Sezon was halfway home when she caught herself thinking about death again.
It had become such an ordinary part of her commute that she barely reacted to it anymore. Some days she wondered what dying would feel like. Other days, whether there was anything afterward. Most often, though, she found herself returning to the same question.
'What's the point of all this?'
She glanced at the clock on her dashboard, then at the endless procession of red taillights stretching along the freeway.
Another day gone. Another eight hours of her life exchanged for money that would disappear into bills, groceries, and whatever other expenses happened to find her before the next paycheck. Tomorrow would be much the same, followed by another tomorrow, and another, until enough of them had passed that people would start calling her old.
It was a depressing thought, although she supposed most of her thoughts had been depressing lately.
She wasn't entirely sure when things had gotten this bad. Nothing particularly terrible had happened to her. There was no single tragedy she could point to, no great injustice that had ruined her life. She simply couldn't shake the feeling that she was spending it on something she didn't care about.
And what bothered her most was how ordinary that seemed to be.
People went to work, came home, found ways to entertain themselves, and repeated the process for decades. They made plans, worried about money, argued over things that wouldn't matter in a hundred years, and somehow managed to convince themselves that the whole arrangement was worthwhile.
Maybe they knew something she didn't.
Or maybe they just didn't think about it as much.
'Must be nice.'
Sezon sighed and adjusted her grip on the steering wheel.
It wasn't as though she had never wanted anything from life. Quite the opposite. She could remember being younger and imagining all the things she might someday experience, all the extraordinary places she might visit and discoveries she might witness. Back then, the future had seemed almost impossibly large.
Now she had trouble getting excited about the weekend.
'Maybe I should just leave everything behind.'
She'd considered it before. Quit her job, sell what she owned, go somewhere she'd never been. The idea was appealing until she remembered that money would eventually run out, and wherever she went, she'd still have to find some way to live.
A different road leading back to the same place.
'Wonderful.'
Her thoughts drifted toward darker possibilities, ones she'd become increasingly reluctant to examine too closely.
She didn't have a plan. She wasn't even certain she wanted to die. There were mornings when the prospect of another forty or fifty years exhausted her, and others when something as simple as a good meal made her glad she'd gotten out of bed.
She wished she could make sense of that contradiction.
'So what, then? Keep going until something changes?'
The question had followed her for months.
It was still unanswered when the car in front of her slammed on its brakes.
Sezon didn't immediately register what was happening. Her mind had wandered so far from the road that the sudden appearance of bright red brake lights seemed almost disconnected from the rest of the world.
Then the distance between the two vehicles collapsed.
"WHAT THE FUCK!"
Her foot struck the brake pedal hard enough to send a jolt through her leg.
The tires shrieked.
She jerked the wheel left, narrowly avoiding the rear of the sedan as her car lurched out of its lane and onto the narrow shoulder beside the concrete median.
For an instant, all she could see was the barrier rushing toward her.
She corrected the wheel, felt the rear tires lose traction, and nearly spun sideways before the car finally came to a shuddering stop.
Sezon remained motionless, both hands gripping the wheel.
Her breathing was embarrassingly loud inside the cabin.
"...Holy shit."
She looked at the concrete barrier beside her, close enough that she could have reached out and touched it if the door weren't in the way.
Another few inches and she'd hit it.
A moment passed before she remembered to breathe properly.
Then she looked toward the sedan that had nearly gotten her killed.
It was still sitting in the middle of the freeway.
"What the hell is wrong with you?!"
She leaned forward, trying to see the driver through the rear window.
"Who just stops like that? Are you trying to..."
Sezon stopped speaking.
The sedan wasn't the only car that had stopped.
Every lane ahead of her was packed with stationary vehicles. Some had pulled onto the shoulders, others had stopped at awkward angles, and several were sitting halfway between lanes as though their drivers had forgotten what they were doing.
She twisted around to look behind her.
It was the same in that direction.
The freeway had become an enormous parking lot.
For a moment, she assumed there had been a serious accident somewhere ahead. That would at least explain the sudden braking. But she couldn't see any wreckage, and the drivers around her weren't behaving the way people normally did during a traffic jam.
