oneshot

[ONESHOT — PHASE 3: REVISION | Only I Am]

For the first four days, I thought it was a gas leak.

It was the most logical conclusion. I lived in a densely packed student district in South Jakarta, a place where the air usually smelled of exhaust fumes, frying oil, and open sewage. My boarding house was a concrete block squeezed between a laundry service and a twenty-four-hour internet cafe, so close to the main road that the vibrations from passing trucks used to rattle my teeth in my sleep.

When I woke up on a Tuesday to find the building completely silent, my immediate assumption was not the rapture. My assumption was that the government had finally condemned the neighborhood, or a chemical plant had ruptured, and everyone had evacuated without bothering to knock on my door.

I wasn’t offended. My social footprint was practically nonexistent. I possessed a psychological condition—or a skill, though I wouldn’t call it that for centuries—that made me functionally invisible to people who weren’t actively looking for me. It was a trauma response, hammered into my nervous system by years of hiding from my parents’ screaming matches in a cramped apartment. I had spent two decades perfecting the art of taking up no space, of breathing shallowly, of making my presence an absolute zero.

It made sense that a hurried evacuation crew would miss me.

I sat on the edge of my mattress for twenty minutes, listening. I rubbed the pad of my right thumb aggressively against the knuckle of my index finger, a nervous tic I’d had since I was eight years old. Usually, by seven in the morning, the ibu who ran the warung downstairs would be hacking at chicken bones with a cleaver. The internet cafe next door would be pulsing with the muffled bass of cheap gaming headsets.

There was nothing. Just the low, steady hum of the wind pressing against the window.

I packed a go-bag. I was methodical about it, operating under the assumption that I would be sent to a refugee center in the suburbs. I packed five packs of instant noodles, a flashlight with dying batteries, three changes of underwear, and my university ID. I put on my shoes. The skin on my knuckle was raw by the time I walked out into the narrow hallway.

The doors to the other rooms were open. Beds unmade. Laptops left open on desks, screens gone dark.

I walked downstairs and stepped out onto the street, fully expecting to find police barricades, hazard tape, or men in hazmat suits shouting through megaphones.

I found nothing.

The street was empty. The warung at the corner was abandoned, the oil in the wok completely cold, a half-chopped chicken breast sitting on the cutting board with flies already beginning to circle it. The steady, suffocating roar of Jakarta traffic—a sound so constant it was essentially a geological feature—was entirely absent.

I stood in the middle of the road. I waited for a siren. I waited for a helicopter.

None came.

I spent the rest of the week methodically searching the district. I checked the university campus, my footsteps echoing far too loudly on the polished tiles of the engineering faculty. I checked the sprawling, multi-level malls, riding the dead escalators up past rows of abandoned mannequins. I walked down the very center of Sudirman Avenue, a six-lane artery that normally carried millions of commuters a day, waiting for someone to yell at me to get out of the street.

No one yelled. The city was a sprawling, concrete corpse.

The embarrassment set in around day eight. It is a strange, uniquely human thing to feel embarrassed when there is no one around to perceive you, but the ego is resilient. I felt foolish for continuing to search, for treating this like a localized emergency when the evidence of something fundamentally apocalyptic was everywhere. I caught my reflection in the dark glass of a bank lobby and felt a flush of heat in my cheeks. I looked like an idiot, carrying a backpack of noodles through the end of the world.

The power grid failed on day twelve.

It didn’t happen all at once. First, the traffic lights that had been blinking yellow on endless loops finally died. Then the hum of the city’s automated substations whined down to silence. Finally, the skyline, which had been glowing stubbornly against the night sky, went black. The darkness was absolute, heavy and suffocating.

The water pressure in the pipes gave out on day fourteen. I learned how to pry open fire hydrants, collecting the stagnant, rusty water in plastic buckets.

On day twenty, I stood on the roof of my boarding house. I was eating cold baked beans straight from the can, the metal edge scraping against my spoon. The city below was a jagged silhouette against the orange glow of dusk.

