As far as Cale could tell, it was a drone. He’d caught sight of it randomly while looking out the window of his squad car. It appeared to be equipped with some sort of blacklight, and unless he was looking right at it, he’d never have noticed it in the first place. Normally, it wasn’t a big deal. People flew drones around all the time. But this one looked like it was over the altitude limit, and that meant it was a threat to aircraft coming into the Nanaimo Airport.

It hung in the air, still as it could be, high above Ladysmith Harbour. For at least a minute he sat in his police cruiser, watching it.

“Dispatch,” he said into his radio. “Call Ten-Bravo.”

“Go ahead Ten-Bravo,” the dispatcher replied.

“I have eyes on what appears to be a drone above Ladysmith Harbour. Can we get another set of eyes on that?”

“Standby, Ten-Bravo,” came the voice from the radio. He knew it would be a few minutes. Ever since they’d switched over to the EComm dispatch system over 60 kilometres away in the Lower Mainland it was normal to wait.

Thankfully, he didn’t have to wait long. “Ten-Bravo call Ten-Tango,” his radio rang out. It was a different voice. The voice of his Watch Commander, Sergeant Boone.

“Ten-Bravo,” he replied.

“I see it,” Boone replied. “I’m up on Sixth. Looks over a thousand feet. Equipped with a blacklight. Dispatch, can you call it in to Transport Canada, Nanaimo ATC?”

“Ten-Four.”

The exchange was over quickly. There wasn’t much he could do about it from the ground. They had their own drones, of course, but it wasn’t worth putting it in the air in the middle of the night to knock another drone out of the sky.

Instead, Cale went back to doing what Ladysmith RCMP Officers usually did: to hurry up and wait until his watch ended at eight. He sat along the side of the highway taking in the common sights of the night. The flash of the stop lights further down the highway, the blinking light of the cell phone tower in Yellowpoint. The moon was exceptionally bright that night.

There were precisely two states in his line of work. Either sweet fuck all, or the shit hitting the fan. Truth told, Cale didn’t know which one he preferred.

For the most part, Ladysmith was little more than a hub. A cottage-country style town on the eastern coast of Vancouver Island known mostly for three stop lights, a world-class Christmas parade, kayaking and being the hometown of Pamela Anderson. He might have called it a crossroads, except there was nowhere to cross over to. It was more like a straight through. People stopped for gas, maybe some shopping at the town’s prestige shops along First Avenue, but little else.

Still, it boasted a population of well over eight thousand people, mostly trades workers, retirees and young families. At least it wasn’t a major city. The town certainly had its issues with homelessness, drugs and shady characters, but most of the time was spent mediating disagreements, stopping drunken brawls and the occasional theft. The last murder in town happened over a decade prior, and it wasn’t common for things to escalate beyond general fisticuffs between residents.

Cale found himself lost in reverie for a few minutes before his radio rang out again. “Ten-Bravo, call Ten-Tango,” Boone’s voice called.

“Ten-Bravo,” Cale replied.

“Are you seeing that, Ten-Bravo?”

Cale had completely forgotten about the drone, and he looked out the window to where it was. It was still there, but was… brighter?

No, not brighter. It was bigger. Much bigger. He trained his eyes on it. The edges of the light were difficult to make out, but they seemed to oscillate against the sky. That didn’t seem right. Drones didn’t behave that sort of way.

Suddenly, it flashed brightly, causing Cale to instinctively look away. When he looked back, it appeared to be gone.

Two seconds later, the light returned in full force. The air around it seemed to ripple as it burst outward and encompassed the entire area. He felt a stab of panic deep within his gut as it continued to spread, making no effort to slow or stop.

His radio started to squeal at him, as though every frequency, civilian or police band, were playing all at one as the light spread across the sky. It reached to the horizon and continued to grow as it touched the waters of the Harbour itself.

With dread, he realised the light was consuming everything from the water to the shore. Then he realised it was coming straight for him. He threw up his arms in shock, hoping to protect himself from the light as he, too, bathed in it.

