2023
The next two or three days were quiet. Which was a stupid thing to call them, obviously. Every phone on the planet held a digital countdown to first contact. White-collared politicians took turns under television lights, issuing hollow joint statements every few hours. Yet, compared to the violent fracture of the first day, the aftermath felt almost normal.
The lights stayed on, mostly and water still trickled from the taps. The double-decker buses rattled down the avenues, though their schedules grew sparse and unpredictable. Shops opened their shutters for a few panicked hours at a time. The schools and universities were closed “until further notice,” a bureaucratic euphemism everyone understood: the people in charge were entirely blind, but they wanted the blindfold to look tailored.
The countdown bled from the corner of every glowing screen. It was entirely indifferent to our panic.
4 DAYS 14 HOURS 22 MINUTES 09 SECONDS
Then, with a microscopic twitch of light:
4 DAYS 14 HOURS 22 MINUTES 08 SECONDS
At first, the collective shock pushed people to go out in the streets and they were enough to fill the lenses of the news crews —dense, shifting swarms outside parliament buildings, holding handmade cardboard signs. They demanded explanations from leaders who possessed nothing but empty podiums. Some screamed about extraterrestrials; others wept about scripture while a few shouted about deep-state cover-ups, which was always the safest thing to yell because the government was almost always hiding a secret in one direction or another.
Online, the theories bred in the dark.
The governments knew. The governments were blindsided. The scientists sold us out. The billionaires had a rocket waiting. The Pope had a prophecy.
Nobody knew a thing, of course. But they wore tailored suits and spoke in measured cadences because that is what men in power do when the floor begins to slide. For about twelve hours, the madness felt like the dawn of a revolution. The gravitiy event struck right after that and it was more catastrophic and damaging than the rupture back at the college. It was enough to lock up the motorways, turning miles of highway into graveyard parking lots. It was enough to make a news helicopter tilt dangerously on a live feed before the broadcast dissolved into static.
After that, the streets emptied. People still hungered for answers, but they preferred to wait for them behind deadbolts. That was when the uniforms multiplied and it wasn’t just the police anymore, or the standard local patrols. Olive-drab army trucks began tracking through the suburbs. Civil Defence vans sat idling at major intersections; ambulances and fire brigades parked like sentinels outside shopping centers. For some, the sight offered a fragile sense of security but fairly quick it curdled into dread.
The thing wit the government was that they looked prepared - seamlessly way too prepared. Checkpoints fractured the main roads. Travel became “discouraged" , then within hours, it was “strongly discouraged.” By nightfall, it was “permitted for essential personnel only.” Nobody dared use the word lockdown.
In our kitchen, Dad watched the television, the remote gripped in one fist and a chipped mug in the other. "I’m telling you," he muttered, his eyes fixed on the rolling text at the bottom of the screen. "They knew." Mam stood by the cracked back door, smoking into the damp air. The wind was driving the rain straight over the threshold, speckling the lino floor. "Who knew?"
"All of them." It was Dad’s absolute favorite political category. Them. A perfectly elastic word. It could comfortably expand to include the Cabinet, the European Central Bank, high court judges, corporate landlords, Washington, or the man three doors down who parked his transit van over our driveway.
Mam blew a thin plume of blue smoke out into the downpour. "And what exactly would you have done if they’d given you a ring to let you know?"
Dad opened his mouth to fire back. Then, slowly, he closed it with a weird silence that stretched for a few seconds. It was rare enough that I actually looked up from my sketchbook. I was sitting at the wooden table, trying to draw, or more like pretending to. The sketch had begun as a simple empty corridor outside Ms. Byrne’s classroom, but the perspective had gone wrong. The hallway had stretched out too far, warping into something endless. The classroom doors had shrunk, becoming narrow and almost like they were'nt there. And the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling I had shaded them heavily, turning them into rows of luminous eyes.
Subtlety, it seemed, had abandoned the house entirely. My pencil moved without much help from me. All of a sudden my chair lifted off the floor. Only a little, just enough that the legs stopped scraping the linoleum tiles. At first, I thought my balance had simply done something strange, or that the pencil was rolling upward against the natural slant of the table. But then the heavy ceramic mug beside me rose next, the cold tea trembling right at the porcelain brim.
Across the kitchen, the blue smoke from Mam’s cigarette twisted into a tight, geometric spiral and froze there in midair, suspended like a frame of film someone had paused. Dad looked at the hovering tea, then at my suspended chair. Very quietly, he said, “Nope., not doing that again.”
The physics snapped back and the chair dropped, the mug slammed down, sending a brown wave of tea splashing across the wood and my artwork. My pencil clattered to the floor, and the frozen spiral of smoke collapsed into a normal, ugly cloud. I landed with a thump hard enough to make me bite my tongue.
Dad didn't even move. “Everybody alright?”
Mam just stared at the cigarette burning between her fingers. “I’m quitting.” She didn't quit, of course. But for almost an hour, she meant it with everything she had.
That was one of the early gravity aftershocks. The official news bulletins called them residual local orientation events, which explained nothing but kind of sounded like something that might happen to a confused tourist in Dublin, not your kitchen chair deciding the floor had become entirely optional.
In Japan, live footage showed thousands of commuters in a Tokyo station grabbing structural pillars for dear life while every hanging sign swung violently in the wrong direction.
In Brazil, a football match that should absolutely not have been playing out under the countdown ended abruptly when the ball hung suspended in the afternoon sky for fourteen seconds. When it finally dropped, nobody on either team wanted to touch it.