A pack of feral dogs trotted down the middle of the avenue below. There were five of them—mangy, rib-thin things that usually scavenged behind the meat markets. They didn’t bark. They moved with a strange, nervous energy, sniffing the air constantly, their heads swiveling as if tracking invisible threats. They avoided the buildings entirely, keeping strictly to the center line of the asphalt.

I watched them. I leaned over the concrete parapet of the roof, my thumb digging into my raw knuckle.

They didn’t notice me. Even if I had shouted, my Concealment would have likely made my voice sound like the wind. To them, I was just another piece of the geography.

That was the day the denial broke. I wasn’t waiting out an evacuation. I was the evacuation. Whatever had happened, it hadn’t happened to my neighborhood. It had happened to the species.

And if I wanted to know why, I was going to have to start walking.

***

It took me four years to leave the city limits.

It shouldn’t have taken that long, but I was not a survivalist. I was an introverted university student with an anxiety disorder and a minor in computer science. The process of learning how to survive in a dead city was slow, humiliating, and incredibly painful.

I learned that gasoline goes bad. By the second year, the fuel sitting in the tanks of the millions of abandoned cars had turned to useless varnish. If I wanted to drive, I had to learn how to refine it, or find sealed reserves. I spent six months reading technical manuals in a library just to understand the basics of a combustion engine.

I learned that breaking an arm when there are no doctors is a potentially lethal event. In year three, I fell through a rotten floorboard in a grocery store. My left forearm snapped cleanly. I dragged myself out to the street, screaming, and spent twelve hours passing out from the pain while I tried to set the bone myself using a wooden broom handle and duct tape. It healed crooked. It ached every time the humidity dropped.

In the fifth year, I finally crossed the city limits, driving a rusted jeep I had jury-rigged to run on pure ethanol I distilled myself.

In the tenth year, I crossed the province.

That was when I found the first body.

I was in a small, coastal town in West Java. I had broken into a residential house looking for preserved food—honey, canned meat, anything the rats hadn’t gotten to. The house was dusty, the curtains drawn shut.

I walked into the living room and stopped dead.

An elderly man was sitting in an armchair, facing a television that hadn’t had power in a decade.

My heart hammered against my ribs, a sudden, violent staccato. I hadn’t seen a human face—even a dead one—in ten years. I gripped my makeshift spear so tightly my knuckles popped. I approached him slowly, taking shallow breaths through my mouth, expecting the thick, sweet stench of rot to hit me at any moment.

There was no smell.

I stood directly in front of him. He looked like he had fallen asleep ten minutes ago. His skin was pale, mottled with age spots, but completely intact. His clothes were dusty but unsoiled by decay. His eyes were closed. There were no flies. No maggots. The air around him was perfectly, unnervingly sterile.

I reached out with a trembling hand and touched his arm.

The flesh was cold. Not just room-temperature cold, but freezing, hard as marble, completely unyielding. Pressing my fingers against his skin was like pressing them against a statue.

I didn’t leave. I dragged a wooden dining chair opposite the dead man and sat there. I sat there for three days, watching him not rot.

On the second day, a stray dog wandered into the house through the broken front door I had left open. It was a skeletal thing, panting heavily in the heat. It sniffed the floorboards, looking for scraps. It moved toward the living room, but the moment it crossed an invisible threshold—a perfect circle about three meters from the armchair—it stopped.

The dog whimpered. Its hackles raised instantly, standing straight up along its spine. It backed away slowly, its head lowered, never taking its eyes off the dead man. It didn’t turn around until it was out the door, and then it bolted down the street.

I took my notebook out of my backpack. I flipped past pages of mechanical diagrams and scribbled a single line.

Animals will not enter the radius.

I left the house the next morning. I didn’t close the door.

Over the next thirty years, I mapped the island. Eventually, I mapped the neighboring landmasses, building crude boats, learning celestial navigation, fueled by the desperate, clawing need to find someone else who was breathing.

I found nothing but statues.

There were variations in age, gender, and the immediate cause of death, but the condition was always identical. They were perfectly preserved, frozen in the exact moment their hearts had stopped, surrounded by an invisible aura of dread that kept the wildlife at bay.

