THE INFINITE ARCHIVE

I was originally writing this for a college writing contest, but I never entered it. Decided to keep it where it is.

First came the light. Not light as the eye knows it, not color, not shape, not photons scattering obediently through the soft lens of perception, but light that tore apart the act of seeing itself. A pulse of energy so sudden, so vast, that it unraveled the delicate filaments connecting thought to the world. It wasn't light. It was the absence of shadow, the annihilation of contrast, a brightness that left no room for the human mind to parse anything but white.

Then came the wave. Not air pushed forward by heat or motion, but the deconstruction of space as a coherent medium. A pressure so total that molecules fused briefly into strange geometries before collapsing into chaos. The atmosphere itself seemed to momentarily give up, its tenuous grasp on matter overwhelmed by the violence spilling out into every dimension at once.

The survivors, such as they were, would later swear they felt nothing. No heat, no sound, no pain, just the absence of things. A pressure so deep and omnipresent it erased sensation altogether, leaving behind only the shadows of bodies vaporized faster than the nerve endings could signal their failure.

The epicenter was incomprehensible, though none who saw it lived long enough to describe it. A storm of particles breaking their bonds, atoms splitting in symmetrical suicide, energy blooming outward with the uncaring elegance of mathematics in freefall.

It came in waves, invisible and omnipotent, like the breath of some ancient, vengeful god. Gamma rays knifed through the wreckage, stripping electrons from atoms and twisting DNA into grotesque hieroglyphs. Neutrons ricocheted through flesh, through bone, through metal, each collision rewriting the fundamental structure of what it touched. The air itself became poison, thick with isotopes that burned lungs and bloodstreams alike.

Beyond the blast, in the distant edges of the detonation's reach, people stumbled in the dark, their minds scrambling to reconcile the sensory void that had claimed them. They felt their skin crawl without knowing it was boiling. They saw colors without realizing their retinas had already burned away. They gasped for air in lungs already half-dead, coughing up cells shredded by radiation too small to see, too vast to escape.

They looked to the horizon, where the sky boiled black, and a single, rising column of light gave shape to their end. It was beautiful, in a way. They didn't understand it, not at first. Some thought it was a weapon; others, a god.

Long after the shockwave had gone, the fallout settled like ash, blanketing the landscape in a kind of obscene quiet. The survivors moved through it like shadows, their silhouettes carved from irradiated dust, their future etched into their marrow. The cancer would come, of course. The pain. The long, slow unraveling of life at the cellular level. But by then, they would be past caring.