The world ended on June Thirtieth, 2098, at one-fourteen PM, Pacific Standard Time.

Give or take a minute.

If my dad’s calculations are correct.

Which I’m going to assume they are, since he’s a quantum spacetime physicist and spent years warning everyone this was going to happen. Of course we all thought he was crazy, even me. Especially me.

Growing up as the daughter of the infamous Dr. Doomsday wasn’t exactly fun, I can tell you that much.

At eleven twenty-five AM that day the end of the world was the furthest thing from my mind. I had much more important things to be concerned about, like how to tell my dad I’d moved out of the dorm and was living with my boyfriend now—which would involve telling him about Chad in the first place, and I’d about decided not to tell him anything when he tossed an ancient copper coin onto the table between us.

I looked up from my comm and quirked an eyebrow. The café we were sitting in was exactly the kind of place that would have a century-old penny lying around—all exposed brick and reclaimed wood tables, with Edison bulbs hanging from black iron fixtures. Half the patrons were hunched over their comms like me, the other half working on ancient-looking laptops that were probably worth more than my tuition. Steam hissed from an espresso machine that looked like it belonged in a museum, all brass and copper fittings, while holographic menu boards flickered silently above the counter.

“Penny for your thoughts?” he asked.

I wrinkled my nose at him. “Where’d you get that?”

“Found it years ago. Keep it for luck. You look like something’s gnawing at you.”

“I can’t believe people actually used physical money—that everyone and their dog touched.” I went back to scrolling blindly on my comm. “It’s unsanitary. Nothing’s gnawing at me. I can’t decide which classes to pick next semester.”

“Mmmhmm.” He took a sip from his little espresso cup. “How’s your mom? Still with—whatever his name is?”

“Vincent,” I sighed. “And he’s old news. That was six months ago and an entirely different continent. She’s in Ibiza now with some Italian guy. Or Swedish. I don’t know. Who can keep track? I’m sure mom’s just fine.”

“Don’t talk much?”

I looked up from my comm and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “Only when she’s sober, so no, not often. What about you? Still seeing Sharon?”

“Shelly.” He scratched at his beard. It had a lot more gray in it than when I’d stayed with him last summer. “And no. She was too much of a city girl for me anyway.”

“Laura Ingalls Wilder would be too much of a city girl for you. It’s not healthy, Dad, living alone in the middle of nowhere.”

“Snoqualmie Valley isn’t exactly the middle of nowhere. I go out. I have friends.”

“Doomsday prepper friends with bad hygiene.” I took a sip of my salted caramel blended latte before pointing it at him. “And swapping conspiracy theories at the rifle club doesn’t count as ‘going out.’”

“Sure it does. You should come. You used to love shooting.”

“When I was twelve, maybe. Guns are your fetish, not mine. Far as I’m concerned they should all be rounded up and melted down.”

“Most have,” he grunted. “So, what is your thing these days?”

I went back to scrolling and shrugged. “Lots of stuff.”

“Like?”

“Stuff. Clothes. Music. Twentieth Century Russian literature.”

“Boys?”

I glared at him over the top of my comm. “I’m not fourteen.”

“Or girls.” He spread his hands. “Or both. That’s fine too. But one at a time, call me old fashioned.”

That made me laugh, and I put down my comm. Might as well drop the bomb, I figured. “His name’s Chad.”

Except he wasn’t listening and his eyes were fixed on something behind me. I turned to see a news feed someone had cast up on a brick wall. The video of the starship orbiting Titan was slightly distorted. The caption read “LIVE: Quantum Folding Drive Test—CWS Magellan at Titan Research Station.”

Dad swore under his breath and I wanted to crawl under the table. The whole café had gone quiet, everyone staring at the wall. This was supposed to be huge—no more waiting years—sometimes decades—to get between worlds. Instant travel. But all I could think about was how he’d been freaking out about this exact thing for forever, and I braced myself for his incoming rant.

Then things got weird.

Magellan began to shift and warp like something impossibly plastic, instead of fifteen thousand tons of advanced alloys, and the space around it folded like origami paper. Then suddenly the ship and the space around it simply… wasn’t there anymore. Like someone had taken scissors to the universe and cut out a circular piece, leaving nothing behind. Not blackness—nothing. I couldn’t focus on it properly. My eyes kept trying to see something where the ship had been, but there was just… wrongness. Like staring at a blind spot that kept growing. The nothingness spread outward from where Magellan had been, as if it was eating space itself. Titan winked out as it touched the moon, as if it’d never existed.

The news feed went blank and I heard Dad’s chair scrape back as he jumped to his feet. I whipped my head around, and his face was the color of ash. My stomach dropped and my heart stopped.

Because he’d been right all along.

“We need to go,” he said. He didn’t sound panicked, or even scared. Just matter-of-fact. He didn’t even raise his voice.

“It’s happening, isn’t it?” I asked, standing slowly at the lights flickered. The casual buzz of conversation started to pick up as it dawned on people that something Very Wrong was happening. The interstellar communications network was dead. News alerts pinged on comms through the cafe. Dad grabbed my arm firmly like he was security escorting a VIP and walked me out of the cafe onto the street as he pivoted his head over mine, eyes searching. He was in full Threat mode, analyzing, calculating, and for once I was thankful for it.

