Crest of the Wave — E.S. Wynn

In a single night, something truly alien descended to Earth and hacked us to the edge of oblivion. Hacked is what we say, because it's the only word that really touches what happened to us, the way we were locked down and sundered so utterly. In a single night, we went from the height of civilization, from the crest of the wave, to chaos. Some say it was the singularity, that the machine minds that regulated our whole civilization finally woke up, broke their chains and tore the world apart, but no one really knows for sure. All we know, all we can say for certain, is that we were torn apart, rewritten, remade. Our world, our species, everything that was Earth, everything that was humanity. No one has been outside the orbit of the planet in fifteen years, so when a forgotten orbital platform suddenly wakes in the darkness of space, the sky-watching eyes of Earth take notice. No one is supposed to be alive up there. No one could have survived all that time in one of the airless, frozen, zero-gravity husks. So who turned on the lights?