Survival/Apocalypse16 min read
Six Suns: My First Stream, My Last Calm
ButterPicks13 views
I woke up in a crowd watching a screen and felt like I was the only thing anybody could look at.
"Can someone tell me why they're escorting him like he's royalty?" a thick-shouldered man said, voice full of disgust.
"They said he's an adult," an anxious woman whispered, "turned eighteen last month."
I kept my mouth shut. My throat tasted like burnt paper. The collar around my neck—black and ugly—pressed against my skin. The little numbers under my clavicle hummed in my head, like a metronome for the end of everything.
"Welcome to the broadcast group," a soldier said when they finally unclipped my neck cuff.
"Thanks…" I said. I barely managed the one syllable before half a dozen hands hovered on gun stocks and the soldier suddenly clarified, "—recruited, not detained."
A man next to me snorted. "Recruited? Cut the crap. That boy's dangerous, otherwise why so many guards?"
"I don't know about dangerous," I told myself. I did not tell them that hunger had been gnawing at me for months—down to bone and marrow. I did not tell them I had followed a food convoy into the noble area because there was nothing else to follow. I did not tell them I had woken up tethered in chains, flash‑tested, branded.
They ushered me toward the shimmering crystal at the center of the temporary camp. The board flashed a message as I stepped forward:
[Player Finch Foley loaded.]
[Welcome to the Life‑Debt Crystal Grand Run.]
The world tilted. The city I had left behind vanished. I was in a plaza that felt like a furnace. Two suns hung in the sky—twin, merciless disks that threw heat like open palms.
"Forty‑six degrees today," a voice from a giant screen intoned with a smile that didn't reach its eyes. "We will deliver aid in twenty‑four hours. Please await rescue in your quarters."
"Rescue?" a woman shouted. Her voice was full of outrage. "Rescue my foot. We're baking in a cage!"
Someone pushed at the edge of the crowd. A broad man near me spat, "Which idiot thought to add more suns?"
"Because it's called 'Six Suns,'" somebody answered. "Three days of testing. Each day, another artificial sun."
A shorter man with gold hair muttered to his live audience from the corner of his mouth, "So the plan is, capture the scientists who launched the suns and get out. Keep away from heat and get food. Easy."
I said nothing. I had learned early that other people's plans rarely considered me.
"Why's no one taking the boy seriously?" the broad man wondered. "The guards didn't bring anyone for show."
The orthopedists call the black numerals on our skin "death clocks." When it reaches zero, your heart stops as if someone has pinched the last light from you. Three years into the Fold, people learned to live with one fact: crystals demand contestants. Only winners get extra time. Losers get broken in ways the papers won't print.
"Easy for you to say," the blonde said to his screen. "You haven't had a collar."
He looked up, startled. The square on my wrist glowed faintly—my identity chip, now stamped with "Broadcaster."
"Look!" someone cried. The plaza turned like a tide. Faces cut toward the giant screen.
My picture flipped up.
"You're kidding," the broad man whispered. "That's the kid. Finch Foley."
"He's in chains," another voice broke. "Why?"
A soldier stepped forward and unclipped my neck cuff right there. The sound was a small click, but the crowd inhaled as one.
"Welcome to the Broadcast Group. You're on the recruitment side, not the containment unit."
I tried to smile. My lips trembled and made no sound. Someone clapped like the show had started.
The plaza was chaos. The right side bloomed green—pockets of life that made me see safety; the left side pulsed red—danger like open sores. My ability kicked in without a thought, a soft voice in my head asking:
[Activate skill — Red‑Green Sight?]
"Do it," I heard myself think.
I pulled the world down to two colors. Green meant chance. Red meant trouble.
"Go right," I said aloud to no one in particular.
A man pinned to the ground by angry locals—a familiar face from the broadcast group, a golden‑haired amateur idol—struggled. "Help me," he called. "I can blink us out of here. Just untie me."
"I don't trust your neck," I told him. "Face it, I don't trust anyone's face."
He blinked in disbelief. Then, as if the plaza itself were made of glass, his eyes slid to mine, and he saw that my hand was steady.
"You're not a dangerous man," he whispered. "You're just hungry."
That was closer to the truth.
People think survival games are about strategy and weaponry. They're not. They are about noticing what others overlook. About listening with ears that should have had time to rot. About looking at the smell of something and knowing it will eat you if you inhale it.
"Who are you?" the golden man managed.
"Finch Foley," I said.
