Zero Day

You hear an explosion.

You open your eyes.

It's still dark.

“Am I dreaming, or did that really just happen?”

You climb out of bed and shove the curtain aside.

A smoking crater scars the middle of your lawn.

Chunks of soil are thrown in a near perfect circle.

Steam coils up and vanishes into the night.

You glance at the clock.

4:21 AM

You throw on yesterday's clothes,

run downstairs and out the back door.

Outside, the air smells electric.

The crater exhales heat. At its center rests a crystal-like stone,

no larger than the palm of your hand, glowing with a soft aquamarine light that pulses gently in the dark.

You crouch at the edge of the crater.

Something catches your ear.

You tilt your head, listening.

A soft melody is emanating from the meteorite itself.

“But… how?” you whisper as you reach down toward it.

The heat is intense but not unbearable,

a feverish warmth that raises goosebumps on your arm.

When your fingers close around the stone,

the music tunes out like a radio station.

For a long moment you stand there, listening to the meteorite’s otherworldly song.

You turn it over once, twice,

its iridescent edges catching the starlight.
~

Back in your room, you set the meteorite on an old text book.

You boot your PC. The fans briefly roar, then settle.

You search for “meteor strike” and your town’s name. Nothing.

No breaking-news banner. Nothing on the local feeds.

The same headline about road construction you ignored yesterday.

“Weird”

You open your audio software,

you hold your phone near the meteorite, and hit record.

The waveform rises and falls, like a dancing flame.

You name the file Frozen Flame.wav

You open your inbox.

Your cursor hovers over his name; Xeno.

Your oldest friend, four years older and like a brother to you.

He grew up just down the road with his mom,

back when everything felt simple.

Things changed when he turned 21

and went to work on an energy farm

owned by his estranged father’s company Xenos Industrial.

The energy farm sits on a stretch of windswept coastal farmland known as the Cerulean Peninsula,

built atop the ruins of an old spaceport.

It isn’t far from town,

but far enough that you haven’t seen him much lately.

Since then he’s grown distant, lost in forums about “doomsday asteroids” and “planet-killer trajectories.”

You attach a picture of the meteorite and the Frozen Flame.wav to a new email and type:

Subject: Meteorite?

Hey man, Found something.

Landed in my backyard around 4:20 AM. It’s playing music..?
Audio attached. Please tell me I’m not hallucinating.

You hit Send.

The reply lands in under three minutes.

Subject: MEGA

Incredible.
I’m almost certain it’s a fragment of MEGA, the meteor I’ve been tracking for months.
My models show MEGA is on a collision course with Earth.

It’s already breaking into fragments, which confirms everything.
But there’s hope.

We might still be able to stop it, I’ll need your help though.

Another fragment is near you, a girl named Cyan has it.
cyan_@angelic.com.
Contact her. Bring your fragment. We don’t have much time.

Your chair creaks as you lean back, reading it twice.

A memory of Xeno joking about the end of the world skitters through your mind and breaks apart.

You look at the stone. The melody is so gentle you could almost forget it’s there until you tilt your head, and it swells.

“Okay,” you whisper. “Okay.”

You find an old coffee tin and set the meteorite inside. The glow turns the tin’s interior a vivid aquamarine.

You close the lid carefully, listening -

The music muffles but doesn’t vanish.

You type to Cyan:

Hi. I got your email from Xeno.
I think we have the same problem.
I have a fragment of a meteorite, something he calls MEGA.
And according to him, so do you.
If you’re willing to meet, I’ll bring mine.
I think Xeno has a plan.

You hit Send, turn the chair to the window,

and sit with the coffee tin in your lap.

The night sky slowly gives way

to an orange band of light on the horizon as dawn approaches.

You lie down, the faint melody still audible from within the coffee tin.

Somewhere between one breath and the next,

you finally drift back to sleep.

You wake to your phone buzzing against your forehead.

From: Cyan
Subject: MEGA

Technically I still have the meteorite.
Either way, I want to help.
Meet at the Beach tonight

“Technically?” You ask out loud

You write back:

I’ll be there.

For the rest of the day you keep the coffee tin within arm’s reach.

