I briefly glanced at the holo as the barista poured my morning coffee. The news was on, with the same headlines I felt like I’d been seeing for months. “Tensions with China at breaking point,” captioned the image of a heavily made-up woman in a sports jacket talking to the camera.

I didn’t much care. It had been going on my whole life, the terror threats, the war threats, the trade sanctions. Stupid politicians bickering about stupid things. Nothing would come of it, nothing ever did.

The only real news were the Exhuman events, when one of them would show up without warning and knock over a city or two, or ten, before finally biting it on live TV. Morbid, gripping, terrifying, and thankfully rare. It had been months since the last one.

“Tall black-eye with foam for Harris Wynn?” asked the barista at the counter, announcing my drink. I took it and dropped an empty credit chit in the tip jar.

It had been a long month at work. Our release had already been postponed twice, and if we couldn’t lock in a deployment window this week for the next version of our app, we’d be held up another month and have to do two deployments at once. Everyone was rushing around like crazy blaming everyone else for everything and it was just a huge mess.

And the thing was, everyone was mostly right. It was everyone else’s fault. Our server cores had a forced update which broke some functionality in the app, and our data provider was still missing some fields we needed. With all the changes needed to fix those unexpected issues, we were way behind on the stuff we were actually supposed to get done. But what I think my coworkers were all missing was that our delays caused other people’s delays, and other people’s delays caused the delays which caused our delays.

Sometimes I wondered, if we just shut the app down altogether if the domino effect would bring the whole world crashing down, if not just for a few minutes. But then I remembered that I just worked for a crappy solutions shop that did random contract work on programming cores, and nobody would miss us, or me, if we just vanished off the face of the earth. Just another contract to renegotiate for someone, another mild inconvenience in another life.

What a depressing and exhausting way to live.

I sat in my chair and pulled out my keyboard, taking a sip of my coffee. Bitter and hot, just how I was feeling at the moment. I saw a couple people watching the holo in the break room and considered telling them to get back to work, but thought I should get some work done myself first, or I wouldn’t have much leg to stand on.

I frowned as I scrolled through the list of defects. Still dozens of critical issues open even after the builds last night. Four of them open in my section. I read through the details of each, trying to figure out what we changed that could have possibly caused them.

I assigned the most difficult-looking one of them to Yoseph, a nice guy on my team who always did his work too fast and asked around to see if he could help others, and marked two more as closed; one was probably already fixed, and the other would get re-opened further down the line, but I’d have more time to work it then. Then I sat down and pulled open the code to look at the last issue.

Coding had undergone a revolution in the past hundred years. Used to be computers were all 1’s and 0’s, and coding was just a bunch of instructions written with those 1’s and 0’s to make the computer do things. Now instead of computers we had quantum cores. Instead of just 1 and 0, we had analog states with infinite gradients of values. We had quantum entanglement, so infinite instructions could be run in parallel and data could be ubiquitous across all threads. We had hyper-states, where data on the core could be programmed to program itself.

People had proclaimed it would be a golden age of computing, but in practice, we did the same things with the cores as we did with older computers, just faster and cheaper. Now it was possible to have infinitely powerful machines, make them infinitely small, make them incredibly cheap. We went from having computing in everyone’s pocket to…still having computing in everyone’s pocket. Yeah, we could make a personal core the size of a flea, but nobody wanted that because you’d just lose it. So handheld touch-holo mobiles were still the norm.

The only real change, I thought, was that programming got a lot less logical and a lot more simulation-based, and that inconvenienced me personally greatly. Or so I liked to imagine. Old digital computers were a relic before my era, and I’d never actually coded for one. I certainly wasn’t enough of a nerd to look around just so I could play with some stupid antique.

I’d almost finished my coffee when the people in the break room (and there were a lot more of them now) let out a collective shriek. I wondered if some sports team had scored, and why it seemed like I was the only guy in the building who could actually do his job. I should film this so next time people are wondering why we’re all so behind, I can show this video around.

I was, of course, curious what the whole assembly was about, but wasn’t about to get up and make a late appearance now. I figured if it was important, someone would tell me on the way back to their cube.

I finished my changes on the defect and started off a build to run some simulations on. Hopefully this would work and keep our numbers looking good enough for the brass to green-light the release window for this week. I was getting tired of the long hours and working weekends, and while I obviously didn’t have the winningest personality out there, I felt the number of hours my job was eating out of my life was turning me into a bitter zombie.

My build was almost done when someone came stumbling out the breakroom. I recognized him as one of the interns we had this quarter. Bryan…or, Ryan, or something.