Around him, the air glowed a deep violet. It was as if he was standing in the light, and yet unlike other lights, this one didn’t cast a shadow. It merely passed through everything.

Whatever it was, that was no drone. He quickly got out of his car. Everything he could see was bathed in that strange light, but it brought no sensation that he could discern. His mind reeled. What was it? Was it radioactive? Some weird weather phenomenon he’d never heard of? A bomb of some sort? Maybe a cosmic event? Aliens?

He got the impression that the light continued to expand despite the fact that he couldn’t make out where the edges were anymore. He was inside of it, and that’s all there was to it.

The streetlights around him all went dead at once, and the God-awful noises erupting from his radio ceased.

For a brief moment, the night was quiet. Not even the animals made noise.

That’s when the ground started to roll and shake. He felt himself thrown off-balance as an Earthquake ripped through the region. For a few seconds it threw him around, and then calmed.

Then the light faded, and silence reigned. He sat there for several moments before he heard the animals resume their night calls.

“What the hell was that?” he asked nobody in particular.

“Dispatch, call Ten-Tango,” he heard Boone call over the radio. Cale got back in his car, expecting dispatch to respond. It remained silent.

“Ten-Tango,” came another voice. It was Shelly Littleton. She had been behind the wheel of the detachment’s only SUV that night. “Call Ten-Charlie.”

“Ten-Charlie, standby,” Boone asked. “Ten-Bravo, copy?”

“Copy,” Cale responded.

“EComm seems to be down,” Boone said. “Cell network’s down. Do either of you have a signal?”

“Negative,” Shelly responded.

Cale briefly checked his work and personal phones. “Copy that, no signal here either,” he said.

“You both saw that, right? The light?”

“Affirmative,” Cale said.

“All right,” Boone said. “Looks like we’re going to have to wake some people up.”

“I’d be surprised if anyone managed to sleep through that,” Shelly added.

“Charlie, head back into town. Check the gas stations, make sure there’s no damage from that quake. Bravo, head toward the airport. I’m going to check the landlines and see if I can’t get ahold of dispatch.”

“Alexa,” he said. “What time is it?”

“It is four-nineteen AM,” Alexa replied in a monotone voice.

Ryan groaned to himself. He didn’t have to be up for two hours, and yet as hard as he tried, he just couldn’t get back to sleep. He’d tried several positions: on either side, on his stomach. He’s even tried the half-military crawl position which always seemed to work, but he just seemed to feel more and more awake. He’d even stayed up late and fell asleep watching YouTube videos. By every right he should have been exhausted.

Yet, he wasn’t in the least. He was wide awake.

With a grunt of frustration, he swung his legs over the side of his bed and reached for his phone. He took a moment to check his notifications. There was nothing new.

With a sigh, he resigned himself to an early wake-up. He didn’t have any plans that night after work except to do his homework, so he could just go to bed early if he was tired. Besides, he was pretty sure the Tim Hortons opened at five, and he could nurse a coffee and get some homework done before he even left for work that day. Thankfully he didn’t have any classes scheduled.

Ryan stood up, stretched and then made his way to the bathroom, flicking the lights on.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the sudden presence of light. His short brown hair was a mess, mussed all about as a result of tossing and turning during the night. He rubbed his face and felt the prickle of his day-old stubble. Ryan reached for the razor when something caught his eye in the mirror. A light reflected back at him from the window in his living room.

Ryan suddenly stopped what he was doing, unnerved by the strange sight. He walked over to his patio and pulled the curtains open, then looked out into the sky.

His heart threatened to burst out of his chest when he saw it. It was some kind of… explosion? A low violet light that was expanding so rapidly and enveloping everything in its path. He took a step back and fell backward just as it approached his balcony. Once on the floor, he scrambled back, watching the light through the curtains.

And then it simply passed through them. He put up an arm in defence, but it ignored him entirely, enveloping him in the light.

He closed his eyes, expecting it to hurt, but he felt… nothing. Oddly, even with his eyes closed he could see the light as though he were staring right into it. Like the light itself was inside of him, all through him.

He opened his eyes and noticed immediately that the light, the blacklight, cast no shadow. Rather, it seemed to be a field.

