Elsewhere, the appearance of the colossal luminous entity had overloaded internet servers across the globe.
It started with a photograph.
No, with tens of thousands of photographs, taken from every angle by phone cameras of every pixel grade, all aimed at the same patch of sky.
The subject was a giant being of light slowly taking shape above the clouds.
The first trending keywords on social media were #GiantAurora#, #Mirage#, and the utterly absurd #GodzillaVsUltraman#. People cracked jokes and used photo-editing software to add all kinds of ridiculous speech bubbles to the figure of light.
But when the first clear video was uploaded, every joke vanished.
It had been filmed by a passenger on an airliner, using his phone through the cabin window.
At an altitude of ten thousand meters, above the stratosphere, the giant of light hovered in the thin air, its silhouette so distinct it made one's scalp tingle.
It was not a vague shadow of light, but a physical entity—a humanoid life-form composed of pure energy.
The video was downloaded millions of times in the three minutes before it was deleted.
The world fell silent.
The carnival-like atmosphere online instantly froze, replaced by a thick, fermenting fear.
People stopped joking. They began frantically @-mentioning the official accounts of governments around the world, as well as the spokesperson for the Planetary Defense Council (PDC), demanding an explanation.
What was that?
An alien?
Or—god?
At that moment, the atmosphere in the PDC command center at United Nations Headquarters in New York was even more frozen than the internet outside.
No one spoke. Only the monotonous hum of server cooling fans filled the room.
Footage transmitted from synchronized orbital satellites around the world played on a loop across the massive holographic screen.
The images were far clearer than anything civilian