“No, no, no, no, no, no!” he kept yelling as he backed away from the room, and came bumping into my cube.

“Hey there, Br…Ry…buddy,” I said. “Y’know, we don’t pay our interns to bumble about in the break room. How’s that metrics report looking?” I was trying to be friendly with the kid, but he just looked at me with a face like a fish. Blank eyes, open mouth. Very bad posture.

“Kid, I gotta ask, what the heck is wrong with you?”

He just gaped for another few moments before he sputtered something about needing to go and fled. Weird kid. But it got me nervous…what was going on over there?

As surreptitiously as possible, I opened a news site on my work computer and browsed the headlines. They all said the same thing, or variants thereof.

“War with China”, “China launches first-strike”, “Several west-coast cities hit”, “Skyweb shoots down dozens of missiles”, “Evacuation orders pending for all major cities”.

What was this? An elaborate hoax? This wasn’t possible, we’d been at China’s throat for years and years now, why would they suddenly decide to attack us now? Today? I opened other news channels and they all read the same types of things. Liberal and conservative outlets alike, no way this could be a hoax.

Someone screamed “THAT’S US!” from the break room and I ran over to the glass walls to see what they were screaming about. It wasn’t us, not technically. It was Philadelphia, which was only a couple dozen miles from us, and it was live footage of missiles coming down on it.

The camera was on street level, pointed at the sky which was black and red with smoke trails. Missiles were pouring out of the heavens like slow-moving rain, and as I watched, I saw some of them break apart far up in the sky into dozens of smaller missiles to rain on a larger area.

None of them were touching the ground though. Lasers from above, looking like nothing more than a transparent-purple distortion were slicing through the missiles like they weren’t even solid. Fired from one of the Skyweb satellites, it must be. One missile hit didn’t explode immediately, but simply split into two half-missiles, cut completely down the middle, and as they continued to fall, they slowly drifted apart revealing all the black and grey metal innards of the thing before another laser beamed through them and replaced them with an explosion.

From the cameraman’s point of view, it looked like hell on earth. Missile debris the size of cars fell from the sky and punched holes in buildings or anything else in their way. The laser beams, though small-looking in the air, were huge on the ground, and cleaved through everything in their path effortlessly. An entire bus was struck and the back quarter of it was cleanly sheared from the rest, the edges glowing white-hot. The pavement under the bus had a line etched in it going who-knows how far down, like a huge invisible cleaver dropped through the street.

I felt a scream coming out of my throat and realized it had been there for a while. For minutes, I had been standing there, staring at the holo and just screaming. I felt something touching me and saw Yoseph pulling my arm and telling me to sit down, to calm down. I couldn’t comprehend it though. All I could see was the end of the world unfurling in front of me. Two angry gods fighting it out, and we were caught under their feet. If Skyweb missed even a single target, the whole city would be gone. If it didn’t, there wouldn’t be any city left.

“Snap out of it man. We have to get to shelter. Come on.” Yoseph was leading the others out and away from the holo. On the faces of the others, I saw the same shock and terror that I knew was on mine, but on Yoseph’s there was just an angry determination. It made me hate him.

“Why would I listen to you?” I yelled, more than asked. “Can’t you see the world is ending?”

“If we get to the shelter the world might not end for us. Same for everyone else who does.”

“You’re insane!” I said. I can’t believe Yoseph was taking advantage of this catastrophe to make a power play. Didn’t he understand that something bigger than us was going on here?

“Staying here is insane. If you’re right and this is the end of the world, they’ll need our help to put it back together. Come on, I won’t ask you again.”

“You’re bluffing. You’re lying. You’re crazy! We’re in the suburbs in the middle of nowhere, and Skyweb is up there protecting us. Nobody’s going to nuke us here.”

“Okay man. Take care of yourself. I’m taking these people to the shelter.” I waited for him to argue more with me but he just left with most of the crowd in tow. Well if he thought I was going to follow him, he was even crazier than I thought.

I would never learn what happened to those people. I would never learn that the focus of Skyweb’s defenses were on major metropolitan areas and military facilities, and that smaller areas like where I lived and worked were totally unprotected. I would never learn that the high-altitude MIRVs had split and would detonate in a huge area surrounding the primary targets.

I stood there, watching the holo at the insane lightshow as two gods duked it out for another ten minutes before a white hot glow flooded through the windows. I turned to look and saw a huge red dome, crested with white, rapidly expanding. I felt my eyes and skin burn as the light of the sun blinded me, and then I heard and felt a thunderclap louder than anything I’d heard in my life. And then I felt nothing at all.