He looked up at the old blacklight reactive poster on his wall. It was old, an image of a tree in the shape of a woman reaching to the sky. It was lit up brighter than he’s ever seen. He moved his hands around in the light, and noticed the tiniest glint of a glowing particle passing through his skin.

He examined it carefully as it moved. It seemed to be on a particular track, and went to cross into his torso before he moved out of the way. He put his hand in front of it and watched the pass through.

Then he noticed a second one.

Then a third.

His entire apartment was filled with them. As he watched them, they continued to slow until they came to a halt.

For the briefest of moments, everything was still and peaceful.

Then the power went out and he felt the building shake violently.

An earthquake? They were common on Vancouver Island, of course, but most of them were only small tremors.

This one, on the other hand, had to be at least a six on the Richter Scale. As his apartment shook violently around him, he chose instead to wait out the quake. After all, they usually didn't last more than a few seconds.

This one lasted longer. His pictures were beginning to fall off of the wall. He watched in shock as the small figurines and knick knacks he'd collected since he moved out on his own began to clatter off of shelves.

Moments later, the shaking stopped, and the field of blacklight surrounding him began to dim. Before long, Ryan was left in nothing but pitch black quiet.

Terra awoke to being shaken violently. This was nothing new. She had vivid dreams regularly and was woken by someone shaking her at least twice a year. Her stepfather used to joke she could sleep through a nuclear holocaust.

“Terra,” the voice of her roommate said. “Come on, get up!”

“Wha?” was all she could articulate. Lily moved back from her as Terra sat up in bed and looked blearily over to her friend. “What’s up?”

“There was an earthquake,” Lily said. “It was huge, the power’s out. I don’t get how you could sleep through that.”

An earthquake? Perhaps her stepfather wasn’t too far off.

She rubbed the sleep from her eye. “Is everything okay?”

“A bunch of stuff fell over,” she said. “We should probably get outside the building just in case. I heard a lot of cracking in the walls, and there was this…” she trailed off.

“What?”

Lily shook her head. “I don’t know, maybe I was seeing things,” she said. “Get your slippers on we should go downstairs. This is an old building, we don’t want to get caught in it if it falls down.”

“That’s an option?” Terra’s voice betrayed her worry. She got up from her bed and put on her robe, grabbed her cigarettes and put her slippers on and set to follow Lily. Their living room bookcase was flat on the floor. That should have woken her up, but she slept right through it. She knew she was a deep sleeper, but that seemed to be a little overkill. She had been dreaming, too. She couldn’t remember it for the life of her, which was odd, but it seemed like something she should remember.

When they got into the apartment hallway, she could see a couple of her neighbours already making their way toward the stairs.

“Hey, you guys okay?” asked Ryan, their next-door neighbour as he held the stairwell door open for them.

“Yeah,” Lily replied as they walked down the stairs. “Just shaken.”

“Did you see it?” he asked. “The light?”

“What light?” Terra asked.

“There was this weird… I dunno if I can even call it a light, it went through everything and never cast a shadow. It was more like a… a force field or something.”

“A force field?” Terra looked at him sceptically. “You watch too much Star Wars.”

“No, I saw it too,” Lily said. “Like a blacklight, right? I thought I was imagining it.”

“Maybe you’re both imagining things,” said Terra as she pushed open the exit door and stepped into the night. She instinctively pulled a cigarette from her back and put it in her mouth, turning to face her roommate and neighbour. Others started to gather in front of the building. All down the street the lights were out. In fact, the only light she could see were what stars were visible, and the diffused light of the moon from behind the clouds. The lack of light coming from down gave the moon’s light a more blue shade.

“I’m telling you,” Ryan said. “It was some kind of… ultraviolet field. I don’t even know how else to explain it. There were these… particles.”

“Probably a transformer blowing or something,” Terra said as she lit her smoke.

Ryan frowned at her. “I know what I saw, Terra.”

“I’m not saying you're lying, but come on… listen to yourself,” she said. “A field? What, like a force field? This isn’t… isn’t…” she began to trail off as the clouds slid away from the view of the moon and she found herself speechless. “I… holy shit.”

