Dawn Experiment

#Day 1 - 11:23

Zhao blinked and tried to clear the static from his brain. Every step hurt. He crab-walked along the portside catwalk, clutching the railing, the surface slick under his palm. He had a vague, insistent memory that this part of the deck was always freshly varnished, that a careless slip here could mean a week off the job with splinters in your ass. Now it looked like someone had splashed the entire length with motor oil and wine.

The sky screamed. Jets, real ones, tearing the clouds apart like tissue. They flew lower than he’d ever seen, maybe two hundred meters up, the roar of their passage vibrating in his teeth. Zhao squinted through the haze. One, two, three—four at least, all in formation, sharp as sharks’ fins. He traced the flightpath with his eyes and saw the flare of something dropping, the smoke trailing after like cartoon tails.

The bombs hit the far end of the harbor, past where the tourist ferries idled. They were almost beautiful, at first. Light, then color, then an angry blossom of fire rolling up into the air. The sound lagged a few heartbeats behind, but when it arrived, it thumped through Zhao’s chest like a drum solo. Glass shattered across half the marina. Sailboats shivered on their lines. The entire world seemed to contract around the pulse of each blast.

He kept moving, heel-to-toe, head buzzing. Voices swirled around him, urgent and overlapping, a three-language mess of orders, curses, and pleas. Most of the passengers were crammed at the bow, pressing against the rails, staring at the inferno that had once been Nice.

From this distance, the horror was almost abstract, more like a model set on fire by a pyromaniac child than a real place. Zhao’s memory skipped and glitched: the noodle shop off the old port where the owner always gave him extra broth; the ring of street vendors by the soccer stadium where he’d bought his first fake ID; the internet café where he’d watched pirated movies as a freshman, huddled in a corner booth, dreaming of a life that looked nothing like this.

All gone.

He thought of his mother’s phone number, stored in his dead phone. Two missed calls from her yesterday—Shanghai number, but she was in Chengdu now, visiting her sister. He’d deleted them without listening. Now Chengdu was eight time zones away, and the satellite feeds showed Beijing burning, Shanghai burning. He didn’t know if Chengdu was still standing.

Why did she keep calling?

The answer was simple. Obvious. He’d never bothered to think about it before.

Because she loved him. Unconditionally. The only person in the world who did.

He reached for his phone. The screen was dark. He pressed the power button. Nothing. Held it down. Still nothing.

Dead.

He stared at his own reflection in the black glass. The text was still in there, somewhere, trapped in a corpse of circuits and lithium. ”Nice meeting you. Let’s do it again sometime.” The words burned in his memory, but he couldn’t prove they’d ever existed. Couldn’t show anyone. Couldn’t even be sure, anymore, that he hadn’t imagined the whole thing—the text, the dream, Aida’s voice in the dark.

Maybe the concussion was worse than he thought. Maybe none of it was real.

He shoved the phone back in his pocket and kept moving.

#Day 1 - 13:35

He’d just started to breathe again when the speakers crackled to life.

The voice of Captain Anaïs Verne rolled through the corridors, clipped and smooth as a blade: ”All personnel and guests, please assemble in the main atrium. Repeat, all hands and guests, atrium now.” Zhao jerked upright. For a second, he thought he’d hallucinated it, but then the comm speakers squawked again, repeating the order in French and English.

He had maybe thirty seconds before people started flooding in from every direction. He patted himself down, checked for blood. His knuckles were raw, but the blood had dried into dark smudges that might have just been engine grease. His head throbbed, and his vision doubled at the edges, but he could walk. That was enough.

He fell into step behind a pair of crew members hustling toward the center of the ship. The crowd swelled as they passed through the lounges and the private dining rooms. There were more women than he expected, most in uniforms but some in elaborate resort wear, all trying to move with calm that bordered on terror. Nobody gave him a second glance.

The atrium was a cathedral of glass and polished teak, a multi-level open space that caught the afternoon sun and broke it into shards across the crowd. There was a grand staircase that looked like it belonged in a palace, and a ceiling so high you could fly a drone through it. Zhao drifted toward the back, instinctively looking for exits.

At the center of the room, under a domed skylight, stood Captain Verne. She was taller than he remembered, or maybe just carried herself that way. Her silver-blonde hair was pulled tight in a bun, and her uniform was pristine except for a single gold epaulet that had come slightly loose. She stood with her hands behind her back, boots planted a precise shoulder’s width apart.

Zhao blinked, and for a moment the scene doubled—two captains, two crowds, two burning cities. He shook his head hard, and the world snapped back to one. The concussion. Had to be.

He glanced around, took inventory. Maybe a hundred people in the room, maybe less. Some guests looked shell-shocked; others had the stiff faces of people who’d spent their lives getting what they wanted and couldn’t believe the world would dare disappoint them. The rest were crew—women in polos, jumpsuits, lab coats, even a handful of chef’s whites. Not a single other man in sight.

He shrank back, tried to make himself smaller, but the dock worker uniform did him no favors. If anyone paid attention, he’d stick out like a rash.

Captain Verne tapped the microphone stand. The noise cut through the murmur like a shot.

