Beep... Beep... Beep... BEEP!

SMASH!

"Fucking mornings..." Jake groaned, barely awake as his alarm clock crashed to the floor.

His fist remained clenched, hovering above the bedside table where the annoying contraption had once sat. Normally, he'd fall back into bed, convince himself he had more time, drift back into oblivion. But not today.

Today was different.

Without his usual sluggishness, Jake managed to untangle himself from the blankets, rising shirtless. Standing at six feet tall and just over twenty-five, Jake looked—if you didn't stare too long—entirely average. Slightly overweight, but he wore his clothes well. A keen eye might notice hints of muscle, remnants from a past when he actually worked out and cut back on the junk food. But lately, that motivation had faded away.

His skin was pale, dark circles hung under his eyes—telltale signs of too many late nights glued to a screen, whether it was video games or work. A few pimples dotted his face, not enough to be severe, but enough to show he was letting things slip.

A shaggy mess of brown hair, untouched by scissors for far too long, and a thick two-week-old beard framed his otherwise promising features. Despite his lack of grooming, his face still held a certain potential—sharp features and smoldering eyes that could captivate. From time to time, those eyes showed a glimmer of melancholy, a sadness that was swiftly smothered by a frown.

His name was Jake Wilderth.

He had been orphaned at the age of three, his parents among the many who perished in the False Third World War of 2084. Today, he turned 25. His uncle Kalen had taken him in, raising him alongside his cousin Anya. It had been a mostly peaceful childhood. Mostly.

The Wilderths were an old family. Not aristocratic or bourgeois, but proud and demanding enough to make life difficult for their descendants. Not because of some family heirloom, hidden secrets, or noble cause—just pure, unrelenting pride.

The Wilderths had one thing in common: they were all smart.

Not prodigies, but each had a solid IQ above 130. Some might say genetics don't matter much, or that IQ is an overrated measure of intelligence. Sure, emotional intelligence was arguably more valuable for real-world success. But in a family like the Wilderths, where everyone had a high IQ, expectations were different.

Yet, when this became a generality in a large family, it changed everything. When a child was limited or mentally challenged, the parents would be much more tolerant, letting them do what they wanted. There would be no requirements. No pressure. No impossible expectations. Just compassion and the quiet acceptance that the child was doing their best.

When the child was exceptional, in contrast, the parents became strict—unyielding, even. On the one hand, they did not want their child to waste their talent. On the other, they would often unconsciously project their own failed dreams onto them. Expectations piled up, and the child had no choice but to meet them, willingly or not.

With the Wilderths, there was a third consideration: not to embarrass themselves. If you were more successful than your cousins, aunts, or uncles, that was fine—good, even. But if you were the one who fell behind? If you were the one who underperformed? Then the comparisons started, the whispers began, and the mockery born of those comparisons would nip any form of happiness in the bud.

That's what happened to Jake. His uncle was benevolent, and his cousin Anya protective. He grew up peacefully.

And yet, whether it was because he was naturally introverted or because the death of his parents had affected him more deeply than anyone realized, he had few friends. His natural ease with academics made it easy for him to attend university, but no one had ever taught him how to grind, how to push himself when things got tough, how to want something badly enough to fight for it.

The sheltered life created an indecisive and procrastinating mindset. He had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and increasing pressure from other family members only made him more uncomfortable. Like many lonely, asocial nerds before him, he found a way out of reality in books, binge-watching, and video games.

It wasn't so bad. As an intelligent and logical man, he chose to link his future career to his current pleasures. He enrolled in a university specializing in programming and informatics.

Unfortunately, he soon got bored. The volume of learning was incomparable to the workload in high school. Even for him, it required effort. The pleasure of playing video games and the pleasure of creating them were worlds apart.

As a result, he dropped out.

He tried a few other paths—management, cybernetics—but the boredom remained. He eventually graduated with a degree in cybernetics and programming, his uncle discreetly using his network to save his sinking nephew.

By 22nd-century standards, his academic path might have seemed strange at the beginning of the 21st century, but not now.

Quantum computing was mature, and the limitations predicted for transistor miniaturization by Moore's Law had been overcome. The performance of computers had once again improved rapidly.

Artificial intelligence and bioengineering had made huge advances, and nano-cybernetics was also on the right track. Earth had established its first colony on Mars over forty years ago. 3D printing had been perfected, even allowing organs to be recreated using donor cells as ink. Medicine had also seen remarkable progress.

The pace of technological development was dizzying, but amid this rapid progress lay deep scars—the remnants of the False Third World War. Even after twenty-five years, the world was still healing.

After 2070, Earth, with over ten billion inhabitants, was drowning in scarcity—water, food, resources. Sea levels swallowed coastal cities, entire islands vanished, and wealthier nations built barriers to protect what they could. Meanwhile, the less fortunate migrated inland, losing their homes to rising tides. As fossil fuels dwindled, wars broke out over what was left—oil, water, precious minerals.

And in 2084, the Third World War almost erupted.

On May 14th of that year, the world did indeed witness destruction, but not in the way anyone expected. To this day, what happened remains shrouded in mystery.

Every major city was wiped out in a single day—Moscow, Tokyo, Paris, Washington, London—erased from the map. No warnings, no explanations. No journalists breaking through military blockades. Just silence.

People reported seeing nuclear mushroom clouds over the cities, but there were stranger testimonies—millions of reports of bizarre phenomena. Phone lines went dead days before the explosions. Calls to loved ones in the cities were met with harsh static, a sense of something being wrong just before the connection cut out.

The stories got weirder. Witnesses claimed to have seen strange, psychedelic lights hovering above the doomed cities. Others spoke of unidentified aircraft—ships that defied all known laws of physics. Theories spiraled out of control. Government conspiracies, alien invasions, secret weapons—each possibility more unsettling than the last.

The official explanation? A Third World War. But hardly anyone believed it.

The popular theory? Alien invasion. Not because of the strange ship sightings, but because of what came next—the formation of the United Earth Government. An Earth Government formed almost overnight, with world leaders and religious heads all singing the same tune.

If you know anything about history or politics, you'd know that even in times of defeat, treaties take time—months, sometimes years. But here? In less than a week, they had a global government. It didn't add up.

The United Earth Government couldn't remain silent forever. Two years after the "False Third World War," they addressed the world. Jake could still recite that speech by heart.

"Earth citizens,

"What happened on May 14th was unprecedented, impossible to explain in a few words. We cannot reveal everything yet, as investigations are still ongoing. What we have discovered is, quite literally, earth-shattering—the kind of truth none of us are prepared to hear. But regardless, we must adapt, for the way we live will change. We must prepare.

"In roughly two decades, the changes we make must be concrete, our resolve unbreakable. Even we cannot predict the exact day of our reckoning—it could come a year sooner, or two months later—but it will come. When that day arrives, our lives will change forever.

"We hope we will all be ready."

That was twenty-two years ago. They were two years off.

Jake, now brushing his teeth, had no idea that today, on August 16th, 2106, his life would change in ways he never imagined.

The day everything changed.