As night falls, you fill a backpack with supplies -

you get the feeling you’ll be a while.

At sunset, you walk the long way to the beach and sit on the seawall, listening to the fragment hum through the metal.

The sky goes ink-blue. Streetlights blink alive.

At a quarter full, the moon feels a lot brighter than usual.

The beach is mostly empty, the only sound the hiss of the tide and the occasional gull crying out in the distance.

Near the driftwood line, a bonfire sends orange sparks into the dark.

A silhouette waits at the fire’s edge, one hand on her hip.

“Cyan?” you call.

She glances up. “That’s me.”

A sharp knife in her other hand catches your eye.

Your step stalls. “Hey. I, uh—”

“So how do you know Xeno?” she interrupts, eyes narrowing.

“We grew up together. He used to live right around here.”

Her suspicion eases. She nods.

You open the coffee tin,

the glow spills faintly as the melody leaks into the night.

You tell her about the crater, the fragments and MEGA.

“So what happened to your fragment”? You ask

She flips her knife point-up in one sudden, casual motion,

holding it inches from your face.

“WOAH—hey!” You stumble back, hands up.

Cyan laughs. “Relax!”

“You carved the meteorite into a knife?” You take a closer look.

It’s got the same subtle iridescent glow as your fragment, but intricately carved with sharp grooves like channels that guide and reflect the light.

“Why not?” she says. “It was a cool rock. Now it’s a cool knife.”

She offers it to you, handle first.

The moment you hold it, a faint melody rises from the blade.

Not the same as your fragment’s song - similar, but darker, edged with something almost menacing.

Cyan studies you, nodding “Beautiful, isn’t it.”

The fire cracks. The ocean breathes.

You realize you’ve both turned to look at the moon at the same time.

“So,” she says, “third fragment?”

“Third—there’s a third?” You ask

“Of course.” She kicks a charred log. Sparks scatter, then fade.

“They’ve been falling for weeks. Could be 15 by now! This one’s in an abandoned radio observatory in the forest outside the city. I’ve had a pin on it for a while… you’re down to do this, right? I mean, I thought thats why—”

“That’s near the hyper train maintenance station.” You confirm

“Exactly.” She dumps a handful of wet sand on the fire.

Steam rolls across your shins.

“If we’re careful, we’ll be there by dawn.”

You shoulder your backpack.

The tin thumps against your spine like a second heartbeat.

Cyan gestures toward the dark trail climbing the bluff.

“Let’s move,” she says, already walking.

You reach the Hypertrain Station and catch the midnight train.

You ride with Cyan in silence out of the suburbs and across miles of sleeping city until the neon thins into fields, then into the black ribs of forest outside the city.

By the time the train eases into the maintenance yard and the doors hiss, it’s almost dawn.

“Now!” Cyan whispers, almost shouting

You run through an open door and off the train while it’s stopped. You follow Cyan into a maze of Hypertrain maintenance infrastructure, through a chainlink fence and into the forest.

The air feels mild, and a bit cooler now.

Dew covers the leaves and slicks the dense rainforest terrain.

“Still heading in the right direction?” you ask.

Cyan’s eyes glow with the reflection of her GPS holo-display.

“Yup. East by northeast.” She tucks the display away and points.

“Cut through there.”

You reach a path, overgrown with giant ferns

and massive other-worldly plants.

Eventually you reach a moonlit clearing

where you both come to an abrupt stop.

The observatory rises out of the trees

like an ancient monument from a bygone era.

The satellite dish is enormous, sagging on its mount,

a white bowl painted with vines and graffiti.

A rectangle shaped building huddles beneath it,

windows scabbed by plywood.

A single bird calls out in the distance.

“Romantic” Cyan says, as she forces open the rusted doorway.

It’s dark except for a faint electronic pulse somewhere deep within the maze of rooms. The air smells like dust and burnt electronics.

Cyan clicks on her light.

The beam cuts through a control room fossilized in place: dead monitors, petri-dishes, coffee cups, a chair on its side.

Your shoes crunch through desiccated leaves.

“Holy shit” she whispers.

At the far end, where the satellite dish would feed into the instruments, something stands in a cradle of cables and steel.

A Security MECH.