A man climbed out of a truck two lanes over.
He stood beside his door, looking toward the right side of the freeway.
Another driver emerged from a nearby SUV, followed by a woman who left her car running in the middle lane.
Within moments, people were getting out all along the freeway. Some walked between vehicles, craning their necks for a better view. Others remained beside their doors, staring at something beyond the road.
Almost everyone was facing the same direction.
Sezon frowned.
'Okay. What did I miss?'
She unbuckled her seat belt and opened the door.
The engine was still idling, but she left it running as she stepped onto the pavement.
The air outside was filled with the familiar sounds of traffic: engines, distant horns, the occasional shout from someone demanding to know why everyone had stopped. Yet the people nearest her were strangely quiet.
A woman stood a few yards away with one hand covering her mouth. Beside her, a man in a business suit was holding his phone halfway to his ear, apparently having forgotten whatever he'd intended to do with it.
Neither seemed to notice Sezon.
They were staring across the freeway, toward the city she had been driving away from.
Sezon walked around the front of her car and looked to her right, turning slightly back toward the distant skyline.
And finally understood why the freeway had stopped.
There was something above the city.
Something so enormous and so completely out of place that, for several seconds, she couldn't understand what she was seeing.
It resembled a sphere, although only its outline suggested that it had any shape at all. Its interior was perfectly black, without texture, reflection, or the slightest variation in color.
Even calling it black seemed inadequate.
She could see the windows on distant skyscrapers catching the afternoon sunlight. She could distinguish the shadows beneath elevated roads and the darker patches of cloud drifting across the sky.
But the thing hanging above the city had none of those qualities.
There was no visible surface to examine, no shadow to suggest depth, and no indication of how far into it she might be looking. It was simply an enormous circular region where nothing could be seen.
The clouds stopped at its boundary.
So did the buildings behind it.
Sezon stared, struggling to reconcile the sight with anything she had ever encountered.
"...What the hell?"
Near the center of the phenomenon stood the UNZIR Science Tower.
Or what remained visible of it.
The hundred-story building was one of the most recognizable structures in the city, a towering monument to the scientific ambitions of the organization that had built it. Sezon had driven past it countless times without giving it much thought.
Now most of its upper floors were hidden inside the darkness.
The lower portion remained visible, ending abruptly where the perfectly curved boundary crossed the building.
There was no smoke. No falling debris. Nothing to suggest an explosion or collapse.
The tower simply disappeared from sight beyond that line.
"That's UNZIR," someone nearby said.
Sezon glanced toward the voice.
A middle-aged man stood beside a parked sedan, holding his phone toward the city.
"Yeah. I can see that," she muttered.
"No, I mean..." He lowered his phone slightly. "That thing is coming from the tower."
Sezon turned back.
He appeared to be right.
The darkness was centered somewhere near the top of the building, expanding outward in every direction.
And with that realization came an uncomfortable memory.
Earlier in her shift, one of her coworkers had been talking about an experiment supposedly taking place at UNZIR. Something involving the smallest known particles of matter and whether anything existed beyond them.
She remembered hearing about quarks, strings, and a few other terms she hadn't understood particularly well.
The researcher being interviewed had apparently claimed they were approaching a discovery that could change humanity's understanding of the universe.
Sezon hadn't paid much attention.
Scientists were always promising discoveries that would change the world. As far as she could tell, none of them had changed how much she was paying for groceries.
But the experiment had supposedly been taking place near the top of the tower.
Exactly where the darkness appeared to be centered.
'Oh, you've got to be kidding me.'
She stared at the enormous sphere.
"Did those idiots make a black hole?"
The man beside her didn't answer.
Sezon wasn't sure whether he'd heard her.
For all she knew, that really was what she was looking at. She had a vague understanding that black holes were supposed to be extremely dense objects with gravity strong enough to prevent light from escaping.
Was this what one looked like?
She doubted it.
If an actual black hole that size had appeared over the city, shouldn't everything already be getting pulled toward it?
