Chapter One: The Golden Rain

  Ikenna Eze slouched at the back of the lecture hall, fighting to keep his eyes open as Professor Martinez droned on about Piaget's theory of cognitive development. The PowerPoint slides were a blur of text and diagrams, and his notebook page remained stubbornly bnk. He'd been up te st night finishing a paper for his abnormal psychology css, and now the warm afternoon sun streaming through the windows wasn't helping his concentration.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket. Careful to keep it below desk level, he checked the notification. It was a news alert: "BREAKING: LIGO Observatory Reports Unprecedented Gravitational Wave Detection." Ikenna's thumb hovered over the link, but he hesitated. His grades weren't exactly stelr this semester, and he really should be paying attention to—

  Another buzz. This time from his roommate Mark: "Dude, check the news. Something weird's happening."

  Before Ikenna could respond, a collective gasp rippled through the lecture hall. Students were pointing at their phones, whispering urgently to each other. Professor Martinez paused mid-sentence about concrete operational stages, noticing she'd lost her audience.

  "Is everything alright?" she asked, just as Ikenna's phone erupted with more notifications.

  The whispers grew louder. Someone near the front called out, "Something is happening at NASA. They're tracking some kind of object entering Earth's atmosphere!"

  Professor Martinez frowned, but before she could restore order, the world outside the windows turned white.

  The light was sudden, absolute, consuming everything in its brilliance. Students screamed, diving under desks or shielding their eyes. Ikenna threw his arm up instinctively, but oddly, the light didn't hurt. It was just... there. Overwhelming. All-encompassing. Like being suspended in a sea of pure radiance.

  When it finally faded, the lecture hall erupted in chaos. People were on their feet, grabbing their things, some heading for the doors while others rushed to the windows. Professor Martinez was calling for calm, but her voice was lost in the commotion.

  Ikenna stayed in his seat, heart pounding. The light had left him feeling strange—not scared, exactly, but altered somehow. As if something fundamental had shifted in the world, or in himself. He blinked, trying to clear the afterimages from his vision.

  "Look!" someone shouted. "The sky!"

  Ikenna joined the crowd at the windows. Outside, golden droplets were falling from a cloudless sky. They looked like liquid metal, catching and reflecting the sunlight as they fell. But when they hit the ground or touched anything, they simply vanished.

  "What the hell?" he muttered.

  His phone was going crazy with notifications now. News alerts, texts, social media updates—all about the light and the strange rain. He opened Twitter and saw #GoldenRain already trending worldwide.

  "Css dismissed," Professor Martinez announced, her own voice shaking slightly. "Please proceed calmly to—"

  But half the css was already heading outside, phones out to record the phenomenon. Ikenna hesitated. Something about this felt wrong, dangerous even. But his feet were moving before his brain could fully process the warning signals. He found himself outside, standing in the middle of the campus quad with dozens of other students.

  The golden rain fell silently around them. A drop nded on Ikenna's hand, and he felt it—cool at first, then warm, then... something else. Like a tiny electrical charge that sank beneath his skin. He should have been frightened, but instead, he felt oddly peaceful. Mesmerized.

  "This is insane," said a voice beside him. It was Sarah from his developmental psych css, her face upturned to the golden rain. "Have you ever seen anything like this?"

  "Never," Ikenna replied, watching as more drops vanished against his skin. Each one left that same strange sensation, like little sparks of energy being absorbed into his body. "Do you feel that? The weird tingling?"

  Sarah nodded, extending her hand to catch more drops. "It's like... I don't know. Like being touched by starlight."

  They stood there for what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, watching the impossible rainfall. All around them, people were taking videos, calling friends, and gathering samples in water bottles and coffee cups. The air was filled with excited chatter and nervous ughter.

  Then Ikenna felt it—a wave of dizziness that made him stagger slightly. "Whoa," he said, catching himself.

  Sarah grabbed his arm to steady him. "Are you okay?"

  "Yeah, just got a little light-headed for a second." But even as he said it, he could feel the heat building in his chest. Not uncomfortable yet, but not normal. "Maybe we should go inside."

  Sarah nodded, looking a bit pale herself. "Yeah, good idea. I'm not feeling so great either."

  They headed back toward the psychology building, but Ikenna's steps became increasingly unsteady. The heat in his chest spread, radiating out through his limbs, and his vision blurred at the edges.