”Ladies. I will be brief.” She scanned the crowd, jaw set. ”At approximately 1120 hours, there was a coordinated attack on the French Riviera, including our port of departure. The nature of the attack is not yet clear. Communications with the mainland are down. Satellite links are unreliable. We are to proceed with all emergency protocols as outlined in your manuals.” She paused. ”If you do not have a manual, you will be issued one.”

A wave of murmurs swept through the room—chairs shifting, throats clearing, whispered questions colliding into a nervous hum. The captain stood motionless, waiting for the sound to exhaust itself against the high ceiling.

”We will maintain course until we reach international waters. Medical personnel will tend to all injuries. For now, no one is to leave the vessel, or attempt to contact outside parties, until further notice.” Another pause, this one heavier. ”It is possible—” She stopped, took a measured breath. ”It is possible that we are among the only survivors in this region. We will operate accordingly.”

Gasps, a few sharp whispers. One woman in a striped dress burst into tears, but her friend grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her upright. Zhao watched the play of emotion ripple through the room—disbelief, anger, a desperate clinging to order.

Near the back of the crowd, two women were whispering. Zhao caught fragments—”...disconnected number...” ”...same thing happened to me...” ”...morning it all started...”

He turned sharply. One was older, maybe fifty, with gray streaking her temples and a voice low and rough like she’d smoked for decades. The other was younger, early thirties, with an accent he couldn’t place—Eastern European, maybe—her words higher, faster, edged with panic.

Their eyes met his for a single heartbeat. Then they were moving, swallowed by the press of bodies.

”Wait—” Zhao pushed after them, elbowing past a cluster of crying guests. But the crowd was a living thing, indifferent to his urgency. By the time he reached the spot where they’d been standing, they were gone. Vanished into the chaos like they’d never existed.

He stood there, breathing hard, scanning every face. Nothing.

Someone else got a text. Two someones.

The thought was a match struck in darkness. He didn’t know what it meant. But it meant something.

He kept scanning, but the faces blurred, and after a minute he couldn’t pick them out even if they were still there.

Someone else got a text. Two someones. The thought should have comforted him. Instead, it made him think of his mother—how she’d never get a text from him again. How she’d never know where he was, what he’d become, whether he was alive or dead.

He turned back to the perimeter, looking for the woman he’d seen on the upper deck. Vivienne Laurent was standing on the second level, hands on the rail, head tilted just enough to catch the captain’s eye. She looked composed, almost bored, but Zhao saw her knuckles whiten where they gripped the railing.

Someone behind him muttered, ”This is bullshit. My husband is still at the hotel. I want a radio now.” The woman next to her shushed her, but the anger spread, contagious.

”We will reestablish contact as soon as possible. For now, all energies must be focused on immediate survival. You have food, water, and medical support. We are better equipped than any other vessel on this sea. If you have complaints, you may file them with me directly. Otherwise—” her gaze swept the crowd, ”—help, or get out of the way.”

Zhao recognized the authority in her voice. It was the same pitch his father used when dealing with bureaucrats, the same chill his high school principal summoned during expulsion hearings. It made him want to stand up straighter, even as he tried to disappear.

He spotted the doctor—Dr. Iqbal—at the base of the stairs, arms folded tight, scanning the crowd. She nodded once, a signal to someone unseen. Near her, a dark-skinned woman in cargo shorts and a life jacket was already checking on the more hysterical guests, corralling them into small, manageable groups.

Zhao realized two things at once: first, that the Blue Oasis was now a floating society with rules and hierarchies as rigid as any government; and second, that his odds of hiding out here until things returned to normal were rapidly approaching zero.

He backed toward a side entrance, careful not to bump into anyone. As he did, he caught a glimpse of himself in a glass panel—dirty, blood-streaked, eyes wild. He looked like he’d crawled out from under a bomb, which, he supposed, was technically true.

He ducked into an empty corridor, heart thudding. His hands shook. He tried to slow his breathing, to recall what the captain had just said. No contact with the outside. No rescue. Just the ocean, and a hundred strangers, and no way to reach his family.

He reached into his pocket. The phone was still there. Still dead.

He pulled it out, turned it over in his hands. The cracked screen caught the light, spiderwebbed fractures spreading from an impact point near the top corner. He couldn’t remember when that had happened—during the explosion, maybe, or when he’d hit the bulkhead. The phone was a ruin now. Useless.

But he couldn’t throw it away. Not yet. Not until he knew.

The question circled back, relentless: Who sent it? Why?

Aida’s face surfaced in his memory—the way she’d looked at him across the table, the way she’d whispered ”Don’t forget me.” Was any of it real?

He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. Not yet.

He put the phone back in his pocket and slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. He closed his eyes. He tried to remember his mother’s voice, the sound of her telling him not to get in trouble, to stay away from rich people and their problems.

But all he could hear was Aida.

Above him, the sun arced through the atrium dome, lighting up the Blue Oasis in a pattern that reminded him of something—a church, maybe, the kind that always made him feel like a sinner.

He wondered if it mattered anymore—who was good, who was bad—or if survival had its own morality now.

Somewhere on this ship, Aida was real. The text was real. That was all he knew. All he could hold onto.

He didn’t know what any of it meant. He didn’t know if he’d ever find out.

Then the lights flickered, the ship lurched, and the world kept turning—toward whatever came next.