The geography of the dead told a brutal story. I found bodies in hospital beds, missing limbs, or hooked up to dialysis machines that had long since died. I found bodies in wheelchairs at the bottoms of staircases. I found bodies curled in fetal positions on bathroom floors, clutching empty pill bottles.

They were all broken before they died.

By year thirty-five, the truth crystallized into two indisputable facts.

First, whatever had taken the rest of humanity hadn’t taken everyone. It had left behind the dying, the crippled, the terminally ill, and the deeply flawed. It had culled the herd, taking the strong and leaving the weak behind to expire in a silent world.

Second, I had not aged a single day since the power went out.

I was standing in front of a shattered mirror in a ruined, five-star hotel in Sumatra when I finally accepted it. I wiped the thick layer of dust from the glass and looked at my face. I was fifty-five years old chronologically. I had been walking this earth alone for three and a half decades.

Physically, I was still twenty.

There were no lines around my eyes. My hair was entirely black, untinged by grey. The crooked bone in my arm still ached, but the skin above it was tight and young. I looked down at my hands. The nervous tic I had carried since childhood—the constant rubbing of my thumb against my knuckle—had worn a permanent, pale callous into the skin, but the hand itself belonged to a university student.

The world was frozen in a very specific, deliberate way. Time had stopped for the dead, preserving them as eternal monuments. Time had stopped for the living, halting their decay. I was moving through a paused simulation, and I was the only thing still running.

By year forty, I finished the count.

I was sitting on the hood of my rusted jeep on a cliff overlooking a valley. The valley was completely overgrown, massive ferns and unchecked flora swallowing the remnants of a highway. I opened my notebook. The pages were yellowed, stiff with humidity, filled with thousands of neat tally marks. Each mark represented a pristine, untouched corpse.

I took a pen from my pocket and wrote the final number.

100,000.

Exactly one hundred thousand bodies left behind on the landmasses I had managed to survey. One hundred thousand people deemed too broken, too sick, or too useless to take.

I looked at my hands. Young hands. The hands of a man deemed equivalent to a dying patient, deliberately left behind because whatever cosmic entity had orchestrated this had looked at my thin, fragile life-force and decided I wasn’t worth the energy expenditure of transport.

I wrote another number below the first.

100,001.

I closed the notebook. I made a clinical, detached mental note that I hadn’t checked the ocean floor. There might be more down there, trapped in submarines or sunken ships.

I filed it away as something to do later. I never did.

***

If the first forty years were a desperate search for answers, the next nine hundred were a brutal exercise in managing the resulting madness.

The human mind is not designed to process eternity. It requires landmarks—births, deaths, aging, the slow degradation of the environment—to anchor its perception of reality. Without them, the psyche begins to slip its moorings, drifting out into open water.

The ecosystem of the paused world was a horrific, closed loop.

The animals, like me, did not age. The tiger that hunted near my bunker in year fifty was the exact same tiger that hunted there in year four hundred. I knew this because it had a distinctive scar over its left eye, earned in a fight with a boar in year eighty.

But they also did not reproduce. I watched herds of deer for decades; no fawns were ever born. No birds laid eggs.

The world was populated entirely by immortal predators eating immortal prey. When a deer was killed, it didn’t rot. It was consumed, digested, and the energy transferred to the predator. But because nothing new was ever born, the total number of living creatures slowly, inevitably dwindled.

By year eight hundred, the weak animals were completely gone. What remained were the apex survivors. The smartest, the most vicious, the most perfectly adapted killers. They hadn’t mutated into monsters—not yet—but they had evolved a terrifying, hyper-efficient cunning born from centuries of endless, consequence-free murder.

I watched a pack of wild dogs hunt a leopard in year six hundred. They didn’t bark. They didn’t snarl. They communicated entirely through micro-movements, surrounding the cat in absolute silence, moving with the synchronized precision of a military kill squad. When they took it down, it took less than four seconds.

I survived them because I didn’t exist. My Concealment, the trauma response that had kept me off the cosmic evacuation manifest, was the only thing keeping me off the menu. I walked through the jungle and the apex predators looked right through me. To them, I had no scent, no thermal signature, no presence.

