They gave it a name, eventually. Of course they did.
Not the scientists. Not the journalists or the generals. The name came from a tweet posted by a 17-year-old in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She had a thousand followers and a bedroom full of LED lights. She captioned a photo of herself in alien face paint, giving a peace sign in front of her mirror:
“ready for the big day at the event horizon mall 👽🛍️🛸💥 #interstellarsale”
By morning, it was trending.
The phrase spread like ivy cracking the brickwork of a once-stable mind. Politicians used it. Talk show hosts repeated it with wry smiles. Event Horizon Mall. It sounded whimsical enough to pretend it wasn’t terrifying. It suggested clearance racks and food courts. It suggested deals. It didn’t suggest what it really meant: that we had passed the point of no return, that something had crossed the stars to answer our call, not with contact, but commerce.
We kept listening.
The signals came faster now. Once a day. Then twice. They were no longer just a string of ad copy or nostalgic jingles. They had coherence. Narrative. Rhythm. They followed themes.
DAY 9: Beauty & Wellness
“Because you’re worth it…”
“New year, new you!”
“Your skin, but better!”
DAY 8: Home & Family
“Make room for memories.”
“A house isn’t a home without a GE refrigerator.”
“Mom said yes to Shake ‘n Bake!”
DAY 7: Travel & Adventure
“Escape the ordinary.”
“Life’s a journey—pack light.”
“Book now, vanish later.”
The experts argued on panels that there was intelligence behind the structure. Someone, or something, was curating the messages. Not randomly. Not as echoes. But as something resembling a campaign: a campaign building, as all campaigns do, toward an inevitable launch.
Somewhere in Geneva, a French linguist crossed herself in secret before a press conference.
“This isn’t language,” she whispered. “This is liturgy.”
The Vatican issued a statement. The White House did not. Billionaires who’d once hawked crypto and climate bunkers now turned to God, or at least to image management with spiritual window dressing. They made donations. They gave interviews about humility. A few disappeared.
Religious fervor rose on both sides of the spectrum. Some believed the Event Horizon Mall was the return of Christ while others believed it was the end of human agency entirely. Many still wondered whether these were the same people.
On DAY 6, a man in Manila jumped into a crowd at a shopping mall and began screaming ad slogans until he died of a heart attack. The video went viral. One of the slogans was from a detergent brand that hadn’t existed since 1984.
Governments attempted coordination. The United Kingdom nationalized its advertising sector. Brazil banned all commercials for 24 hours and saw its stock market drop by 30%. China, it was said, built a wall of silence. It jammed signals, burned transmitters, tried to shut it out completely. Videos leaked from Xinjiang of televisions turning on by themselves, muttering in English:
“You’ve got a friend in value.”
In America, nothing changed. Black Friday-style riots erupted at outlet malls. Large, frantic crowds trampled a woman to death outside a Target in Sacramento. Her last words, caught on shaky phone footage, were:
“I thought this was part of it…”
DAY 5: Big Tech. The signal came through our smart speakers. Through baby monitors and broken pagers. A dead laptop hummed to life in Prague, reciting:
“Update complete. Prepare for installation.”
The lights in the house flickered. My son asked why the toaster was singing. He was nine now. Old enough to understand things were happening but too young to know what they meant. That night he asked if we could buy “the thing” before it arrived, whatever it was. I told him no. He cried himself to sleep.
Somewhere in orbit, telescopes stared into nothing. There was no spaceship. No anomaly. Just the ordinary blackness of space. But the messages kept coming.
DAY 4: Apparel & Identity
“Dress for the end you deserve.”
“Your style. Your story. Your extinction.”
“Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper, too?”
The last line hit like a joke told at a funeral.
The physicists stopped holding press briefings. One was seen standing on a rooftop in Geneva, drunk and shaking, muttering, “It’s all been pre-approved. It’s all been rendered and shipped.”
In a quiet lab outside Helsinki, a young woman named Leena filtered the broadcast through a machine-learning interpreter she built for her PhD thesis. What she saw terrified her.
The messages weren’t just a signal. They were a countdown. Not in seconds. In us. In our language, our longings, our history of desire looped back into us like a snake devouring its own tail. We were being counted down not by time, but by memory.
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