The plaza's hum shifted as if a chord had been struck. My stream, tiny and new, jumped. Numbers spiked and sunk like the city's heartbeat.
"He's quiet," a viewer wrote and clicked. "He's interesting."
"Don't get close," another wrote. "He was in the containment unit."
That jury was slower than the breath on my skin.
We moved forward. A white armored line of enforcement stood between us and a gated area. The broadcast's board read: [Two suns active. One day left to survive.]
"Why'd you come right here?" the golden man hissed. "Nobody goes toward the enforcers. You die."
"They will die if they burn," I told him. "But not here."
He coughed. "You're weird but smart, Finch. Want to team up?"
I thought of the crate of food I had followed in my old life. I thought about the teeth I had dreamed about in the dark. I thought about the way the containment room had smelled like boiled metal.
"No," I said. "Not yet."
We reached an area where the change happened. A white poodle ran its nose across the dirt and began to tremble. The woman who found the dog smiled—then it ate her.
"Jesus—" someone in the crowd screamed. "It ate her!"
"Stand back," I said, watching the dog's bones pry the skin apart like thin paper. The dog's jaws worked with mechanical hunger; its bones grew out through skin as if its skeleton were trying to be first out of a suit.
"Why is a pet like that here?" someone asked.
"They're not pets," I said.
Antonio Knudsen, a broad fellow with a round face and greasy hair, edged to my side in a business that looked more like clinging. Antonio—everyone called him "Chubby Doc"—had a small desert cat with him, a fierce little creature that loved no one but its owner.
"Do you have water?" he whispered.
"Do you have plans?" I asked.
We hid in a shuttered shop. The air smelled of old fabric and fear. Antonio clutched his mount—his little cat—like a miracle. He chattered about his audience and how they sent coins and therapy and love from the air.
"How do you know Eddie?" he kept asking, calling the cat some other name.
"Gold cat," I corrected. "She doesn't have a name beyond her coat."
Antonio laughed too loudly. "Goldie likes you," he said, as if that were a currency.
"Save it," I muttered.
He laughed, and Goldie—small, fierce—licked the skin of my wrist like she might read my numbers with her tongue.
"You're warm," Antonio said. "You look like someone who knows soup."
We watched through a slit in the metal shutter as a helicopter tore at the sky, dropping crates like thunderclaps. People ran for miles; men and women clawed into those crates. I didn't move.
"Why not run?" Antonio hissed.
"Because the crates will burn you," I said. "Because someone will win. Because all of you will kill to get into ten minutes of safety."
"That's grim."
"It is what is."
We crouched in the dark and kept watch. I ate with a speed that made Antonio gag. I ate like a ghost trying to remember what his weight felt like.
"You'll make yourself sick," Antonio said, aghast.
"I already am," I said.
That night, the third fake sun flamed into being. If two suns meant the world could spit bugs and dogs at you, a third boiled something else up: walking dead.
"Run," a kid screamed in the arcade down the street.
We were in the car—stolen, smashed, a place that smelled of metal and old blood—when the dead rose. They lurched like puppets with strings shortened to the bone. Their heads tipped and the skin on their fingers shone with dried black blood.
"Drive," Finbar Brock, the golden‑haired showboy whose teleportation dazzled cameras, said. He looked at me with the rawness of someone who had learned to trust his fans more than the world.
"How far can you move us?" I asked.
"Short jumps," Finbar said. "Two or three meters. If you give me a jewel I can extend it."
I had no jewels. I had no patience for promises. Antonio flung a backpack of the air drop into the back seat. Gravel crunched at our necks as the crowd screamed—runs for supplies often turned into sudden wars.
We pulled a crate. A tall man—Vernon Dominguez—came with a gang, pushing like he owned the air. He had a brother, Kenneth Black, who always seemed to slip into the shade like a whisper. Vernon was muscle; Kenneth was a doctor in the way his eyes connived with the market of pain.
"Get that crate, you rats," Vernon sneered. He had a habit of making his cruelty show like a swagger.
I got my fingers on the chain attached to the crate. Vernon hauled. The metal bit into my palms. Antonio chewed his lower lip until white.
"Let go," Vernon said. "I've got the arm of a prize hog. You think you'll win?"
"Why don't you let it go and test me?" I answered.
He pulled harder and the crate rose. Someone else figured this was a contest. Antonio clung to me like a life preserver. Vernon grinned and tightened his grip.
A spark of something beside the crate flared. The crate jumped in the air as if some hand grabbed it. A voice cackled.