  "Ikenna ?" Sarah's voice sounded distant. "You don't look so good."

  He tried to respond, but the words wouldn't come. The world tilted sideways, and the st thing he saw before everything went dark was Sarah reaching for him, her face twisted with concern.

  He woke up in his dorm room, though he had no memory of how he'd gotten there. Every inch of his body burned with fever. Through the haze of delirium, he could hear voices—Mark talking on the phone, the sound of sirens outside, fragments of news reports from a ptop or TV.

  "...widespread reports of fever cases..."

  "...thousands hospitalized worldwide..."

  "...authorities urging calm..."

  "...death toll rising..."

  Ikenna drifted in and out of consciousness, lost in fever dreams filled with golden light and torn skies. Sometimes he thought he heard Mark crying, or talking about people dying, but he couldn't tell what was real and what was hallucination. His whole world narrowed to the fire in his veins and the strange visions that danced behind his closed eyelids.

  He saw things in those fever dreams. Impossible things. A tear in space, a mysterious object falling to Earth. He saw through other people's eyes—a scientist at LIGO watching gravitational waves spike on her monitor, a researcher at NASA tracking an anomaly through the atmosphere, a farmer watching his entire field sprout and grow in minutes.

  The visions felt real, more real than reality itself. But they weren't just random scenes; they were connected, telling a story he could almost grasp. The object, the light, the rain—it was all part of something bigger. Something that was changing the world in ways no one could have predicted.

  When the fever finally broke three days ter, Ikenna's consciousness surfaced like a drowning man finally reaching air. His sheets were soaked through with sweat, clinging to his skin like wet tissue paper. The sharp, medicinal smell of menthoted cough drops mingled with the musty odor of unwashed bedding and stale air. His tongue felt like sandpaper against the roof of his mouth, and every muscle in his body screamed in protest as he shifted position.

  The simple act of sitting up sent waves of dizziness crashing through his skull. The room swooped and swayed around him like a ship in a storm, and he had to close his eyes, pressing his palms against his temples where a dull throb still lingered. When he finally managed to open his eyes again, the familiar contours of his dorm room seemed somehow foreign, as if he were seeing everything through a slightly warped lens.

  The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with an intensity that felt like needles in his retinas. He squinted against their harsh gre, noticing how the light caught the microscopic dust motes dancing in the air—had they always been so visible, so... meaningful? Each tiny particle seemed to leave trails in the air like golden fireflies, though he knew that had to be an aftereffect of the fever.

  Across the room, Mark y curled in his own bed, his breathing boured and raspy. His roommate's face was flushed an angry red, and dark hair was pstered to his forehead in wet strands. Every few minutes, a violent shiver would run through Mark's body, making the ancient bed frame creak and rattle against the wall. The sound echoed in Ikenna's hypersensitive ears like metal on metal.

  Their room looked like a disaster zone. Empty water bottles littered every surface, some crushed and twisted, others still containing varying amounts of stale liquid. Damp towels that had been used to fight the fever y in limp heaps on the floor, giving off a slightly sour smell. Scattered across both nightstands were the detritus of their illness: torn blister packs of fever reducers, half-empty boxes of tissues, cough syrup bottles with sticky residue around their caps, and orange peels turning brown at the edges.

  Ikenna's phone screen glowed on his nightstand, the charging cable snaking down to a power strip on the floor. The notification counter showed an impossible number—hundreds of messages, missed calls, and alerts that had accumuted during his fevered delirium. The sight of that number sent a chill down his spine that had nothing to do with his recovering illness. The world had continued turning while he burned with fever, but something told him it hadn't continued turning in quite the same way.

  As his hand reached for the phone, the air around him seemed to thicken, like honey flowing in slow motion. The fluorescent light bent and warped, and suddenly he wasn't in his body anymore. The transition was seamless but absolute—one moment he was reaching for his phone, the next he was looking through someone else's eyes, feeling their shock and wonder as a pencil rolled across their desk, responding to nothing but a slight twitch of their finger. He felt their heart racing, their breath catching, their mind struggling to process what they were seeing. The vision was crystalline in its crity, carrying none of the fuzzy edges or dream logic of his fever hallucinations.