The cars were still sitting on the freeway. The buildings were still standing. She could even feel a faint breeze against her face.
Nothing seemed to be moving toward the sphere.
Except, perhaps, the sphere itself.
Sezon narrowed her eyes.
Its lower boundary had reached the bottom of the tower.
She was almost certain that hadn't been the case when she first looked.
A nearby woman pointed toward the city.
"Is it getting bigger?"
Nobody answered immediately.
They were all watching now.
The lower floors of UNZIR disappeared from view as the boundary passed across them. It reached the surrounding streets and continued outward, concealing neighboring buildings beneath that same featureless black.
Sezon took an involuntary step backward.
'It's expanding.'
She could actually see it happening.
Slowly enough, at first, that she might have mistaken the change for an illusion, but the longer she watched, the more obvious it became.
The boundary moved across a skyscraper standing some distance from UNZIR. Its upper floors vanished behind the black surface, leaving the rest of the building visible below.
A few seconds later, the entire skyscraper was hidden.
Sezon looked around.
People were beginning to talk again.
Some were pointing, others recording with their phones. A few had started moving back toward their vehicles, although most remained where they stood, seemingly unable to look away.
She understood the feeling.
There was something profoundly disturbing about watching an entire building disappear without witnessing any of the destruction that ought to accompany it.
The skyline was changing in front of her eyes, and she couldn't make sense of how.
A young man nearby laughed nervously.
"That's gotta be some kind of projection, right?"
Nobody seemed particularly convinced.
Sezon considered the possibility anyway.
'A projection of what?'
Even if somebody had somehow created a hologram large enough to cover several city blocks, that wouldn't explain why she could no longer see the buildings behind it.
She looked back at the tower.
Or rather, where the tower had been.
The darkness now covered the entire structure and much of the surrounding skyline.
"Well, shit," she said quietly. "Guess we're all getting tomorrow off."
It was an absurd thing to say.
She knew that.
But she couldn't think of anything better, and something about the silence around her was making her increasingly uncomfortable.
Then the sirens started.
At first, she heard one emergency vehicle somewhere in the distance. A second followed shortly afterward, its wailing echoing between the buildings.
Within moments, alarms were sounding across the city.
Sezon's phone began vibrating in her pocket.
She pulled it out and found an emergency notification filling the screen.
Before she could read more than the first line, a man farther down the freeway started shouting.
"IT'S MOVING!"
Sezon looked up.
The darkness had expanded beyond the buildings surrounding UNZIR.
Much farther.
Its boundary was advancing across entire sections of the city now, passing over rooftops and streets with a speed that had become impossible to ignore.
A few people began running toward their cars.
Others remained where they were.
Sezon watched a large building vanish behind the darkness, then another a short distance away.
'That's getting pretty damn big.'
She glanced down the freeway in the direction she'd been traveling, then back over her right shoulder toward the city.
The road continued away from the expanding sphere. If she could get moving again, she might be able to put some distance between herself and whatever was happening.
But first she had to get through the traffic.
She looked toward the highway signs above the lanes, then back toward the city, trying to work out how far away the boundary actually was.
Several miles, she thought.
Probably more.
It was difficult to judge distance when there was nothing visible inside the sphere to provide a sense of scale.
The boundary looked just as sharp from miles away as it had when the phenomenon first appeared.
Another section of the skyline disappeared.
Sezon suddenly noticed that the sphere was growing faster.
A lot faster.
'Wait...'
She stared at the advancing edge.
The distance it had crossed in the last few seconds was considerably greater than before.
Another building disappeared.
Then an entire row of them.
The expansion was accelerating.
A woman screamed somewhere behind her.
That seemed to settle the matter for everyone else.
The freeway erupted into movement.
Drivers scrambled back into their cars, doors slamming as engines revved and horns sounded from every direction. People who had been recording the phenomenon moments earlier were now running between vehicles, shouting at one another to move.
A man began climbing over the concrete median, dragging a child after him.
Another driver threw his car into reverse without checking behind him, nearly striking two people trying to cross the shoulder.
"HEY! WATCH IT!"
