Hour 0

 Somewhere in America, a quaint suburban neighborhood was blanketed in the soft shadows of night. Emi stirred in her bed as something lit up and chimed on her nightstand. With tired eyes, she sat up and looked over to her phone. "Whose texting me at 1 in the morning?" She asked herself groggily as she realized her home screen read 12:51am. She checked her messages and noticed a new unread text at the top, one that simply read:

First objective: kill someone.

0:013:46:07

 the macabre message and cryptic number meant nothing to her as she replaced her phone on the nightstand and muttered to herself, "lame ass spam." As she withdrew back into the comfort of her warm blankets she had no idea everyone on earth with a cellphone just received a text similar to hers.

 Her golden blond hair shimmered in a beam of morning sunlight that carved a slice of heat through her room from a nearby window. She yawned and sat up, the random text from last night the last thing on her mind. She was 18 years old, had beautiful sharp blue eyes, and a slender face that was framed with a feminine grace even with her current bedhead. She changed her clothes and brushed her hair before throwing it into a lazy ponytail and making her way downstairs. She made herself a bowl of cereal and carried it into the living room where she found her mother watching the news. Her mother, a slim woman who had just started to show the slightest signs of her age, asked her, "Emi, did you get a strange text last night?" As she sat down next to her mom, she replied, "Yeah, some kind of spam, I think. Why?" Her mother replied, "I did too, and so did your brother." Between a bite of generic cornflakes, emi laughed, "Ha, guess we're more popular than I thought." It was then that Emi realized what the newscaster on the TV was saying. The news anchor reported in a stern voice, "At approximately 12:51am, a text message alert was mass sent out to everyone in the area. We're currently working with law enforcement to determine if there has been some kind of data breach or if this is some form of cyber attack." "Probably just some lame prank," Emi replied half heartedly as she took another bite of her cereal. "Furthermore," the news anchor continued, "it is strongly advised everyone stay in their house and quarantine until further notice." "What's that about?" Emi asked with genuine curiosity as she pointed her spoon at the TV. Her mother answered, "There's been an abnormal number of deaths reported in the last 6 hours across our local area; the county police said this all might be some form of terrorist attack." Her mother looked at her with a thin layer of panic etched into her facial features and said, "I'm worried; I think you should stay home today." Emi sighed as she slurped her milk and said "I had no plans to go out anyway. Need to finish sending out my college applications." She brought her bowl to the sink and washed it out before deciding to return to her room to work on her applications. As she was about to start up the stairs she noticed the photo of a young man in a military uniform that had been freshly dusted hanging on the wall. She smiled as she said, "Sorry, Dad, almost forgot. Good morning."

 A large prison keep located somewhere in the snowy mountains of Russia was roaring with commotion. Officers were scattered around the complex, checking holding cells and howling orders over the loudspeakers as an alarm sounded in the background. The prison yard was a haunting sight to behold full of the chilled, lifeless bodies of inmates laid out in various stiff positions. Inside the facility, all of its visible cells housed nothing but the corpses of the deceased. The warden, who was in charge of the entire prison complex, sat slouched at his desk as he thumbed his way through witness statements submitted by his officers. All of them had reported relatively the same thing, every inmate in the facility had dropped dead of an unexplained cause. He put the papers down and thought quietly to himself. He was an older man who was quite tall and broad for his age with slicked back grey hair and a full beard. An old picture, one of his wife and young daughter, sat framed on his messy desk next to an overflowing ashtray. He thought, "Is this some kind of government setup? A conspiracy? What would anyone have to gain from this? these were all death row inmates anyway." His thoughts were interrupted when one of his officers knocked on his door. He allowed them in, and they said, "We've found several prisoners who are alive." The surviving prisoners, of which there were 3, were quickly detained and questioned in private. They didn't seem to have any knowledge of the situation, but after some harsh interrogation, they admitted to receiving a strange text message at exactly the same time the other inmates died. Cellphones were banned, of course, but the 3 inmates still alive had illegally smuggled them in independently of one another; they were all from different floors and cell blocks. The warden thought the connection strange; none of the dead inmates had any phones on their bodies, but the only surviving ones did. He ordered his officers to check their personal phones, something he disallowed normally while they worked their shifts but he was curious if they had received a similar message. To everyone's surprise, all of them had a text message with a gruesome command, "First objective: kill someone," and a unique sequence of numbers. The warden's was 0:098:56:12.

 Somewhere in France, A homeless woman with baggy clothes and long, scraggly hair overgrown in tangles walked through her homeless encampment. There were bodies laid out in their tents, bodies laid around the embers of dying fires, and bodies laid out with no significant meaning. Everyone was dead, everyone she had learned to call friends over the last 6 years. Police sirens echoed in the distance, and as she turned on her phone to check the time, she noticed she had a text from an unfamiliar number, one that told her to kill someone and gave her the number "0:051:22:59."

 Somewhere in Asia, a man sat in a dark room barely illuminated by the light of a computer. There seemed to be multiple certificates and awards on the wall behind him but it was impossible to tell what they were for in the dim light of the room. He had short yet thick black hair and eyebrows furrowed in consternation just above a surgical face mask, his gaze stuck on the image of an x-ray his computer displayed. His phone lit up briefly and painted the room in weak light, but he didn't give it any thought; his attention was fully absorbed in the screen of his monitor. He missed the message that instructed him to kill someone and presented him with the numbers "0:022:33:04."

 Somewhere in Africa, a young man returned to his village with fresh water from the local well only to find everyone in the market dead, flies already beginning to cluster around their bodies. He was able to find some locals still alive, hiding in their huts, but they seemed petrified; they would only speak to him through the door and scream about evil curses and bad energy. He opened his ancient flip phone to try to call someone and found a new text that insinuated he should kill someone and designated him the numbers "0:062:09:00."

Somewhere in Colombia a man was tied firmly to a chair and had a sheet of duct tape plastered across his mouth. Sweat drenched his white tank top and his eyes were consumed with panic. In front of him stood a darkly tanned man with curly black hair and a distinct scar on his upper lip holding a machete which he made sure to unsheathe menacingly slow. The man in the chair begged with muffled cries to be spared but the other man might as well have spoken a different language. He placed the empty sheath on a dirty coffee table painted with bloody hand prints as he looked over his new victim. The man in the chair wriggled as he continued to produce muffled grunts and half-words through the tacky tape on his face. As the man held the machete tightly, his eyes radiated with excitement, and a smirk snaked across his tan face. A humid wind blew through the open windows and coaxed the slightly ajar door fully open across from the man in the chair revealing two dead men in the bathroom. As the man with the machete took out his phone to film the grisly deed he was about to partake in he realized he had a new message, one that told him to do something he was just about to do anyway and gifted him the numbers "0:000:06:33."

 It was impossible for anyone to know at the time but the world had silently started to end, their demise heralded by a single text message. Those without a cell phone died instantly, and those spared instant death were about to realize the horror was just beginning.