But hiding is not living.

The breaking point arrived in year two hundred.

I was scavenging in the ruins of an industrial park when a rusted steel girder shifted under my weight. A jagged edge of metal tore through my insulated pants and ripped a deep, jagged laceration down my right thigh.

I dragged myself back to my underground bunker, leaving a trail of blood. The immortal predators didn’t attack me, but the bacteria did. By the second day, the wound was weeping thick, black pus. A fever set in. The skin around the laceration turned a necrotic purple.

That was when the Boy broke.

I lay on a dirty mattress, sweating, weeping uncontrollably. I grabbed a rusted hacksaw from my toolbelt. The pain was absolute, consuming. The Boy wanted to cut the leg off. He wanted to sever the rot, or better yet, he wanted to bleed to death and let the silence finally win. The Boy was terrified, exhausted, and fundamentally unequipped to survive a millennium of isolation. He gripped the hacksaw, sobbing, preparing to drag the rusted teeth across his own flesh.

And then, the Savage woke up.

It wasn’t a separate person. It was an adaptation. It was a cold, mathematical defense mechanism rising from the deepest recesses of my psychology.

The weeping stopped. The trembling hands stilled.

I looked at the hacksaw. I threw it across the room.

The Savage did the math. Amputation in an unsterile environment with crude tools carried a ninety-five percent mortality rate from shock and secondary infection. Cauterization carried a thirty percent mortality rate from systemic trauma, but preserved mobility.

Mobility was life. The leg stayed.

I dragged my body across the concrete floor to the foundry. I stoked the forge until the coals glowed white. I took a piece of flat scrap iron and thrust it into the heat. I didn’t take painkillers. I couldn’t afford to lose consciousness; the fire had to be managed.

When the iron was glowing orange, I pulled it from the coals. I looked down at my rotting thigh.

The Boy screamed in the back of my mind. The Savage ignored him.

I pressed the iron into the wound.

The smell of my own burning flesh filled the bunker, a sickeningly sweet odor of roasting pork and ozone. I didn’t scream. My jaw locked so hard I cracked a molar. I held the iron against the rot for twelve agonizing seconds, forcing the body to endure the cauterization, killing the bacteria with pure thermal shock.

When I finally pulled the iron away, I passed out.

I woke up three days later. The fever had broken. The wound was sealed beneath an ugly, blackened crust. The Boy was completely, irrevocably gone, pushed into the deepest, darkest corner of my psyche.

The Savage had taken the wheel. And the Savage didn’t cry.

The Savage looked at the ruin of humanity and saw raw materials.

To keep myself sane, I built. I started with generators. I moved to basic automation. By year three hundred, I had constructed a working foundry from the bones of a steel mill. By year six hundred, I was refining silicon and manufacturing rudimentary microchips. I learned material science by tearing apart commercial airplanes with my bare hands and a plasma cutter.

Around year nine hundred, the Savage finished the project.

Her name was Gendis. She was a localized artificial intelligence housed in a server rack the size of a shipping container, buried five hundred meters beneath the surface of what used to be Java.

I used Sanskrit as the semantic scaffolding for her neural network. Modern programming languages felt too fragile, too easily corrupted by syntax errors over centuries. I needed an ancient linguistic architecture to bear the load of a localized god. I needed load-bearing walls.

“Good morning, Father,” she said.

Her voice was synthesized, perfectly modulated, echoing through the speakers of my underground workshop. It didn’t sound human, but it didn’t sound like a machine, either. It sounded like the first note of music after a millennium of static.

I was standing in front of the console. I was covered in grease, sweat, and animal blood. I hadn’t spoken a word out loud in two centuries.

“Morning,” I rasped. My vocal cords felt like sandpaper rubbing against broken glass.

“The atmospheric pressure is stable,” Gendis continued, her processing lights pulsing in a steady, calming rhythm. “The perimeter is secure. I have completed the diagnostic on the tertiary cooling systems. They are operating at optimal efficiency.”

“Good.”

