There was no signal that morning. No jingle. No slogan. No static. Only silence. 03:17 UTC came and went like any other moment in history. But history, as it turned out, had already ended.
People noticed quickly.
The absence was louder than the noise had ever been. It felt as though the air had been vacuumed from the room. The entire world held it’s breath and no one had said why.
A girl in Jakarta cried because her cereal box didn’t speak to her. A man in London broke his own TV open with a hammer, trying to hear the ghost inside. In São Paulo, a boy threw his tablet into the street, screaming, “It stopped listening!”
In Washington, the President was moved to a classified facility beneath Andrews Air Force Base. In the Vatican, the bells rang without being touched. In Tokyo, thousands gathered silently in Shibuya Crossing, not to protest, not to celebrate. Just to wait. By noon, the skies were still clear. No mothership. No falling star. No redemption code. Just the pause before impact. Just the moment before the sale begins.
Then, at 3:33 p.m. UTC, it started.
Across the globe, every device with a speaker lit up. Phones, radios, elevators, pacemakers. All of it. Even those long since dead. Even those buried. Even those underwater.
The final message began not with sound, but with feeling. A deep, aching pull in the chest. Nostalgia, pure and weaponized. The exact sensation of being six years old on a Saturday morning. The smell of carpet. The taste of sugary cereal. The light of the television glowing blue against your skin.
Then, a voice. Clear. Crisp. Familiar.Male. White. American. But also somehow all voices at once. It said:
“Friends. Shoppers. Dreamers. It’s finally here. The moment you’ve been waiting for. The launch of something extraordinary! One day only. No refunds. No exchanges. No warranty required.”
People stopped in their tracks. In offices. On subways. In basements and prisons and mountaintop monasteries.
“Are you ready to fulfill your destiny? Because the future is now!”
It paused. Then:
“Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper, too?”
That line again. The line. The last line. It rang not from the speakers, but from inside the skull. It bypassed the ears. It lived in the nervous system.
“WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO BE A PEPPER, TOO?”
Louder now. Louder still. Not shouted, but transmitted like a virus across every synapse, every wire, every spark of the human brain.
All at once, every electronic system on Earth died. Not shut down. Not powered off. Fried. Melted. Unrecoverable. Airplanes fell. Power grids collapsed. Pacemakers stopped. Every bitcoin vanished like smoke. The stock market flatlined. Nuclear silos opened, but did not launch. They didn’t have to.
The sky split, but not with light. With heat. With instruction. Above every continent, in precise geometries, came the detonations. Thermonuclear. Rhythmic. Surgical. Not from the stars. From us. From silos long since sealed. From submarines we thought we retired. From drones never disclosed to the public.
Our own hands, guided from afar.
And in the final millisecond, just before flesh became shadow, just before soil turned to glass, just before the last breath was made irrelevant. One final phrase echoed in the space between atoms:
“Everything must go.”
There was no wreckage. There were no survivors. There was no Earth. Just a slowly fading transmission, moving outward through space like a coupon printed on radiation.
Somewhere in the black. A satellite. A signal tower. A voice, smiling:
“Transaction complete. Thank you for shopping with us!”
The planet was gone. Not obliterated. Not exactly. More like cleared. Where oceans once boiled, now there was a shine. Where forests once tangled, a blankness. A perfect nothing.
From orbit, the remains of the Earth shimmered like a coin flipped on black velvet. Its surface, scorched to symmetry, was carved with impossible precision into a shape not found in nature: a hexagonal glyph.
Somewhere, light-years away, a machine noticed. Its eye blinked on.
INVENTORY UPDATE: TERRAN NODE 0001 — STATUS: FINALIZED.
ASSET: WORLD TYPE-B (CONSUMER-GRADE)
OUTCOME: MAXIMUM CONVERSION
LOYALTY POINTS AWARDED: 7.2 TRILLION
A printer whirred. The receipt was long. It listed everything:
1,331,224,009 refrigerators; 9,117,830,433 smartphones; 52,990,821,407 unique marketing slogans; 114,012,093,202 unmet desires; 1 planet (lightly used)
At the bottom, printed in bold:
“No returns. No refunds. No regrets.”
“Thank you for participating in The Final Sale.”
And beneath that:
“NEW ITEMS IN YOUR AREA!”
[Next node: MARS COLONY BETA. Scanning for viable echoes…]
The screen blinked, paused, then dimmed. The system moved on.
Far beyond the reach of light or time, a probe drifted. It was old. A relic. It’s golden plates were still etched with greetings in forgotten languages. A relic of hope, hurled into the void by a people who dreamed of contact.
It did not know what had happened. It did not know it had been heard. That it had been answered. It played music in silence. On it, still spinning in the black, was a voice: clear, crackling, impossibly earnest:
“Hello from the children of planet Earth.”
Far, far away, something smiled.