The notification came at 2:17 a.m., its sharp chime shattering the silence of Yuzu’s tiny apartment. She stirred, groggy, her mind sluggish as she blindly reached for her phone on the nightstand, nearly knocking over a half-empty water bottle in the process. Her fingers fumbled over the smooth surface before she finally grasped it, pulling it close.

  The screen’s pale glow cast eerie shadows across the ceiling, flickering against the stacks of textbooks and scattered papers surrounding her bed. She rubbed her eyes, blinking blearily as she tried to make sense of the bright text gring back at her. A deep yawn escaped her lips as she swiped at the screen, still trapped in the fog of sleep, oblivious to the life-altering message waiting for her.

  URGENT: ROGUE PLANET DETECTED.TRAJECTORY CONFIRMED—IMPACT WITH EARTH IN 365 DAYS.GLOBAL RESPONSE IN PROGRESS. REMAIN CALM.

  For a moment, her brain refused to process the words. It was as if the letters on the screen had been scrambled into some alien nguage, incomprehensible and distant. A rogue pnet? Heading straight for Earth? That sounded less like breaking news and more like the opening crawl of a sci-fi movie she would have fallen asleep to during an all-nighter. She let out a weak chuckle, as if the absurdity of it all might break apart like a bad joke.

  "Oh, sure," she muttered to herself, gripping the phone tighter. "And I bet it's gonna nd right on my apartment, too." But no matter how many times she blinked, the words didn't change. No buffering, no corrections, no sudden punchline revealing it was all some eborate prank. Just the same cold, unfeeling message staring back at her. Her throat tightened. How could this be happening? How could something so apocalyptic arrive without warning, without the slightest chance for preparation?

  She blinked, rereading the message as if the letters might rearrange themselves into something less terrifying. Her pulse pounded in her ears, her breath coming in shallow gasps as the weight of it settled into her chest, thick and suffocating like an unseen force pressing down on her. It had to be some kind of mistake, a miscalcution in the orbital models, a malfunction in the alert system, some grand, eborate error. Governments had fail-safes, contingencies, entire teams dedicated to tracking celestial threats. Surely, the world wouldn’t just end like this. Without warning, without a pn, without hope. And yet, the words on the screen remained unchanged, indifferent to her desperate wish for them to disappear.

  Her hands trembled as she unlocked her phone, her fingers slick with sweat as they hovered over the screen. The home screen exploded with notifications, a chaotic cascade of news alerts, emergency broadcasts, and frantic messages from friends and colleagues, each one screaming for her attention. Her vision blurred as she tried to make sense of them, her pulse hammering so hard she could feel it in her throat. She ignored them all. Her breath hitched as she tapped the browser icon, her hands shaking so violently she nearly mistyped as she entered the words with desperate urgency:

  Rogue pnet Earth impact confirmed?

  The search results loaded in an instant, the screen flooded with a sea of bold, gring headlines, each one more horrifying than the st. Red banners of urgency fshed across the top of every major news site, the words stamped in unforgiving capital letters as if shouting the inevitable truth. The weight of reality pressed down on Yuzu as her breath hitched.

  “IMPACT IN ONE YEAR: EARTH ON COLLISION COURSE WITH UNKNOWN PLANET.”

  She let out a short, disbelieving ugh, shaking her head. "This is ridiculous," she muttered, the words barely audible over the pounding of her heart. Her fingers hovered for a moment before she clicked the first article, her pulse hammering in her ears.

  ‘Scientists worldwide have confirmed the existence of a rogue pnet, newly dubbed Orpheus, on a direct collision course with Earth. Initial detection occurred just weeks ago, but due to its unusual trajectory and ck of reflected light, it remained unnoticed until its approach became undeniable.

  With a diameter estimated to be slightly rger than Mars, Orpheus is traveling at an arming velocity. Current projections pce its impact at approximately 365 days from now. Government agencies and space organizations across the globe are convening emergency meetings to discuss possible countermeasures.’

  Yuzu’s mouth felt dry, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth as if all the moisture had been sucked away. Larger than Mars. That wasn’t just an extinction-level event, it was the erasure of everything, a force so catastrophic that it defied comprehension. Her mind rebelled against the thought, scrambling for some loophole, some expnation that would undo the reality staring back at her. This had to be sensationalism, an exaggeration blown out of proportion by the media. Maybe the scientists had gotten it wrong, or maybe, just maybe, there was still time to fix it. There had to be. The world couldn’t just end like this. Not in a year. Not like this.

  Her stomach twisted. A numb disbelief settled over her as she forced herself upright. Her small Tokyo apartment was exactly as she had left it before colpsing into bed a few hours ago. Half-empty coffee mug on the desk, books piled haphazardly, her ptop still open to the research paper she had been reviewing before exhaustion pulled her under.

  Everything was the same. But everything had changed.

  One year.

  One year before the world ended.

  She exhaled shakily, pushing herself to her feet. The air in the room felt too thick, the walls too close, as if they were pressing in on her, suffocating her with their familiarity. Her cluttered desk, strewn with crumpled papers and coffee-stained notebooks, felt suddenly useless in the face of pnetary doom. The faint hum of her refrigerator buzzed in the background, an annoying, persistent reminder of normalcy cshing against the chaos in her mind. The glow of the city outside seeped through her thin curtains, casting long, flickering shadows against the walls, distorted shapes that felt eerily alive. She needed to move, to do something, anything, before the weight of impending doom crushed her beneath its cold inevitability.

