Zero-Hour Trajectory

Chapter 1: The Doomsday Clock

March 15, 2035, the spring equinox. Chen Mo's fingers hovered over the holographic keyboard for three seconds as he calibrated the dark matter detector's resonance frequency for the seventeenth time. The lab's LED ceiling lights suddenly flickered three times in an eerie pattern, like a warning before some mechanical failure. When he looked up, the curved screen embedded in the bulletproof glass abruptly switched to a global news broadcast. New York's Times Square, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Tokyo Skytree: above every landmark floated a translucent, deep-blue veil of light, all displaying the same countdown: 1