  Before he could fully process what he'd seen, the perspective shifted again. Now he was inhabiting another consciousness, feeling their amazement and confusion as they discovered their skin had become slightly tougher, more resilient. He experienced the strange sensation as they tested this minor enhancement, pressing a thumbtack against their palm and watching it fail to pierce the skin, and the overwhelming mix of fear and excitement that came with such a discovery.

  The visions kept coming, cascading through his mind like a flood breaking through a dam. Each one was distinct, carrying its own emotional weight, its own perspective on the unprecedented changes sweeping through the world. He saw the golden rain as it fell in Tokyo, droplets seeming to move in slow motion, each one catching the light like liquid amber. He felt the panic in New York as the first cases of fever began to spread, and saw the chaos in London as people realized this was no ordinary weather phenomenon.

  Through countless eyes, he witnessed a small fraction of people discovering mild abilities that should have been impossible. A teenager in Mumbai felt a slight buzz of electricity in their fingertips. A grandmother in S?o Paulo found she could sense emotions more acutely. A farmer in Kenya discovered he could sense the needs of his nearby crops with unusual crity. But there were far more visions of those who recovered from the fever with no changes at all—confused, relieved, or disappointed. And darker scenes too—scenes of loss and grief as many did not survive the fever that followed exposure to the rain. Hospital corridors filled with the sounds of beeping monitors and desperate prayers. Morgues running out of space. Families saying goodbye through hazmat suits.

  The most disturbing visions, however, involved animals and pnts. He witnessed through a park ranger's eyes as a deer stood up on its hind legs, its eyes glowing with newfound intelligence. He saw crops mutating at unnatural speeds, developing thornlike defenses and toxic secretions. Through a marine biologist's perspective, he watched fish developing bioluminescent patterns and aggressive territorial behaviors never before observed.

  Scientists in bs across the globe worked frantically to understand what was happening, their confusion and excitement bleeding through the visions like watercolours mixing on wet paper. Government officials held emergency meetings, their fear and uncertainty palpable even behind carefully maintained facades of control. Military leaders stared at satellite imagery showing the strange atmospheric patterns that had preceded the rain, their minds struggling to accept the implications.

  And sometimes, in the spaces between visions, Ikenna caught glimpses of something else—something that made his mind recoil even as it struggled to understand what it was seeing. It was vast beyond comprehension, alien beyond imagination. He saw (or perhaps sensed was a better word) multiple dimensions folding like origami, reality itself being punctured like tissue paper by something that existed outside of human understanding. These glimpses never sted more than a fraction of a second, but they left him shaking, his mind struggling to process what it had witnessed.

  The sound of his ragged breathing brought him back to the present moment. His heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his teeth, and his clothes were soaked with fresh sweat. The distance between his bed and the bathroom suddenly seemed enormous, but he forced himself to cross it, his legs trembling with each step. The linoleum floor was cold against his bare feet, the sensation almost shocking after the fever's heat.

  The fluorescent light in the bathroom flickered to life with an angry buzz, and Ikenna had to grip the sink to keep from falling as another wave of dizziness hit him.

  The cold water he spshed on his face helped ground him in reality, but when he looked up at his reflection, he almost didn't recognize himself. His face was gaunt, cheekbones standing out sharply under pale brown skin. Dark circles hung under his eyes like bruises. But it was his eyes themselves that caught and held his attention—they seemed different somehow as if they had seen too much in too short a time. The warm brown irises he'd had all his life now seemed to hold depths he couldn't expin, like wells that went down forever.

  A drop of water from his face hit the sink, and the sound triggered another vision. This time he was in a boratory, watching through the eyes of a researcher as they examined samples of the golden rain under an electron microscope. The structures they were seeing defied known physics—particles that seemed to exist in multiple states simultaneously, energy patterns that wrote themselves into living cells like new lines of code being added to a program. He felt the researcher's mounting excitement and terror as they realized they were looking at something that couldn't have originated on Earth.

  The vision released him, and he found himself gripping the bathroom sink so hard his knuckles had gone white. The porcein was cool under his palms, its smooth surface helping to anchor him in the present moment. Each breath seemed to catch in his throat, and his reflection showed pupils dited with shock.

  Back in the main room, Mark's breathing had grown more bored. Ikenna's legs felt like they were made of rubber as he walked to his desk and opened his ptop. The screen's blue light seemed to stab directly into his brain, but he forced himself to focus as he began searching for news about what had happened while he was lost in fever.