Because everything was descending into chaos.

People were pointing overhead at the flailing trails of aircraft detonating in the sky and screaming, autonomous vehicles were shutting down and parking themselves or colliding into each other. I checked my own comm and all the interstellar feeds were dead. A complete information blackout.

He steered me through the pedestrian traffic off Broadway and down Olive Way.

“The car’s the other way,” I protested.

“We’re not getting anywhere in a car, Kira.” He knife-handed to the clog of vehicles in the street as he hurried me along. People were either freaking out inside their self-driving cars or abandoning them entirely. “The anomaly caused a quantum decoherence wave that’s fried the traffic control system.”

“Quantum what?”

“A resonance cascade. The attempted jump at Titan failed—just like I warned it would. It created a tear in spacetime that destabilized the quantum vacuum state, sending a shock wave through the field that’s propagated instantaneously via our entanglement networks.” He gestured sharply at the growing chaos around us. “Every piece of quantum-enhanced tech is becoming unstable. The entangled particles in processors, communication arrays, drive systems—they’re all losing coherence simultaneously.”

I stared up at him. “In English, Dad.”

“The quantum computers that run everything just had their brains scrambled. All at once. Across the entire Commonwealth of Worlds. Instantly. Ships, traffic systems, communications, navigation—anything using quantum enhancement is either dead or about to explode. And meanwhile the tear is expanding, consuming everything.”

“Like a black hole,” I stated somberly.

“No, not like a black hole. Nothing like a black hole. A black hole bends spacetime, creates gravity, pulls things in. This is different—it’s a region where spacetime doesn’t exist. Matter doesn’t get sucked in or crushed. It just… stops being. The tear consumes space itself, erasing everything that was there. No event horizon, no spaghettification, no escape velocity you could theoretically exceed. Once it touches something, that something never existed.” He paused, seeing my confusion. “Think of it this way—a black hole is like a whirlpool in a river. Dangerous, but the river’s still there. This is like someone took a knife to reality and carved out a piece. There’s no ‘there’ there anymore. And it’s growing.”

“So we’re dead.”

“No, Kira. Dead implies you existed and then stopped existing. If it touches you, you were never born. Never lived. Never were. It doesn’t kill you—it erases you from reality completely. There’s no body, no atoms, no trace you were ever here. No soul, if you believe in that. The universe just… edits you out.”

“Oh my God. I need to call Mom,” I said, flipping through one app and then another on my comm, trying to find something, anything, with a connection. I looked back up at my dad. “What do I tell her?”

“Goodbye.” His eyes narrowed and he gave a curt nod. “There we go.”

“There we go what?” I asked as he walked me across the street, weaving past stopped vehicles and confused people. If we were about to be deleted from existence, I didn’t see much point in spending the last moments of my life running from the inevitable. “Where are we going? How much time do we have?”

“Ninety minutes, give or take. If we’re lucky.”

I planted my feet and he turned back to face me, clearly annoyed.

“Where are we going?” I asked again. “If we have less than an hour and a half shouldn’t we—I don’t know—try to make the most of it?”

A gunshot echoed down the street and I flinched as more people started panicking. He took my arm again and steered me into an alley beside an ancient vintage motorcycle. It was sleek, some kind of sports tourer, with huge blocky cylinders that stuck out of the sides.

“We’re going home.” He knelt beside the bike and started working at the seat lock with his multitool. “It’s not safe here. People are already panicking and the situation’s already degrading into violence.” Another gunshot, this one closer, punctuated his warning. “We’re going home and then we’re leaving.”

He popped off the seat and got into the bike’s electronic guts, stripping wires with his multitool and hooking up some kind of harness connector to his comm.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

The bike’s old LCD display lit up and he grunted in satisfaction, then thumbed the ignition. I nearly jumped back as the internal combustion engine fired up thunderously.

“Love that sound.” He grinned at me as he set the seat back on. “Electric bikes just aren’t the same. Hop on.”

“Hop on? That thing? It’s like a hundred years old.”

“Seventy-three,” he corrected, shouting over the engine roar as he threw a leg over the bike and tested the throttle. “But it’s been maintained beautifully. There’s nothing quite like German engineering. We’re going home and leaving Earth, Kira. I have a ship ready. We can outrace the tear.”

Of course Dad had a ship ready. How stupid of me not to think of that. He’d made a fortune from the upgraded pulse fusion drive he’d invented with his partner, and he’d been warning about The End of Everything ever since he resigned from the jump drive project in protest. So naturally he’d bought his own ship to escape on. I was about to point out that neither of us had helmets, but realized that seemed like a petty concern compared to our entire existence being erased. Instead I hooked a boot onto the passenger peg and threw my leg over the bike, settling in behind him as the seat vibrated like the whole machine was about to fall apart.

He glanced back and shot me a reassuring grin. “Hold on.”

The next ninety minutes were scarier than everything I’d experienced in my previous seventeen years combined.

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