As Lily and Ryan craned their necks to see what Terra was looking at, the moon came into full view from behind the clouds. First, it was bigger. Second, it was brighter. Third… it wasn’t the moon. At least not any sort of moon she’d lived under her whole life.

It was full and blue. And seemed to reflect more light than the moon she was used to. As far as she could tell, that was because the moon was ocean blue… at least mostly. Parts of it were green, other parts brown or yellow.

It wasn’t a moon, it was a planet complete with oceans and landmasses.

Terra’s cigarette fell from her mouth.

“What the hell is that?” Lily asked. "What’s going on?"

"I dunno," Ryan answered.

Around them, Terra could hear the gasps and nervous chatter of her other neighbours as they caught sight of the planet hanging low in the sky.

Lily pulled her phone out of her pocket. “I’ve got no signal at all,” she said. “No internet. What do we do?”

"I think we'd better get downtown. That's probably where everyone's going to gather," Ryan suggested. “I’m going to get the truck. You two coming?”

Terra nodded without breaking her gaze. The sight of the moon was easily the most beautiful thing she’d ever said. It was also the most terrifying. She pulled her own phone out of her pocket and checked it. It was as Lily had said: no signal. She finally looked back to her friends. “We need to find out what’s going on,” she said. “I’m going to run back upstairs and change,” she said.

“We don’t know if it’s safe,” Lily said.

Terra stabbed a finger at the blue moon. “If that thing is real, either I’m dreaming, or nothing is safe.”

Lily looked to her grimly for a moment, then nodded. “Okay,” she said. She looked to Ryan. “Give us five?”

Ryan nodded.

Cale swore to himself. The power was out all over town. All the traffic lights were down. Thankfully the radio was working, but they were on a propane generator auxiliary power system. It was supposed to have been a boring night, and he was only a few hours away from being off work. Now he was speeding up the highway trying to reach the Nanaimo RCMP via radio. The problem was, their frequency was eerily silent. The earthquake had been massive, however, and there was a chance their radio tower had been damaged. But even the Fire and Ambulance frequencies were down. Not even Air Traffic Control seemed to be working. He didn’t know what it meant, but he had a bad feeling about it.

As he approached the airport, however, he could see a line of cars backed up on the adjacent stretch of highway. People were outside of their vehicles, lingering about. At first, he assumed there was some sort of accident.

But something was off about it. Something about the lay of the land didn’t seem right. As he pulled up alongside the backed-up vehicles, he saw a group of people clustered near the front, standing in front of a copse of trees.

A copse of trees that were smack-dab in the middle of the road.

He could scarcely believe his eyes. A landslide? No, there would be more fallen trees. As he slowed down, he turned on his external floodlights and shone them toward the end of the road.

It was dense forest. The people lingering nearby turned their attention toward him and waved him down.

“Hey!” called a big, burly looking man. He had the look of a truck driver, and assumed him to be the driver of the big rig at the front of the train of vehicles. “Officer, you seeing this?”

Cale parked and got out of his care. He said nothing, but had to be certain of what it was he was seeing. He walked to the edge of the highway and looked down. There was nothing but forest, and the ground level looked to be about ten feet lower than it should have been. As if that wasn’t strange enough, there were no signs of landslide, and one tree stood perfectly at the edge of the road looking like it had been sliced in half by a razor. He reached out and touched it.

It was perfectly smooth. He pointed his flashlight down to the road. The asphalt of the highway seemed to be cut with the same sort of perfection. Careful not to lose his balance he knelt down and slid his hand across the edge of the pavement.

Smooth. Just like the tree. Worse yet, he noticed as he followed the edge of the pavement, it appeared to flow into the distance, cutting directly through the north part of the airport. He could see people mulling about near the terminal building. He turned the other direction. The smooth line also continued to the west as far as he could see. A building at the consumer storage facility looked to have collapsed, likely as a result of being cut into by whatever had done the job to the road.

And on the other side of the cut? Trees. Just… wilderness.

Cale turned back to the truck driver. “Did you see anything?” he asked. “Mister…?”