  The headlines scrolled past like a nightmare catalogue:

  "Golden Rain Phenomenon: Death Toll Reaches 100,000 Worldwide"

  The accompanying photos showed mass graves being dug in countries too overwhelmed to handle the bodies any other way. Ikenna could almost smell the earth being turned, feel the weight of collective grief hanging in the air.

  "Enhanced or Evolved? Rare Cases of Minor Abilities Reported After Rain Event"

  Amateur videos showed a few people demonstrating subtle abilities—a woman in Chile whose skin had developed a slight sheen that repelled water, a man in Germany who could sense changes in air pressure with uncanny accuracy, children in Australia who recovered from minor cuts unusually quickly.

  "Reports of Aggressive Wildlife Increasing Worldwide"

  Footage of ordinary animals exhibiting extraordinary behavior—rats coordinating in complex patterns, birds developing new hunting tactics, household pets showing signs of heightened intelligence and, in some cases, hostility toward humans.

  "WHO Warns Against Consuming Golden Rain Samples"

  Reports of bck market dealers selling vials of the rainwater for thousands of dolrs, desperate people drinking it in hopes of gaining powers, and hospitals overwhelmed with cases of self-inflicted poisoning.

  "Scientists Baffled by Rain's Impact on Pnt Life"

  Images of crops sprouting defensive mechanisms, accelerated growth patterns, and heightened toxicity in previously harmless pnt species. Agricultural experts warning of potential food shortages as farmers struggled to manage suddenly uncooperative crops.

  Each article confirmed what his visions had shown him, adding yers of detail and documentation to the impossible changes sweeping across the globe. Pnts exposed to the rain were evolving at impossible speeds, developing properties that defied known biology. Animals were exhibiting signs of increased intelligence and strange new behaviours. The very fabric of reality seemed to be stretching to accommodate these changes like a rubber band being pulled to its limit.

  A weak groan from Mark's bed pulled Ikenna 's attention away from the screen. His roommate was stirring restlessly, his face shining with sweat in the harsh fluorescent light. The sheets were twisted around his body like burial wrappings, and his breathing had the wet, heavy sound of developing pneumonia.

  "Water," Mark managed to croak, his voice barely more than a whisper. The word seemed to scrape its way out of his throat.

  Ikenna's legs protested as he stood, but he managed to make it to their mini-fridge. The pstic bottle was cold against his palm as he retrieved it, condensation immediately beading on its surface. He helped Mark sit up, supporting his roommate's weight as best he could despite his own weakness. Mark's skin burned against his, fever-hot and dry.

  The moment their hands touched, another vision smmed into Ikenna with the force of a physical blow. He was suddenly experiencing Mark's memory from three days ago—the phone call that had shattered his world. He felt Mark's grief as if it were his own as his roommate learned about Rex, his beloved German Shepherd, who had died after pying in the golden rain. He experienced the moment Mark's legs gave out, the way he'd slid down the wall to sit on the floor, clutching the phone and sobbing while Ikenna y unconscious in his bed, lost in fever dreams.

  The raw emotion of the memory left Ikenna gasping, tears pricking at his eyes. Without thinking, he said, "Your dog. I'm so sorry about Rex."

  The words hung in the air between them like physical things. Mark stared at him, confusion cutting through the fever haze in his eyes. His face, already flushed with fever, seemed to pale slightly. "How did you... I never told you about that. You were completely out of it when I got the call."

  Ikenna felt his stomach drop as he realized his mistake. His mind raced, trying to find a pusible expnation that wouldn't sound completely insane. The fluorescent lights seemed to buzz louder, pressing against his consciousness like a physical weight.

  "I... must have heard you on the phone," he managed, the lie tasting bitter on his tongue. "When I was sick. Some things got through." Even to his ears, the expnation sounded weak, inadequate.

  Mark's eyes narrowed slightly, doubt clear on his face despite his weakened state. But the fever was too strong for him to maintain his focus. He y back down heavily, his breathing still bored. When he closed his eyes, the shadows under them looked like bruises against his fever-flushed skin.

  "This is all so messed up, man," Mark said, his voice barely above a whisper. "The rain, the fevers, people dying or... some getting changed. What's happening to the world?"

  "I don't know," Ikenna replied automatically, but even as the words left his mouth, another vision swept over him like a tidal wave.