The world had become a gallery of little, impossible things. Some were terrifying, some ridiculous, and most were both. A man in Galway became briefly famous across the internet for continuing to sip his pint while the pub table lifted toward his chin.
Dad asked me to help him out in the back garden. I knew he was only doing it because the four walls of the house were driving him mad. He was a man who needed something to be angry at with his hands, and the shed door had been sticking since the forever. Apparently, the slow collapse of reality was the perfect time to fix a rusty hinge.
We walked down the narrow path to the shed. He already had the metal toolbox open on the grass. I took hold of the damp wood of the door while he went to work on the top hinge with a flathead screwdriver. For ten minutes, the universe behaved itself and everything was grand. There was Dad muttering under his breath about cheap, stripped screws and curse at me. There was me, standing there uselessly with both hands on the frame, pretending to help.
Then the metal hinge twisted. It wasn't because of the screwdriver. The heavy steel bent inward with a wet, sickening creak. Dad yanked his hand back, his knuckles scraping the timber. “What the hell?”
The door sagged instantly. I grabbed the handle properly before it could drop, but the moment my fingers closed around the wood, the weight changed. It wasn’t door-heavy anymore. It was stone-heavy. Mountain-heavy. The sudden mass yanked my arms down, my shoulders screaming as my joints threatened to pop.
“Dad.”
He moved fast—faster than I’d seen him move in years. He shoved a heavy block of timber under the rotting edge of the door, throwing his shoulder into the frame to take the crushing weight with me. And then, just as quickly, the heaviness evaporated. The door became normal again.
“What was that?” I managed, my voice thin.
Dad stared at the top hinge. The twisted, malformed steel shone wet and silver in the dull light. “Gravity?” he said.
It was the first time in my life I had ever heard fear in his voice without an armor of anger wrapped around it. That silence stayed with me long after we went back inside. He fixed the door eventually. Badly, of course—it opened, which was his universal definition of a job well done. Inside, Mam had made a pot of tea. Nobody said thank you. We just lifted our mugs and drank like survivors.
By the fourth day, the strange events slowed, not completely, but slowed enough that people started speaking about them in the past tense. That was another thing humans did. If something did not happen for twelve hours, we decided it had probably finished because the alternative was worse. The official explanation came through the phones and news at the same time.
CORRECTION ONE: GRAVITY INITIAL ACTIVE PHASE: STABLE == ==RESIDUAL EVENTS EXPECTED AVOID HIGH-RISK TRAVEL == ==AWAIT FURTHER ADMITTANCE INSTRUCTIONS
Correction One. That was the first time I remember seeing it numbered. One. Which meant more corrections of course. The internet noticed that immediately.
IF THAT WAS ONE WHAT THE FUCK IS TWO That post had two million likes by the evening.
There were food distribution problems in cities where panic buying met transport restrictions. Hospitals were dealing with falls, heart attacks, hysteria, head injuries, and whatever category you put “my house moved but didn’t move” under.
2 DAYS == ==03 HOURS 11 MINUTES 40 SECONDS
RORY: Dad says if the aliens turn up driving John Deere tractors he’s defecting immediately.
ME: Understandable.
RORY: Also the side gate is still broken.
ME: The famous gate.
RORY: Aye. It survived the localized gravity inversion but it couldn't survive my father reversing emotionally.
Vivian (whom we had only ever known through a glowing Discord window until a few months ago, yet somehow already felt like an old fixture of the group) was systematically dropping theories into the chat.
VIVIAN: If this is a textbook System Integration, first contact won't be flying saucers landing on lawns. It’ll be a localized UI drop and ofc Instructions. Or hear me out class selection xD . Maybe unlock conditions. Also Rory stop with the emotional jokes, they're getting exhausting -.- .
RORY: Vivian, if goblins spawn I’m blaming you personally. Also I’m feeling deeply emotionally affected by that feedback.
VIVIAN: No goblins. Too generic. Also lame. Like your humor. :p
ME: Comforting to know the apocalypse has standards.
I couldn't find Patricia on social media anymore. And I didn’t have her phone number. I found myself thinking about that far more than I should have. She had stepped off the Luas three stops before the college, stepping out into a morning that still belonged to the old world. For a long time, I tried to convince myself that stepping onto that platform had saved her from the initial anomaly. Later, of course, I would learn that nobody was saved from anything. The universe didn't grant exemptions; it merely handed out different versions of the same bill.
On the sixth day, the sky tore. People would argue over the semantics for months. Television anchors actively avoided the imagery, scientists despised it, and the fringe forums practically lived on it. I was standing out on the damp tarmac of the driveway with Mam when it happened. A perfectly straight line split the clouds, tearing a seam from one horizon clean to the other. It was definitely not a weather event. Behind the parting clouds lay something that wasn't blue sky, nor the familiar black of night. It was an impossible, velvet depth; not space, but the heavy suggestion of a distance so vast my eyes began to water just trying to process the scale of it.
Mam lunged sideways and grabbed my wrist. Her fingernails bit deep into my skin, her grip white-knuckled and trembling. By nightfall, every channel on earth was looping the exact same footage. Different time zones, different vantage points, identical tear. Some populations witnessed it at high noon; others saw it cut through a clear midnight sky. The perspective was universally uncanny, it didn’t look like something happening in our atmosphere, but rather something being drawn across the lens of the world from the outside.
The official government broadcast termed it an external reference alignment artifact. Everyone else just called it the Crack. After that, the streets emptied completely. No one went out unless they were running out of milk or medicine, and even then, they kept their heads down, terrified to look up at the clouds.
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