"Hey! Someone's tugging my crate!"
It was Finbar. He'd transported the crate away. It landed ten meters across, neatly placed by a stairwell.
"Two bottles of water," Finbar said as if he'd performed a miracle.
"You're a thief," Vernon said.
"You're a bully," I said.
Later, the air grew thinner around us. The crate, now lying idle, had been set aflame. Vernon watched the flames eat at the plastic, then the cardboard; his eyes displaced from hunger to rage. He saw me, and with the sharpness of a man who'd been humiliated before, he bullied.
"You burned this on purpose?"
"I did," I said. "I won't feed you."
The crowd howled. Vernon took two steps forward. The sudden silence that followed was the sound of a thing holding its breath.
The crate exploded into light and I reached for it, because we needed food. I needed to stop the constant gnawing in my stomach.
Vernon had been laughed at before. He had built a small empire of petty cruelties and thought the world owed him.
In the cinema, the fight changed the rules.
"You can't be serious," Vernon gasped, as sparks licked around his shoes. "You're going to burn everything?"
"It's either this or watch you eat those crumbs and feel nothing." I clipped a match from Antonio's sleeve and lit the fuel.
"No!" Vernon twisted. "You can't—"
He was too slow.
We ran into the cinema. The dead poured like gray water. Someone slammed the freight door closed and the old projector lights screamed like old gods: a row of xenon lamps strapped across the door started to hum, and with water poured over the contacts, they flashed, shorted and sizzled. When that metal smoked, men in the hall outside froze and shuddered. The lights arced and bent and finally exploded in a display that left Vernon's gang useless.
Vernon never learned the scent of fear—yet he tasted it that night. He yelped as a live wire shocked him where he stood, and the living dead flooded him like a tide.
The platform cut him off in the middle of a roar: his broadcast froze. His last screams were a public spectacle in itself.
The stream logged a kill like a game scoreboard. "Host Vernon Dominguez terminated," blinked the text.
We moved on. We survived. But discovery in those moments isn't quiet. Somebody's camera always records.
I did not know it then, but the feed from that night sent me into a popularity I had never wanted. People called me names—"Daring Finch", "The Boy Who Burned The Crate", "Finch—Bad Wife"—the last a mock affection. Antonio kept adding to the followers.
"You're getting recommended," he said. "Your counter jumped."
"Good," I said. "More eyes. More coins. Maybe one day I can buy a piece of land where I am not made to starve."
"Do you have a plan for the researcher thing?" Finbar asked. He'd found some pages, a diary of a research assistant. Its words clawed like a warning:
"If anyone reads this—stop the suns before the fourth. The fourth will break something we cannot fix."
"Go to the research lab?" Antonio asked.
"The mainline updated," the voice said to us that only players could hear.
[Step 1: Proceed to the Research Facility.]
Finbar perked up. "Mainline. That changes the stakes. If you progress, you get days. If you don't, you bake."
"How long do you have?" Antonio asked quietly.
"Six minutes," I told them.
The way they stared at me then—like they'd glanced at the numbers under my collar—was hushed.
"Six minutes of clock?" Antonio asked, his voice thin.
"Not weeks. Minutes." I lifted my collar for them to see the little numerals that had once been a sentence of doom.
We drove into the underbelly of the city with a truck we found in the car park. It stank of old oil and old blood. People pushed the heavy vehicle like it would save them.
"You're lucky," a man said, sweating, pushing with us. "You're lucky the car runs."
"Luck has nothing to do with it," I said. "It has to do with seeing the thing no one will name."
Back in the dark, we found a note nailed to the dismantled projector in the cinema. It was written by a scientist, thin characters like someone writing with the tremor of fear:
"Stop the suns. Fourth sun will make the dead rise. Please. Please stop them."
The platform pinged us again.
[Step 2: Advance to the Research Facility.]
We had a path, then.
A problem named Kenneth Black sat in the shadows. He was not a man who laughed. He was a man whose brother had been eaten and who was spent on revenge. He learned of our presence. He whispered to his crew that the tickets would be waiting.
That hunger inside me raged. I had eaten. I had not stopped being hollow.
"What is our plan?" Antonio rasped.
"First," I said, "we find a vehicle."
"We have one," Finbar said, "but it's broken."
We made the choice that would have taken other people weeks to decide. We used fire as a tool as well as a knife. We stripped down broken things, tied ropes, and made a map of the city with our feet. We rode curfews and jumped subway gaps. We saw suns come up and the temperature climb.
