The lights in Rome had been dark since nightfall, and every hour had increased the sense of dread. There had been no explanations, only repeated claims by officials that ‘this sort of event shouldn’t be possible’. But it was not only possible, it had been predicted. And the people knew this. They’d been told it would happen, and it had, and as the minutes scraped along, it was beginning to terrify them.
The average Roman citizen was educated, enlightened and no more prone to superstition than a man or woman in any other modern culture. But there were few who didn’t mutter the word – whether in disdainful dismissal or in an increasingly tense worry – that seemed planted on everyone’s lips.
Prophecy.
The words of the tablet which had been circulated on the Internet had predicted the darkness, and it had come. Just like the river. It couldn’t be denied. And guns had come with the water. And deaths. And fear.
Just what was going to come with this darkness?
But amidst the streets flooded with people taking to their cars, not sure where they were going but content to be moving somewhere, the darkness came to an abrupt end.
In an instant Rome was bright again. As if at the flip of a switch – not in phases or cyclically regenerated power flows as was the case when any large-scale grid system was reinitiated. As the lights of Rome had twinkled out in the blink of an eye, so did they return. Street lamps snapped back to attention, interior fixtures of houses and flats popped back to life, even televisions and kitchen utilities which had been in use before the strange outage whirred and garbled back into electric action.
Impossible, the official line resonated in the populace’s memory, the electricity in Rome doesn’t switch on and off like a lightbulb.
But it did. And the instant it had, the city went racing for answers.
The Internet exploded with activity the moment the citizens of Rome were able to reconnect their computers to WiFi networks, cable feeds and cellular data connections. But there were no answers to be found. No official explanations. So the people had nothing else to take in but guesswork and hypothesis.
Or a video, which many had seen before.
They returned to it now with new viewers in the tens of thousands. The video clip ran only three minutes, and featured its lone man speaking directly into a camera, reading them the revelations contained on a tablet.
‘You have tasted the prophecy,’ he said as the video rounded into its final seconds, ‘but we know the whole. We knew it before, and we know it now.’
The man on the screen coughed, and with him the whole of Rome held its breath.
‘Like all prophecy, it speaks of what is to come. Next . . .’ He leaned into the camera as the file ran with only six seconds to go.
‘It speaks of the fog.’