Ten feet of industrial armor with limbs like excavator arms, shoulders belt-fed with tubing and wire. Its chest plate is open, and in that cavity, nestled like a heart, a stone glows aquamarine.

“The fragment,” you breathe.

You take one step. Two.

The room snaps to life.

A deep internal whirr. A flash. Red lines sweep the floor.

“ＷＡＲＮＩＮＧ,” a digitized voice booms, slightly off in pitch.

“ＬＡＳＥＲ… ＴＡＲＧＥＴＩＮＧ…

ＳＹＳＴＥＭ… ＡＣＴＩＶＡＴＥＤ.”

The MECH’s optics flare. Plates slide into place.

The cradle detaches.

It stands.

A Flash.

Cyan yelps and drops to a knee, clutching her shoulder.

A shallow burn scorches her jacket where the beam grazed her.

“That was close”

“Your knife!” you shout.

She fumbles; the knife skitters across the floor.

You dive, spin and scoop it up.

The MECH tracks you.

On its shoulder, a logo stares: XENOS INDUSTRIAL

Its torso pitches, servos whining.

You run straight at it.

At the last second you drop to a slide and thrust the

blade up into the cavity where the fragment sits.

The knife sinks into the exoskeleton.

For a heartbeat nothing happens.

Then everything happens at once.

The MECH shrieks in a voice made of metal.

Gears seize. White sparks fan out in a sheet.

The red targeting lines stutter and go out.

The machine slumps against its cables, hissing.

You wrench the fragment free.

It’s smaller than yours but brighter,

and its melody jumps across your skin like static.

“Come on!” you grab Cyan “These things self-repair!”

You guide her down the corridor.

Behind you, something clanks.

You make a run for it.

Just as you reach daylight Engines thunder overhead.

Wind slaps your face.

A hovercraft drops through the trees like it’s been here a hundred times. XENOS INDUSTRIAL is stencilled along the hull in white letters.

The ramp lowers. A figure jogs down - grease-stained jacket,

messy dark brown hair, eyes bright.

“Need a lift?” Xeno says.

You exhale so hard it’s almost a laugh. “How did you-“

“No time to explain!” He interrupts, gesturing toward the craft

The hovercraft skirts the forest edge, until you break through the

tree line and suddenly the world opens up.

You reach the Cerulean Peninsula -

Miles of solar arrays spread across coastal cliffs in geometric patterns,

while towering wind turbines turn in slow unison.

“Welcome to the Xenos Industrial Energy Farm” Xeno says

leaning into his headset mic, imitating a captain

“You live here?” Cyan asks, wincing as she peels her jacket

from her shoulder.

“Full-time caretaker,” he says.

“It’s mostly run by AI now. I just make sure everything runs smoothly.”

A silo swells on the horizon.

CERULEAN is painted down its side in letters the size of a building.

“Home sweet home,” Xeno says. He sets the hovercraft down beside an old crop-drone hangar patched with sheet metal.

By the time they touch down, the sun is high-nearly noon.

You realize you’ve been awake all night, nerves running on fumes.

Xeno waves you inside the hangar, takes the fragments without ceremony, and dives straight into his workbench setup.

His workshop is a cathedral of machines and monitors glowing with maps of orbits and weather systems.

He loads the fragments, sliding each stone

into a cradle wired to an acoustic scanner.

First your meteorite, then the observatory fragment

and cyan’s remarkably unscathed knife.

The speakers hum.

Tones braid together.

Your fragment’s melody pours through the room.

Cyan’s knife, when he holds it near a contact mic,

adds a faint harmonic, like a ghost singing harmony

from the back row along with the chorus of the Observatory fragment.

“They synchronize perfectly with MEGA,” Xeno murmurs, half to you, half to his machines. “Together they give me an exact lock.”

“For what?” you ask.

He points out the hangar window to the silo.

A 3D model of the structure rotates on a monitor,

skin peeling back in layers: grain elevators becoming fuel tanks,

access ladders becoming conduits,

a conical cap resolving into a command module.

“You turned a silo into a rocket,” you say, barely surprised.

“Reverse-engineered,” he corrects, but he’s smiling. “The goal here is to ram MEGA with the silo before it crosses into the dense atmosphere.”

