours. 14 minutes. 09 seconds.
By the time I reached home, my fingers were numb from the plastic handles of the grocery bags. Our house looked completely ordinary from the pavement with curtains half-drawn and the wheelie bin parked by the side gate. My dad’s old canvas jacket hung over the chair in the hallway, visible through the glass of the front door.
The frantic voices coming from the television reached me before I even turned the key in the lock. My mother was standing in the center of the living room, her arms folded across her chest so tightly it looked physically painful. My father sat on the edge of the sofa, leaning forward, the remote control gripped like a weapon in his right hand.
On the screen, a news presenter was speaking over shaky footage of surging crowds outside government buildings in Dublin.
“—officials continue to urge calm as the countdown remains visible on devices worldwide. The Department has advised households to avoid unnecessary travel and maintain reasonable supplies for the coming week, while stressing that there is no evidence of immediate hostile activity—”
“No evidence,” my father muttered. He let out a single, sharp laugh that held absolutely no humor. My mother turned her head the moment she heard the door click shut. “Put those bags straight into the kitchen, Arden.”
I was quite hungry, and the faint smell of raw onions and burnt toast drifted from the kitchen.. A heavy pot sat cold on the stove, untouched. She had probably started preparing dinner before the world shifted on its axis, and then simply forgotten that food existed. When I returned to the living room, my father was aggressively cycling through the channels. He finally stopped on a live government press conference. An official stood behind a microphone-clustered podium.
“—we are actively coordinating with our international partners. At this time, we ask the public to remain calm, avoid spreading unverified claims, and prepare to follow official guidance as it becomes available.”
My father jabbed a finger at the screen. “They don’t know a single bleeding thing.”
“Of course they don’t,” my mother snapped, her voice brittle. “How on earth would they know?”
“They’re the government. They’re meant to know.”
“About aliens?”
I sank onto the edge of the armchair. In my pocket, my phone vibrated.
**RORY:
Home. Dad fine. Gate dead. Tractor emotionally damaged.
I stared at the tiny text on the glass for a second. Then, a sudden, sharp laughter escaped my throat and it was entirely too loud for the room. My mother looked down at me, her brow furrowing as if I had officially lost my mind.
“Sorry,” I said, clearing my throat. “It’s just Rory. He made it home safe.”
She gave a tight nod, but her eyes lingered on my face for a long beat before drifting back to the broadcast.
I used to believe that was the exact day the world ended. It wasn’t. Human beings prefer clean endings. We crave a single, definitive checkpoint where everything before belongs to the old life and everything after belongs to the new one.
The very first lesson of Admittance was that the world can end, and it will still expect you home in time for dinner.
Dr. Varga claims the human mind instinctively hides inside grand drama when the truth is simply too ordinary to bear. I had once believed that who we were lived somewhere inside us, in the mind, the body, or the soul. I know better now. The self is constructed from experience, from every choice, action, and reaction layered over the foundation of our birth. To change yourself is to begin dismantling that construction, peeling away each layer until you can no longer tell where the person you became ends and the thing you call “I” begins.
We had seven days.
For the first three, the majority of people behaved significantly better than I ever expected them to.
For the next two, they behaved infinitely worse.
By the dawn of the seventh day, every soul on this planet finally understood that first contact was not the same thing as a welcome.
And by then, it was already far too late to ask who had opened the door.
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