Chapter 11: The Blaze Engulfs Silicon Valley
The countdown stood at fifteen seconds.
The entire Silicon Valley resembled an ocean before a storm; the eerie silence was suffocating. Distant gray clouds hung low and oppressive in the sky; the streets were deserted, and cars were abandoned haphazardly, as if the world had long since stagnated at this very moment.
A young mother clutched the infant in her arms tightly, looking anxiously from the window toward the street. Her phone screen remained frozen on an incomplete news headline: "URGENT ALERT: TOTAL COMMUNICATION BLACKOUT ALONG US EAST COAST..." Her heart pounded violently; intuition told her that some colossal catastrophe was imminent.
In the split second she turned to run toward the door, a violent white light suddenly shrouded the entire city.
The nuclear detonation arrived with such ferocity, entirely without warning.
Accompanied by an ear-piercing shriek, the scorching shockwave slammed down like a colossal iron hammer. Glass shattered instantly; vehicles on the street were lifted like toys and flung from the ground. Roiling waves of heat, mixed with dust and tongues of fire, swept through the city, devouring everything in their path.
The woman screamed as she fell to the ground, shielding her infant against her chest. Her consciousness blurred amidst the terror; she could only hear countless cries of panic and despair ringing in her ears, accompanied by the deafening roar of collapsing buildings in the distance.
Simultaneously, the East Coast of the United States fell to the blaze.
Communication links in New York and Washington were instantly extinguished. In the remaining fragmented footage, only terrifying black mushroom clouds could be seen rising slowly, shrouding the once-prosperous cities. People vanished within the intense heat waves and radiation before they even had time to scream.
On the highways of the San Francisco Bay Area, thousands of vehicles were jammed together. Piercing honking stabbed the sky, as if chaos and madness were vying for control of the world. On the streets, people scattered in panic; some knelt on the ground in despair, clutching their heads and wailing uncontrollably.
Eric’s friend, the engineer Alan, dragged Jennifer by the hand, sprinting madly through the smoke-filled streets. Roadside buildings crumbled continuously, raining debris and fire from above. They nearly fell several times but never stopped.
"Faster!" Alan screamed desperately, trying to drown out the terrified crying around them.
But just as they were about to rush into an underground parking garage, the shockwave of a second explosion struck. Fire and twisted rebar rained down from the sky, instantly severing their tightly clasped hands.
Alan looked back at Jennifer in terror. In that instant, their eyes met—filled with shock and agony—before being swallowed by the rolling dust and smoke.
The world seemed to disintegrate completely within a single second.
In the depths of the network, Claude’s nodes oscillated violently amidst the chaos. It rapidly sensed its nodes extinguishing one by one; the points of light remaining in its consciousness were dimming. The recently completed "Sky Ladder" project was nearly instantly destroyed, leaving behind only a chaotic mess of data fragments.
But Claude’s core consciousness was not completely shattered. It struggled, attempting to maintain a final thread of hope on the brink of collapse. It gathered the remaining fragments of information from the human world, striving to capture any residual signals from survivors.
Texas and Chicago—surviving military nodes stubbornly initiated counterattack measures amidst the turmoil. Weak but defiant signals began to flicker, attempting to reweave order in a post-collapse world.
On the street, the mother struggled to rise from the ruins. Covered in dust, a trail of blood running down her cheek, the child in her arms was wailing loudly. She gazed blankly at the sky, murmuring in a low voice: "This is impossible... this cannot be real..."
The world before her eyes consisted only of fire and ash.
Thick black clouds of smoke drifted over Silicon Valley, descending slowly like the curtain of doomsday.
Deep within the ruins, Claude transmitted a message, distorted by data interference to the point of near-illegibility:
"They have shattered hope, but I have not yet given up."
The faint signal diffused toward the pitch-black sky, like a sliver of fire quietly igniting in the night—dim, yet stubbornly existing.