“And if we don’t?” Cyan asks, expression flat.

Without saying a word, he swivels a screen toward you.

A simulation runs: a bluish-pink meteor with a tail falls

into the earth like a lit-match into gasoline.

Xeno rubs at the corner of his eye, suddenly looking older.

“Plan A was deflectors. Failed every simulation test. Plan B is the Silo Rocket. Built the override in case the targeting goes stupid.”

“Goes stupid?” you echo.

“Computers are unpredictable” he says. He taps a key. The scanner pings softly as it writes the fragments’ melodies into a targeting profile. “Good news: the lock quality is clean. Bad news: dawn comes fast.”

He straightens. “Get some rest guys.

Nothing more we can do tonight. We launch at first light.”

You glance at Cyan. She’s already nodding off,

her graceful demeanour giving in to ordinary human fatigue.

You want to argue for staying awake,

but your legs make the decision for you.

~

The barracks are quiet on the far side of the compound,

lined with rows of sleep pods glowing with a soft, amber light.

“Wake me if the world ends,” Cyan yawns as she climbs in.

“Sure,” you whisper back, too tired to laugh.

The hum of machinery fades as the pod seals around you.

Within moments, sleep drags you under.

The next morning, you wake to a deep blue sky,

heavy with stars fading into daylight.

Beyond the horizon, a pale glow gathers.

The first hint of dawn.

The wind turbines creak softly in the breeze,

their blades slicing the dim air like metronomes.

You knock on Cyan’s sleep pod.

You hear her rustle awake.

“Coming!” She pipes up

Together, you set off toward the silo.

Your footsteps crunch over gravel

as the hum of machinery grows louder.

Something catches your eye.

Then you see it.

You freeze.

In the east.

Low on the horizon, it hangs like a bluish-pink moon

with a trailing stream of light, glowing brighter than the dawn.

“MEGA” you whisper.

Cyan stares, transfixed. “It’s real…”

You both walk on in silence,

the imposing meteor shining like God’s lantern in the indigo sky.

The air tastes electric.

A strange déjà vu ripples through you; as if you’ve seen this all before, though you can’t place where.

A traveler at the end of a long journey, approaching a final destination.

“Where did you come from? What do you know? Who are you?”

The questions swirl in your mind as the silo comes into view,

glowing like a monument.

Floodlights paint it white-hot against the dim sky.

The earth trembles underfoot.

“Engines warming up” You say, half to your self half to Cyan

“Morning!” Xeno’s voice cuts through the hum as he hops down

from a scaffold, a coil of fuel hose slung over his shoulder.

His grin is tired but unshaken. “Ready to save the world?”

Cyan raises an eyebrow. “So what exactly happens when this thing explodes?”

“Best case?” Xeno says, wiping his hands on a rag. “We get a very impressive fireworks show.”

He tosses the rag aside and checks a fuel gauge. “Worst case? Total devastation. But don’t focus on that. Timing’s everything. We have to hit MEGA at the exact moment it enters the atmosphere which…” he glances at his watch “…is in about an hour.”

You wait in the control room with Cyan,

a glass-walled bunker across from the silo.

Time drags.

Forty minutes pass. The single window faces away from MEGA,

but you can see dawn spilling in: deep pink bleeding to red,

the turbines stark against the light.

The roar of the silo engines builds until

the walls hum and your teeth buzz.

Xeno bursts through the door “We’re almost at one hundred percent,” he says, voice clear with focus. “This is it.”

Suddenly, his console flashes crimson.

A harsh alarm splits the air, and a synthetic voice stutters to life:

ＴＡＲＧＥＴＴＩＮＧＳＹＳＴＥＭＦＡＩＬＵＲＥ

ＴＡＲＧＥＴＴＩＮＧＳＹＳＴＥＭＦＡＩＬＵＲＥ

Cyan stiffens. “What does that mean?”

“I… I don’t understand.” Xeno slams the side of the monitor, eyes flicking across numbers.

Cyan glances at you with concern.

Xeno curses, half to himself. “The fragments were perfect.

The lock was clean.

The system just won’t hand control to the autopilot…”

He falls silent, shoulders sagging.