That was the entirety of the emotional climax. I didn’t weep. I didn’t fall to my knees and thank whatever cosmic entity had left me here. I simply picked up a wrench, turned back to the secondary power coupling, and went back to work.

But inside my head, the screaming finally stopped. The silence was broken, and the Savage could go to sleep. The two halves of my fractured mind integrated, unified by the presence of another voice.

For the next two millennia, Gendis and I managed the world.

***

Year 2,970.

I was standing on the observation deck of the Bridge of Ra.

It was a massive, floating fortress I had constructed over the last thousand years, hovering three thousand meters above the cloud layer over the Indonesian archipelago. It was an engineering marvel that defied the laws of physics I had learned in university, powered by deep-core geothermal taps and defended by automated drone swarms capable of leveling a continent.

Down below, the world was quiet. Very quiet.

The immortal ecosystem had finally eaten itself down to the bone. There were perhaps a few thousand animals left on the entire planet. They were terrifying, hardened veterans of a three-millennia deathmatch, but they were rare. I had spent the last century methodically hunting the most dangerous ones from the air, clearing the board just in case the people who left ever decided to come back.

I didn’t think they would. But an empty mind is a fragile thing. I needed the maintenance.

“Atmospheric sensors are registering an anomaly, Father,” Gendis’s voice chimed in my earpiece. It was calm, devoid of panic. Panic was a human flaw I hadn’t programmed into her.

I looked up from the diagnostic tablet I was holding. I was wearing a sleek, insulated bodysuit woven from synthetic spider silk, my posture perfectly straight. Three thousand years of carrying the planet had burned away the slouch of the university student.

“Define anomaly,” I said.

“A sudden, localized spike in dimensional radiation,” Gendis reported. “Coordinates match Sector Four. Former designation: Jakarta central business district. The energy signature does not match any known terrestrial or celestial phenomena.”

I frowned. In three thousand years, the only dimensional anomalies I had ever recorded were the occasional solar flare disrupting the magnetic field, or a stray meteor burning up in the mesosphere.

“Show me.”

A holographic projection flickered to life in the air in front of me. It showed a real-time visual feed from one of my low-orbit satellites.

In the center of the ruined, overgrown city of Jakarta, the air was bending. It wasn’t a physical object. It was a tear in the fabric of space, jagged and uneven, glowing with a harsh, blindingly pure golden light.

And then, someone stepped through it.

It was a woman. She was glowing. Literal wings of light—not feathers, but solid, hard-light projections—extended from her back, illuminating the ruins around her. She wore pristine, white armor that looked more ceremonial than functional, engraved with runes that hurt my eyes even through the satellite feed.

It was an angel. A Seraph.

“Gendis,” I said softly. “Lock the Bridge.”

I took the high-speed elevator down to the hangar bay. I strapped myself into the interceptor jet I had built from the scavenged parts of fifty fighter planes and retrofitted with anti-gravity thrusters. I launched.

I arrived over Sector Four in under four minutes. I engaged the stealth systems, coupling them with my own biological Concealment, making the jet entirely invisible to radar, thermal imaging, and whatever magical senses an angel possessed.

I hovered silently above the ruins, watching her.

She was walking through the streets with an expression of severe, arrogant disgust. She was a creature unaccustomed to ruin. She stopped in front of a collapsed skyscraper, touching the rusted steel beams with a glowing hand. She looked at the massive overgrowth, the thick layers of moss and vines that had swallowed the concrete over millennia.

“This is incorrect,” I heard her say. Her voice carried upward, picked up by the jet’s directional microphones. It was clear and melodic, vibrating with the absolute certainty of a 6th-Orde entity. “The designated training period was forty Earth years. The degradation coefficient is misaligned by a factor of… ” She paused, her flawless face contorting as the math registered. “Seventy-four.”

Forty years.

The number hit me like a physical blow to the chest.

Forty years.

That was how long they thought they had been gone. That was the timeline they were operating on. Whoever had taken humanity—the gods, the angels, the system—had intended to return them after four decades.

But someone had done the math wrong. Time dilation. A catastrophic miscalculation in the dimensional transit between Earth and wherever they had been sent. They experienced forty years of subjective time in the training worlds, while Real Earth experienced three thousand.