“Randy,” he said. “Randy Curtis. I drive for Mosaic Forest Products. And… I don’t really know what it was I saw. Was just coming up to the airport when everything looked like it was under a blacklight. I pulled over right where the truck is now just as the earthquake started.” Randy gave him a sigh. “I could see the road ahead just fine then… Just… boom. It was there, then it was this.” He gestured to the wilderness.

“No landslide? No idea what could have made this cut in the ground?”

Randy shook his head. “Like I said, it just changed. There was a rush of wind, though. Like the air pressure changed. But… that’s it.”

He turned back to the others. “Did anyone else see anything?”

There was a steady movement from everyone. They were all shaking their heads.

“What do you figure?” Randy asked. He looked somewhat panicked. “This is some sci-fi shit. Aliens?”

Minutes before, Cale might have scoffed, rolled his eyes or ignored Randy entirely for bringing up the idea of aliens.

Right then, however, Cale couldn’t rule them out. This was unprecedented. Cale flashed his light into the distance, trying to see how far the cut in the ground went. It seemed to curve to the south in both directions.

“I don’t know,” Cale answered. “I’ll need to–”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Randy suddenly cried out, cutting him off. He had turned away from Cale, his face illuminated by the moonlight. Cale found himself and every head present turning their heads southward, looking toward the moon as it appeared from behind a cloud.

What hung in the sky was no moon.

“That’s a goddamned planet,” Randy exclaimed.

Randy wasn’t wrong. It was blue, as though it were covered in ocean. And yet, there were landmasses clearly visible. Even cloud cover. It reminded him of the famous image of the Blue Marble. Except in this case, the landmasses were entirely unfamiliar. It didn’t look like the Earth. But that made sense, since they were on Earth.

He paused, then pointed the flashlight back into the wilderness. At least, they should be on Earth. Suddenly, Cale wasn’t so sure anymore.

“Ten-Tango, call Ten-Charlie,” his radio rang out. It was Shelly’s voice. She sounded frantic.

"Go, Ten-Charlie," Boone's irritated voice said.

"The moon, sir,” she said. “It’s not… I mean, it’s different. It’s not ours.”

There was a prolonged silence from Boone’s end of the exchange. “I’m going to need a ten-nine on that,” he said.

Cale took the opportunity to speak up. “Ten-Charlie’s right,” he said. “I’ve got eyes on… a planet in the sky. Sergeant, there’s an ocean on that planet. Can’t you see it?”

“Standby,” Boone replied. “I don’t have line of sight.”

A few moments passed, and Boone’s voice came back. The tone had changed noticeably. “Ahh, ten-four, Ten– Christ. What the hell is that?”

Cale had never heard Boone break radio etiquette before.

“There’s more,” Cale said. “I’m out by the airport. The road’s gone. As far as I can tell, everything north of the airport is… unfamiliar territory.”

Another moment of silence from Boone’s end punctuated the air. Cale could tell he was attempting to process what was going on.

“What do you mean unfamiliar territory?”

“I mean where the road continues north of the highway there’s nothing but forest. Forest that looks like it’s been here for some time. The landscape looks like it was sliced with a razor on both sides.”

“Ten-Tango,” Shelly spoke up over the radio. “Thetis Island is gone.”

Another moment of silence. “What do you mean gone?”

If Thetis Island was gone, then it meant that the cut in the land continued to the south. From the looks of the curve, he suspected it met somewhere south of town. Cale got a gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He knew what the feeling was. It all added up. The planet hanging in the sky. The strange cut in the ground, the loss of power and communications with anyone outside of Ladysmith. He desperately didn’t want to put it into words, but he knew he had to.

“Sir,” Cale said. “I’m not sure we’re on Earth anymore.”

A pregnant silence erupted from the radio. Boone had keyed in his transceiver, but wasn’t saying anything. The sound went dead for a few moments before Boone finally replied. “People are going to panic,” Boone said. “I’m going to go wake up the town council. I want both of you back here, pronto. We’ll rendezvous at City Hall in an hour. Try to keep people from freaking out.”