Crimson Temptation

In the winter of 2025, a freak cold snap came early to Naperville, Illinois.

Gray light spilled through the high windows of the Naperville Central High cafeteria. The bell for the last morning period had rung ten minutes ago, and the air smelled the way it always smelled — frozen pizza and fried potatoes.

Mary Hall sat in her usual spot by the window, applying herself to an omelet drowned in ketchup.

Her best friend Bree Kaminski slid in beside her with a tray and dropped her voice. "Okay, listen. I have to tell you something. Snapchat and TikTok are both losing their minds about the Great Reset prophecy. May twelfth, 2029. That's it. That's the end of everything."

Mary took a bite of egg and shrugged. "Come on, Bree. You actually believe that garbage?"

And who could blame her? Haven't we heard this one before?

From the Y2K panic to the Mayan calendar running out in 2012, the continental United States alone has produced several hundred sects and conspiracy channels, each with its own carefully announced Judgment Day.

And what came of it?

We packed into Times Square every year anyway to watch the ball drop, and turned every last one of those apocalypses into another New Year's morning with party wreckage to clean up.

The Great Reset was just this season's model, running a little hotter than most.

Hollywood, which is never slow, had a film called Final Warning in theaters by that fall. It sold out AMCs nationwide for several weekends running.

Mary's high school career, unfortunately, did not pause for it.

No teacher in history has ever assigned one fewer response paper on To Kill a Mockingbird on the grounds that the species was ending.

The pop quizzes still came, on schedule, unannounced. Fifth-period history still ran long, because fifth-period history had always run long and the end of the world was not going to change a man's relationship with a bell.

Her algebra homework remained precisely as incomprehensible as it had been the week before, and the cafeteria omelets, though perpetually a little cold, remained in generous supply.

What nobody expected was that four years later, the prophecy came true.

It began with a chain of megaquakes.

Then Yellowstone went up. The West Coast went under a wall of water. Burning meteorites came down across the Great Lakes.

Extreme weather swallowed the globe. The glaciers melted at a rate nobody had modeled for. Plague and a new strain of malaria tore through the shelters and kept going.

People went down like wheat under the blade, and a great many of those who survived chose to end it themselves.

Spring came very early in 2029, but Mary never again got the chance to sit in a high school cafeteria and complain about the eggs.

When her father James Hall and her mother Linda Young pushed her into a life pod in tears, in the middle of all that chaos, there hadn't even been time to grab the hoodie with the school crest on it.

Governments, of course, had continuity plans. They had built starships for the elite in secret facilities, counting on preserving the seed of civilization.

The plans were flawless. It was only when the actual end of the world arrived that every contingency protocol turned out to be worth exactly the paper it was printed on.

Convoys jammed the roads outside the launch silos. Security screening collapsed entirely. The scientists who were supposed to board first were still stuck on I-95.

And so those escape berths, the ones reserved for scholars and researchers, ended up mostly in the hands of private military contractors and resource conglomerates.

Winning a seat had nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence. It came down, in the end, to how much you had in storage.

The military could requisition the strategic grain reserves. The corporations could mobilize whatever was sitting in their warehouses. And the bulk of what they held had been requisitioned, by one route or another, from ordinary people.

When most of the world's landmass is underwater and every farm is gone and food is worth more than anything else on earth, a crate of freeze-dried meat really is worth vastly more than a crate of spacecraft components.

But why would ordinary people trade away their last cans of food for a pile of metal they couldn't identify?

The answer was simple. A ticket.

Military aerospace technology married to corporate production lines proved astonishingly efficient.

Raytheon and Lockheed Martin retooled their assembly lines overnight and began mass-producing cheap cryo-pods. Their communications teams saturated social media with a single message: Floating out there is better than dying down here.

It worked, naturally. It always does.

Those pods — rushed off the line, half-finished, never once put through quality control — were priced obscenely, and the survival instinct being what it is, ordinary people staked every dollar they had left to get hold of one.

And the windfall from selling berths and hoarding food went straight back into the corporations' hands, where it was promptly spent cutting deals with governments to secure the real evacuations. The guaranteed ones. The ones with paperwork.

As for everyone else?

They were too busy congratulating themselves on getting hold of a steel box that might fail halfway to wonder where all that money had actually gone.

Mary's parents used everything the household had left.

Five bags of flour, three jars of peanut butter, ten boxes of energy bars and twenty gallons of bottled water bought her one cryo-pod.

Mary knew that was the last of it.

So she didn't cry when she lay down. She just looked through the glass at James and Linda wiping their eyes on the other side and said, very clearly, "I'm going to make it."

And she had to. Anything less would be an insult to the chance her parents had given up, an insult to the energy bars and the bottled water, and above all an insult to those few hard-saved jars of peanut butter.

As James liked to say: you spend the money, you'd better get the thing.

Perhaps it was that stubborn refusal to let a purchase go to waste. Perhaps Mary was simply the luckiest human being who has ever lived.

In a universe governed by probability, some coincidences are going to be difficult to believe.