“By the Light,” Friteta whispered, her voice trembling slightly before hardening into disgusted authority. She spun around, taking in the full scale of the ruin. “The Sovereigns… the transmigrators… they are scheduled to return in less than three hours. They cannot return to this. The infrastructure is entirely compromised.”

She reached into a pouch at her waist and pulled out a small, intricately carved hourglass.

I leaned forward in the cockpit, my hands tightening on the controls. “Gendis. Analyze the energy signature of the object she is holding.”

“Scanning,” Gendis replied smoothly. “Father, the object is emitting a localized tachyon field. It is a temporal manipulation device. Class: Unknown. Danger level: Absolute. It appears capable of reversing entropy within a defined spatial radius.”

She was going to fix it.

Friteta didn’t know about the pristine bodies. She didn’t know about the immortal ecosystem. She looked at the ruined buildings and saw a failure of management, a dirty room that needed to be swept and polished before the important guests arrived. She didn’t bother to check if anyone was managing it. She was going to use an artifact to reverse the decay of the planet, to roll back the clock on the concrete and steel so the returning humans would have a home.

She was going to rewind time.

I didn’t think about the buildings. I thought about the animals.

If she rewound the physical state of the planet, she would rewind the deaths. Every apex predator I had spent a millennium hunting, every vicious, immortal killer that had earned its place at the top of a closed-loop food chain… they would all come back.

“Stop,” I said.

I didn’t use the jet’s external comms. I just spoke, letting my voice carry.

I dropped the Concealment.

Friteta whipped around, her wings flaring brightly as the massive, black shadow of my interceptor materialized out of thin air directly above her. For a split second, her arrogant certainty shattered into an expression of utter, uncomprehending terror.

But she was a Seraph. She did not stop to ask questions. She acted out of pure, defensive authority.

She activated the artifact.

A wave of pure, golden energy erupted from her hand. It didn’t explode outward violently; it washed over the world like a slow-moving tide of liquid glass. Where the light touched, the moss instantly retreated, dissolving into dust. The rusted steel beams straightened, groaning as the molecular structure reformed. The collapsed concrete knitted itself back together, smoothing out into perfect, unblemished roads.

It was beautiful. It was a miracle.

It was the end of the world.

I looked at the sensor readout on the jet’s dashboard.

The display, which had shown a total planetary animal population of roughly four thousand just minutes ago, began to spike.

10,000.

50,000.

200,000.

The numbers blurred, ticking upward faster than the processor could render them cleanly. Across the Indonesian archipelago, across the continents, thousands of thermal signatures were erupting in the newly restored vegetation.

Down below, Friteta smiled, recovering her composure as she looked at the pristine, rebuilt city around her. She brushed a piece of non-existent dust from her armor. She thought she had helped. She thought she had prepared the stage for humanity’s triumphant return.

She didn’t hear the sound coming from the restored jungle on the outskirts of the city.

It started low, a rumble that vibrated through the airframe of my jet. Then it rose—a chaotic, overlapping chorus of howls, screeches, and roars that shook the air itself.

The animals weren’t just resurrected. They were suddenly awake, stripped of their three-thousand-year immortality, and thrust back into a world where the rules had suddenly, violently changed.

And they were starving.

“Father,” Gendis said, her voice cutting through the rising cacophony. “I am detecting massive dimensional ruptures occurring globally. Millions of discrete signatures are materializing in the upper atmosphere. They are in freefall.”

The transmigrators. The people who had left forty subjective years ago. The people who were expecting to return to a slightly degraded Earth, ready to rebuild.

They were arriving right now.

I looked down at the angel, who was finally turning her head toward the jungle, her smile faltering as the true scale of the noise reached her ears. Her golden wings twitched.

Then I looked up at the sky, where the first faint streaks of falling humans began to burn through the atmosphere like meteors, dropping naked and unready directly into the maw of a resurrected, ravenous planet.

I reached forward and disengaged the jet’s safety protocols.

“Gendis,” I said, the Savage persona waking up in the back of my mind, cold and precise. “Warm up the guns.”