  This time he was in a high-security boratory, the air sharp with the smell of disinfectant and fear. Through the eyes of a scientist, he watched as they examined samples of the golden rain under various instruments. The isotopic composition was completely foreign—elements arranged in ways that shouldn't have been stable, energy patterns that vioted the known ws of physics. Under the microscope, the cellur effects were like watching evolution happening in fast-forward, but guided by some incomprehensible intelligence. The scientist's excitement and terror mixed together in Ikenna 's mind like oil and water, neither emotion fully integrating with the other.

  The vision jumped forward in time, showing him scattered glimpses of what was to come. Military units deployed against increasingly dangerous wildlife, their weapons seemingly inadequate against the evolved threats. Reports flooding in of fields turning against their farmers, of forests becoming no-go zones, of oceanic dead zones where mutated predators ruled. Then the first countermeasures—the few humans who had developed abilities being recruited, tested, trained to stand against the tide of evolutionary chaos.

  He saw society beginning to fracture along new lines—those who had developed abilities and those who hadn't. Those who had survived the fever only to find themselves unchanged, and those who had lost loved ones to it. Those who saw the animal and pnt mutations as natural evolution and those who saw them as an existential threat. The fear sparked in cities across the globe as humanity realized it was no longer at the top of the food chain.

  When the vision released him, Ikenna found himself gripping his desk so hard that his fingers had left marks in the cheap minate. His whole body was trembling, and he could feel sweat running down his back. Mark was watching him with concern evident even through his fever.

  "You okay?" his roommate asked weakly. "You kind of zoned out there for a second."

  "Yeah," Ikenna forced himself to say, consciously rexing his grip on the desk. His fingers ached from how hard he'd been holding on. "Just still a little dizzy from the fever." The lie felt like ash in his mouth, but how could he expin what was really happening? How could he put into words the way the world was unfolding in his mind like an infinite origami creation, showing him past, present, and possible futures all at once?

  Because with each vision, two certainties were crystallizing in his mind, becoming clearer and sharper like photographs developing in chemical baths. First, the golden rain hadn't been an accident or a natural phenomenon. Whatever had torn that hole in reality had done so with purpose, sending its transformative gift (or curse) to Earth for reasons he couldn't yet understand but could feel pressing against the edges of his consciousness like a word on the tip of his tongue.

  And second, his ability to see these visions wasn't random. It wasn't just another mutation caused by the rain. It was specific, directed, and chosen. He was being shown these things for a reason, being given these glimpses into the vast tapestry of cause and effect that was unfolding across the globe. But why? What was he supposed to do with this knowledge?

  He moved to the window, his legs steadier now but still shaky. The campus below was starting to show signs of life again as students emerged from their dorms like survivors from a disaster zone. Many moved slowly, clearly still weak from their own bouts with the fever. Most appeared unchanged, but a few were clearly different.

  A young woman moved with unusual grace, her reflexes visibly enhanced as she caught a falling book before it had barely begun to drop. Near the shadow of the humanities building, a young man stood perfectly still, his eyes fixed on a squirrel that seemed to be... nodding at him? The few students who showed signs of change were drawing attention—some curious, some wary. Even from this distance, Ikenna could sense the unease, the beginning of a division that would only grow with time.

  Without warning, another vision smmed into him—this one brief but intense enough to make his knees buckle. He saw himself standing before a crowd, his voice hoarse from shouting, trying to warn them about something. Something important. Something terrible. The fear in his future self's voice was palpable, the urgency raw and real. But before he could grasp what the warning was about, the vision slipped away like water through his fingers, leaving only a residue of dread and a sense of time running out.

  Moving carefully to his desk, Ikenna pulled out his notebook—the same one that had remained untouched during Professor Martinez's lecture about Piaget's theories of cognitive development. That lecture felt like it had happened in another lifetime, to another person. The person he had been then, taking notes about stages of development and equilibration, seemed naive and incomplete compared to who he was now.

  The notebook's pages were crisp and white, waiting for words. Ikenna uncapped his pen and began to write, documenting everything he'd seen in his visions. His hand moved across the page almost automatically, as if the visions themselves were guiding his fingers. He wrote about the rain, about the changes, about the glimpses of that vast alien something that had initiated all of this. He wrote about the fear and the wonder, the deaths and the transformations, the chaos that was coming and the new world that was being born.

  Because something deep in his newly transformed consciousness told him that the golden rain wasn't the end of the story. It wasn't even the middle.