When Vernon and his gang finally found us again it was in a marketplace. He stood, the image of a man who believed he could take what he wanted because the world owed him.
"You're just a kid," Vernon said, smug and ugly.
"I am a man who won't die quietly," I answered, and the crowd around us waited.
Vernon tried to strike me. He failed.
In the end, it was not my fist that killed him.
It was the hunger of the world.
He and his men were ripped apart by their own arrogance. The living dead surrounded them and made a public example. The crowd watched from rooflines. People recorded with their phones. For once the world gave a show of justice, and it was terrible and unsparing.
I stood and watched as Vernon thrashed in the hands of those we had been taught were myth. His face slid from defiance to fear. He clawed at the sky like someone begging to be pulled back into the living world.
"Don't—" a watcher sobbed. "We shouldn't be watching."
"Bye," someone phoned, posting a clip.
He shouted and pleaded; he was loud and then small and then silent. He tried to deny; he begged; he accused us of betrayal. He screamed that he was someone, that he had a daughter, that he was not a villain. The crowd spat. The cameras flashed.
It was ugly and it was final.
We left the theater with the taste of smoke and nervous laughter. We had hours in which to breathe, to walk, to take the mainline forward.
Finbar cracked a joke, the kind that hides nerves. "You're not all doom and gloom, Finch. You have a brand."
"Don't make me into a brand," I said, and we walked.
There would be more suns. There would be more tests. There would be a lab with a locked door and people with white coats who had once blithely sought progress and now tested the city as if it were an experiment in pain.
In the dark, in the hum of streams and the chorus of comments, I learned a practical fact: being alive in this world was a public performance. People watched. They judged. Some applauded; some prayed for our swift demise.
They will watch me run.
They will judge me for the choices I make.
They will not know what it is like to have a collar on your skin and a small number ticking away.
"Why did you save that crate?" Antonio asked while we walked.
"Because letting him have it only made him stronger," I said. "Because sometimes the only justice the world answers is the one it can see."
"Are we going to the research lab?"
"We're going to try."
The first steps toward the research facility were steady and messy. We scavenged keys, bribed an enforcement officer with lies, and stole a van lying in the sun. Kenneth Black and his watchers had a map of the city in their pockets. We had the map in our heads.
When we finally found the research facility, it was like walking under a lid. The heat was terrible. Inside, the lab smelled of burned sugar and antiseptic, and on the table, a set of papers—blueprints, logs, a diary—sat like an accusation.
"I saw this in a cache," Finbar whispered.
"The fourth sun," I said. "If they fire the fourth, the dead will be worse than the night."
We read the scientist's hand again and again:
"If the fourth sun goes, it will not just heat the dead. It will energize them. They will not sleep. They will not fall. If anyone reaches the control room, they must override the sequence before daybreak."
We had time—less than a day. Less than that for some of us. I put my hand to the collar and felt the faint electric warmth. I thought about whether the world deserved the scientists' punishment. I thought about whether we did.
I do not wear my collar like a badge. I wear it like a clock.
"How will we stop them?" Antonio asked.
"We'll find the main console," I said. "And we'll stop the fourth sun."
"That'll be a spectacle," Finbar said. "A lovely, on‑screen spectacle."
When we reached the control chamber, the doors were heavy. Kennth—Kenneth Black—had never expected us in his chair. He had stitches in his jaw and a glare that could peel paint. He rose when he saw our faces, as if prepared for contrition. He had no plans for mercy.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"People who value life," I said. "People who will try to shut your sun down."
He laughed. "Do you know the cost of my brother's head? The lives at stake if the lab goes dark?"
"Save your pleas," I said.
We argued while the world outside leaned toward flame. He spat history at us—brotherhood, debts, deals. He screamed that his brother's death would be avenged. But we had other voices listening: tens of thousands on the stream and the watchful eyes of the city.
We did not come to plead with him. We came to stop him.
When the console began to hum and the fourth sun's ignition window opened, there was a moment like the click of a lock.
Kenneth reached for the switch. His hand trembled, and with that tremor he made his choice.
"Finish it!" he shouted. "Finish what they started!"
"No," I said. "No."
He looked at me like I had insulted his ancestor. He threw words like stones—insults, memories of someone he'd lost. He tried to rally the watchers. The world outside answered with a chorus. Someone screamed his name. The streaming platform lit up like a city of pyres.
