Three months after the Glass Border incident, the world stopped asking whether the Lapse was real.
The question now was how much time humanity had left.
Every major government on Earth had abandoned secrecy. Emergency broadcasts had become part of daily life. News networks operated twenty-four hours a day. Scientists, military leaders, religious figures, and world governments all searched desperately for answers.
None of them found any.
Because the phenomenon was getting worse.
Much worse.
And nobody understood how to stop it.
Elias stood on the roof of an Underground safehouse overlooking the outskirts of Almaty.
The city lights stretched across the darkness below.
For a moment, everything looked peaceful.
Normal.
Then the skyline flickered.
A cluster of buildings vanished.
Not collapsed.
Not destroyed.
Gone.
In their place appeared towering silver structures that reached impossibly high into the sky.
The future city remained visible for three seconds.
Then reality snapped back.
The original buildings returned.
Cars continued driving.
People continued walking.
As if nothing had happened.
Elias closed his eyes.
Three months ago that would have terrified him.
Now it happened every day.
Behind him, Sola stepped onto the rooftop.
"You felt it too."
Elias nodded.
"The frequency is increasing."
Sola looked toward the horizon.
"The storms are spreading."
Neither of them needed to explain what that meant.
The entire world knew the term now.
Echo Storms.
Massive synchronized temporal disturbances capable of affecting entire regions simultaneously.
Unlike ordinary Echo zones, these events didn't remain localized.
They moved.
Spread.
Expanded.
Like weather systems crossing continents.
Except these storms weren't made of wind and rain.
They were made of time itself.
Inside the safehouse, dozens of monitors displayed live global feeds.
Every screen showed chaos.
Paris.
São Paulo.
Beijing.
Lagos.
Los Angeles.
Moscow.
The storms were everywhere.
A scientist from the Underground stood near the central display.
Her face looked exhausted.
"Another event just started."
The room turned toward the screen.
Satellite footage appeared.
Paris.
For a brief moment the entire city disappeared beneath a shimmering wave of distortion.
The Eiffel Tower vanished.
Historic districts dissolved.
Roads disappeared.
Then something else emerged.
An arcology.
A gigantic self-contained megastructure covering nearly half the city.
Millions of lights illuminated its surface.
Massive transit lines crossed its exterior.
Entire ecosystems appeared suspended inside transparent sections of the structure.
The futuristic city remained visible for almost twenty seconds.
Longer than any Echo event on record.
People across the world watched the footage live.
Then the arcology vanished.
Paris returned.
But thousands of people were missing.
Silence filled the room.
Nobody needed to say it.
Everyone was thinking the same thing.
The overlap duration was increasing.
And longer overlaps meant more disappearances.
Another screen flashed.
South America.
Satellite imagery zoomed over the Amazon rainforest.
The image looked normal at first.
Then the forest began changing.
Trees vanished.
Green disappeared.
The landscape transformed into something alien.
Metallic terrain stretched across thousands of square kilometers.
Massive industrial structures covered the horizon.
Gigantic extraction machines stood motionless beneath dark skies.
The Earth itself looked wounded.
Scarred.
Dead.
Elias stared at the image.
"What happened there?"
The scientist swallowed.
"We think it's a future version of the Amazon."
Nobody spoke.
Because the implication was horrifying.
Humanity wasn't merely seeing the future.
It was seeing possible outcomes.
And some of those outcomes looked catastrophic.
A third alert sounded.
This one came from orbit.
The room's largest monitor displayed live satellite tracking data.
Red warning symbols filled the screen.
"Another failure," someone whispered.
"How many now?"
"Thirty-seven."
The room grew quieter.
Over the past month satellites across the globe had begun malfunctioning during Echo storms.
Communication arrays disappeared temporarily.
GPS systems failed.
Weather satellites flickered between timelines.
Several spacecraft had vanished completely.
No debris.
No explosions.
Simply gone.
As though history itself had misplaced them.
The consequences were becoming severe.
Air traffic disruptions.
Navigation failures.
Global communication blackouts.
The infrastructure of modern civilization was beginning to crack.
Elias felt his Echo device vibrate.
A familiar voice emerged from the speaker.
The Archivist.
"Statistical projection updated."
The room turned toward the device.
The digital intelligence rarely interrupted unless something important had changed.
Elias frowned.
"What projection?"
A holographic display appeared above the device.
Charts filled the air.
Mathematical models.
Temporal graphs.
Simulation data.
"The acceleration rate has increased."
Sola stepped forward.
"By how much?"
The Archivist paused.
Even an artificial intelligence seemed uncomfortable delivering the answer.
"Forty-three percent."
The room fell silent.
One of the scientists looked pale.
"That's impossible."
The Archivist disagreed.
"The data is conclusive."
The holographic graph shifted.
A steep upward curve appeared.
Elias immediately understood what he was seeing.
The Lapse wasn't growing steadily.
It was growing exponentially.
A terrible realization settled over the room.
Echo storms.
Chrono-Colonies.
Temporal migration.
The Glass Border.
The Remnant arrival.
Everything they had witnessed so far…
had only been the beginning.
The scientist operating the monitors looked toward Elias.
"What does it mean?"
The question hung heavily in the air.
Everyone looked at him.
The Reverse Echo.
The man connected to Project Echo-Sync.
The one who had seen further into the future than anyone else.
Elias stared at the accelerating graph.
Then at the images of Paris.
The Amazon.
The failing satellites.
The disappearances.
The impossible cities.
He remembered the vision inside the Glass Border.
The orbital ruins.
The dying Earth.
The Grand Sync Engine.
And the army coming through time.
His stomach tightened.
Because for the first time…
he understood something he hadn't understood before.
The future wasn't approaching.
The future was colliding with them.
The Archivist spoke again.
Its voice echoed through the room.
"New scientific consensus achieved."
Sola folded her arms.
"What consensus?"
The hologram changed.
A single line of text appeared.
TEMPORAL COLLAPSE THRESHOLD APPROACHING
Nobody breathed.
Nobody moved.
The Archivist continued.
"At the current acceleration rate, full timeline convergence will occur significantly earlier than projected."
"How much earlier?" Elias asked.
The answer came immediately.
"Estimated arrival window: less than four years."
A wave of silence rolled through the room.
Four years.
Humanity had believed they had decades.
Maybe centuries.
Now they had four years.
Outside, thunder rolled across the sky.
Except it wasn't thunder.
The clouds themselves were flickering.
For an instant they became something else.
An unfamiliar sky from another age.
Then they returned.
The storm continued spreading across the horizon.
The world was changing faster now.
Reality itself was beginning to fail.
And somewhere beyond time…
something was pulling harder than ever before.
The Lapse was accelerating.
And Earth was running out of time.