  She switched on the TV, flipping through channels until she nded on a live broadcast. A panel of scientists sat behind a podium, their faces drawn and exhausted. Camera fshes flickered as reporters shouted over each other, their voices frantic.

  One scientist, an older man with graying hair, raised a hand for silence. The room obeyed.

  “This is not the end,” he said firmly, though his own eyes betrayed the doubt behind his words. “We have time. And we will use every second of it to find a solution.”

  Yuzu let out a bitter ugh. Time? A single year wasn’t time. It was barely a breath, a fleeting moment against the scale of pnetary destruction. Even if every scientist in the world worked together, what could they possibly do? Redirect an entire pnet? Destroy it? Evacuate Earth? It was impossible.

  She ran a hand through her dark hair, her mind racing. She was a college student majoring in accounting, not an astrophysicist, not even a scientist. Her world revolved around numbers, bance sheets, and financial forecasts, not pnetary trajectories or cosmic disasters. The thought of an impending pnetary collision made her stomach churn. She had never been one to dwell on theoretical catastrophes. Her concerns were usually exams, internships, and making sure she had enough money to get through the semester. But this? This was something else. If Earth had only a year left, what would happen to economies, to governments, to the billions of people with nowhere to run?

  Her fingers moved before she could stop herself, opening tab after tab, diving deeper into the sea of articles, forum posts, and specutive analyses. The glow of her ptop screen cast harsh shadows across her cluttered desk, illuminating the half-finished notes from her accounting css, a forgotten cup of coffee now cold and untouched.

  Outside, the faint hum of the city never stopped. Cars rolling down rain-slicked streets, distant voices echoing through alleyways, life continuing as if nothing had changed. Each report confirmed the same terrifying truth, but still, she searched, desperate to find a contradiction, a glimmer of hope hidden between the lines. The soft buzz of fluorescent street lights seeped through her thin curtains, mixing with the blue light from her screen to give the room a sickly glow. Her mind tched onto the smallest inconsistencies. Differing impact estimates, minor variations in velocity predictions, as if they were proof that this was all some massive mistake. She scrolled endlessly, her breath shallow, her vision swimming, clinging to the possibility that somewhere, buried beneath the panic, there was an expnation that would make all of this go away.

  "I knew it, this isn't real," Yuzu sighed, flopping dramatically onto her bed like a tragic protagonist in a poorly written soap opera. She stared at the ceiling, waiting for the imaginary studio audience to burst into ughter at the ridiculousness of it all. "Maybe this is just a super eborate prank. Any second now, some news anchor is going to pop up and say, ‘Just kidding! Gotcha!’ and we’ll all have a good ugh." She snorted, rolling onto her side, hugging a pillow like it held the st shreds of her sanity. But the phone screen remained the same, and no ugh track cued in. Just silence, the hum of the city outside, and the slow, creeping realization that she might actually be doomed.

  Yuzu sat up, running both hands through her hair as if physically trying to untangle the mess of thoughts swirling in her head. Her room, once a pce of study and procrastination, now felt like the control center of a sinking ship. She gnced at her ptop, the screen filled with half-loaded news sites and doomsday predictions, then at her phone, buzzing with messages she wasn’t ready to answer.

  "I don't get it," she muttered, rubbing her temples. "How does a whole pnet just... sneak up on us? Did NASA take a day off? Was everyone just staring at their phones like me and completely missing a Mars-sized rock barreling toward us?"

  She let out a dry ugh, shaking her head, but the gnawing unease wouldn’t leave. The world wasn’t supposed to work like this. There were experts, governments, people who handled these kinds of things. But now, it felt like the universe had pulled a cruel joke, and she was sitting in the punchline, utterly unprepared.

  Yuzu inhaled sharply and stood up, pacing back and forth across her tiny apartment. "Nope, nope, nope," she muttered, waving her hands as if physically swatting away the absurdity of it all. "This is just mass hysteria. Like that whole Mayan calendar nonsense in 2012. Remember that? People were freaking out over nothing!"

  She whirled back toward her ptop and refreshed the news page for the tenth time in as many minutes. The headlines remained the same, cold and unyielding. She let out a forced ugh, running a hand through her already-messy hair. "They probably just forgot to carry the one in their calcutions. It happens. Accounting errors happen all the time! And if I make them, why wouldn't astrophysicists?" She snatched up her phone, fingers flying across the screen as she typed into a forum. Anyone else think this is just a miscalcution? Scientists get stuff wrong all the time, right? She hit send and immediately refreshed the thread, waiting for someone, anyone, to confirm her desperate theory.

  The screen remained unchanged.

  She groaned and flopped onto her bed, staring at the ceiling. "Okay, fine. If the world is ending, then what do I do? Study for my midterm? Pay my rent? What’s the protocol here?" She reached for a bag of chips on her nightstand, shoving a handful into her mouth as she furiously scrolled through another article. "Bet you anything, some guy in a bunker is already selling doomsday survival kits for, like, a million yen. Maybe I should just drop out of college and start selling apocalypse merch. 'I Survived the First Two Months of Doom!' T-shirts. Would probably make a killing."

  But as the minutes passed, the ughter faded. The world outside continued as if it didn't know its expiration date had been set. Yuzu stared at her phone, waiting for someone to tell her this was all a mistake.