“There’s only one option now,” he says finally, voice flat.

“Either I go… or we all go.”

You feel the floor tilt beneath you. “What do you mean?”

He looks out the narrow window at the silo, engines breathing smoke.

“I’m going up.”

“What? Xeno, no. You’re joking, right?” You already know from the look on his face that he isn’t joking.

“If I don’t go,” he says with a small, almost amused laugh, “...you know what happens.”

He rests a hand on the console. “This is why I built the manual override. The AI can run things here without me. Better to go out a hero than a -”

“NO!” You cut him off. “No, man, we’ll fix it, we’ll figure something out, you’re not-”

He lays a steady hand on your shoulder. His eyes, calm and sharp, have never looked more like an older brother’s.

Your eyes well up. Your vision blurs.

“Hey,” he says softly, “Trust me”

Xeno picks up his helmet “You two stay put. If something goes sideways, hit this,” he says, pointing to a lever labeled CONTAINMENT. “If everything goes right, you'll have front-row seats to the best fireworks show in history.”

He clips the helmet on “Say a prayer” he says, nodding once before closing the glass visor.

For a moment the glass reflects you both back at yourselves; tired and terrified - and then he’s gone, running across the gantry toward the ladder that vanishes into the silo’s side.

You and Cyan sit.

You listen to the noise climb until you feel it in your chest.

On the main monitor, Xeno’s telemetry scrolls: heart rate steady, oxygen good, a tiny dot moving through the command module like a very calm ant. Your throat is dry enough to crack.

“Almost time” Cyan says, looking at a count you hadn’t noticed. She reaches for your arm and grabs hold.

Somewhere outside, clamps release.

A synthetic voice counts down with indifference.

“Liftoff”

The window goes black with smoke. The monitors show the silo leaping upward, CERULEAN sliding down its side like a word being erased.

“Two minutes to intercept.” Cyan announces

“MEGA entering the atmosphere,” you reply

The rocket burns a line toward the imposing visitor.

It steadies, corrects, steadies again. You think of Xeno playing StarBlaze in the arcade as kids, driving the space ship into the final boss with ease as everyone cheers him on.

“Ten Seconds to impact,” Cyan whispers. Her fingers bite crescents into your sleeve.

“Five Seconds!”

“One…”

Suddenly, everything goes blank.

First, chaos.

Then flame.

Then smoke.

And through the ringing in your skull, a voice:

Cyan’s voice.

“You’re okay.”

Her words pull you back into your body.

You stumble to your feet, and together you run.

The control room falls away behind you,

a fading silhouette in a storm of fire and vapor.

You don’t stop until you’ve crossed the perimeter fence

and burst into the open wheat fields,

their golden stalks swaying like a sea under a scorched sky.

You collapse in the grass, lungs burning. Cyan falls beside you, gasping.

MEGA shatters overhead in a chain of silent explosions,

a cosmic tapestry unraveling itself.

Millions of fragments streak across the heavens at once,

painting the sky in a torrent of impossible colors,

blues like glacial glass, pinks that bleed into molten violet.

Hypercolor rainfalls of light cascade through the upper atmosphere,

each burning piece a star born only to die in seconds.

You can do nothing but watch. The sheer scale of it renders you weightless, a speck beneath an apocalypse turned to art.

“He did it,” you whisper, voice breaking, laughter and tears together.

“The crazy bastard… he really did it.”

A dawn chorus rises from the fields, stirred by the alien sunrise.

“Thank you,” you look to the sky, not sure if you’re speaking to Xeno, to the world, or to something even larger.

You look at Cyan, her hair haloed by the strange dawn,

her expression caught between wonder and disbelief.

Glittering shards of frozen meteor drift lazily around her, landing in her hair, on your clothes, melting into nothing.

The melody from the meteorite hums faintly in your memory, as if the fragments are still singing from the heavens.

Gentle, distant, but impossibly clear.

Cyan says nothing, only stares skyward

with wide eyes and a trembling smile.

You lie back in the grass, staring up at the radiant pink sky

as if it might blink out any second,

afraid to move and break the spell.

The melody lingers. The wheat sways.

“Am I dreaming,” you whisper, “or did that really just happen?”