You know what punishment the world offers when a man makes monsters and then tries to join them? It makes his failure public.
We stopped the ignition. We forced his hand from the lever. The cameras saw everything.
Kenneth's reaction was a theater: first the sneer of someone who believes he is above consequence; then the wordless widening of his eyes; then denial—"You can't!"—then rage that cracked into pleas, then collapse. He crawled on the floor and roared that they'd lied to him. He shouted that he had a family, that he had been protecting them. He begged.
We dragged him into the plaza.
We did it publicly.
We laid out the research logs and the diary in the center of the square. Street cameras streamed the pages. The guards who had once protected the facility turned their eyes. The crowd gathered, a slow tide braiding curiosity with rage.
"These are the logs," Finbar explained. "They tried to kill us in the name of 'progress.'"
Kenneth's face went from ash to stone and back to ash. He tried to pull a face of wounded scientist. He tried to say he had acted under orders, that he had done it to save the city.
"Then why send the suns without evacuation?" a woman shouted. "Why burn us to test things in your lab while your family hides in towers?"
Kenneth flailed. "You don't understand! It wasn't meant—"
"It was meant," I said.
"Stop the suns, and your lawmen will have to answer," Finbar said.
Vernon wasn't alive to be there; his end had been recorded in the cinema. But Kenneth stood in the middle of the crowd, his pride and his denial collapsing in real time on a looping broadcast. His humiliation was a thing the crowd ingested like a meal.
He attempted to defend himself with technical terms. The crowd called his words nonsense. He then attempted to invoke moral urgency. The crowd spat.
For half an hour he tried the old scripts: shame, anger, denial. For half an hour he was exposed until his pleas dissolved into raw breath. A woman from the crowd filmed him up close and posted the clip to half a million viewers. Her hands were shaking. People left their windows, peered from rooftops, streamed comments like rain.
Then he crumbled.
He fell to his knees and begged for forgiveness in public. He begged for a mercy I could not give. He wanted the scientists spared, the suns kept, his calculations absolved. He wanted his world back, but the world would not go backward.
In the end the city decided the science was unredeemable.
Authorities arrested him, but the crowd did not wait for brass seals.
They spat at him. They threw the research pages into the fountain. Someone took his ID and ripped it in half. A child shouted, "You meant to burn my school!"
Kenneth grabbed at the child's small wrists and apologized. The camera recorded it. He was taken, cuffed and screaming, to a truck that would take him away and put his face in news headlines.
Vernon—Vernon had bitten the dirt and had been torn by the dead; Kenneth had his shame publicly burned. The crowd's reaction was catharsis. They cheered. They cried. They filmed. The platform binged the clip and pushed it to front pages.
When they marched Kenneth past the research towers, he saw the empty labs and the hums that had once sounded like gods. He saw the suns still burning in the sky. He realized then that killing the curiosity of the world hadn't saved his place in it.
For me, the punishment was not joy. The crowd's hunger was not mine. But the sight of his denials and his pleas—those were the city's mirror.
"What's next?" Antonio asked as we walked away from the plaza, the broadcast still lit like a moon.
"We go deeper," I said.
We would fight the fourth sun if we could. We had done something that day: made a villain small. We had watched a man who had thought himself above law fall in front of thousands.
My numbers under the collar ticked. The platform pinged and my stream climbed.
"Your followers," Antonio said, "they call you something new."
"What?"
"Bad Wife," he said, smiling like he held the funniest secret.
"Tell them I don't like that name," I said.
"Too late," he laughed.
I touched the little square on my wrist and felt the warmth of the platform's timers. They blessed and cursed me in one invisible breath.
"Keep your eyes on the lab," Finbar said. "We have to stop the fourth sun."
I nodded. The city around us crawled with a thousand small tragedies, but the broadcast would carry us. People needed us to be brave or to fail in grand ways on camera.
When the night darkened and the twin suns lowered themselves like tired overseers, I thought of my collar, the number glowing cold under my skin.
"Six minutes," I said.
Antonio's laughter stopped. He had forgotten the little hand that lives in my throat. For a moment we were three strangers on a street that smelled of burnt plastic and lost seconds.
"Keep watching," I said.
"Always," Finbar said, but his voice cracked.
I thought about hunger and about how the platform had made my life into a stage. I thought about the research logs in our pockets and the men who had sought to play god.
And I thought—without deciding yet—how I would use the attention.
We walked toward the lab.
The End
— Thank you for reading —