Sezon stumbled backward as the reversing vehicle scraped against the barrier a few feet away.
The driver never even looked at her.
He kept trying to back up through the traffic.
'What the fuck am I still doing out here?'
She turned toward her car.
The door was still open, the engine running.
She started walking, then broke into a run as another chorus of screams rose from farther down the freeway.
By the time she reached the driver's seat, several people were already abandoning their vehicles entirely.
Sezon threw herself inside and slammed the door.
"Come on, come on..."
She shifted into drive and pressed the accelerator.
The car rolled forward a few feet before she was forced to brake.
A pickup truck had pulled diagonally across the shoulder ahead of her, its driver trying to force his way between two stationary vehicles. There wasn't enough room, but he kept attempting it anyway, repeatedly backing up and accelerating as though the gap might somehow become wider.
Sezon leaned on her horn.
"MOVE!"
The truck lurched forward, struck the side of a sedan, and stopped again.
"Oh, for fuck's sake!"
She considered reversing, but another vehicle had already pulled onto the shoulder behind her. The freeway lanes were packed, the median blocked her left, and the pickup was taking up what little space remained ahead.
She was trapped.
For one absurd moment, she almost laughed.
She'd spent the entire drive contemplating whether life was worth continuing, only to find herself caught in a traffic jam during what might genuinely be the end of the world.
'Of course.'
Somewhere ahead, two vehicles collided with a tremendous metallic crunch.
Sezon flinched, then turned toward the passenger window.
The city lay off to her right and behind her, and the darkness was still several miles away. But the enormous sphere was expanding so quickly now that she could follow the movement of its boundary without concentrating. Entire sections of the skyline were disappearing behind it, the smooth black curve advancing across the city at a speed that seemed to increase with every passing second.
'How fast is that thing moving?'
She turned toward the pickup.
"COME ON! FUCKING MOVE!"
The driver finally managed to squeeze between the vehicles, tearing off his side mirror as he forced the truck forward.
Sezon immediately accelerated.
Her car surged ahead, but she barely cleared the damaged sedan before another cluster of stopped vehicles forced her to brake.
"Are you SERIOUS?!"
She slammed her palm against the steering wheel.
A terrible chorus of screams erupted from the lanes to her right.
Sezon looked through the passenger window.
For a moment, she couldn't understand what she was seeing.
The city was almost entirely gone from view.
Buildings that had stood miles away only seconds earlier were hidden behind an immense expanse of black. The remaining skyline was disappearing as she watched, and the sphere's boundary was sweeping toward the freeway with a speed that made her previous attempts to judge its distance seem ridiculous.
'What...?'
She twisted farther to look over her right shoulder.
The darkness crossed an elevated interchange in the distance, hiding the entire structure almost at once.
Then it reached the buildings nearer the highway.
'Wait.'
Her mind struggled to make sense of the distance.
'Miles... It was miles away.'
The boundary kept advancing.
It swallowed the visible stretch of highway leading back toward the city, overtaking vehicles that had only just begun moving.
People were screaming.
Someone ran past her car, their body clipping the passenger-side mirror as they stumbled between the stopped vehicles.
Sezon whipped around and stomped on the accelerator.
"NO, NO, NO! MOVE!"
Her car slammed into the vehicle ahead.
The impact threw her against the seat belt, knocking the air from her lungs. She barely registered the pain before turning toward the passenger window again.
The darkness had already crossed almost the entire remaining distance.
It swept over the outer lanes of the freeway, hiding cars and the people running between them. Entire rows disappeared behind the advancing black before she could properly register what was happening.
'Oh, fuck.'
She grabbed the driver's door handle.
'GET OUT!'
Her fingers had barely closed around it when the darkness reached the vehicles to her right.
Through the passenger window, she caught a final glimpse of the people running between the cars.
A woman was pulling desperately at a car door.
A man was climbing onto the hood of a truck.
Someone was screaming for help.
Then the boundary swept across them.
Sezon barely had time to react before the darkness reached the passenger window.
"NO, PLEA—"
Then, absolute nothing'd silence.