At 5:37am EST, the sirens went off. The sound, low and baritone, pierced through the quiet of the early morning stillness like alarms from the 1950s, heralding doom by air raid.
The sound came from everywhere: refrigerators, bedposts, dashboard hula girls. Some people woke up screaming as their very pajamas emitted the eerie call.
The alarm lasted for roughly ten minutes, waking those who were sleeping, terrifying those already up, regardless of how remote. Even in the distant sands of the Sahara, saddles and stones emitted the strange warning. There was really no choice but to pay attention to it.
When the sirens finally stopped, people scrambled to make sense of it. But television broadcasts couldn’t be resumed, phone lines were jammed, and browsers could no longer find a connection to the internet.
Then, the music started.
It was nondescript; the kind of music played in supermarkets, or inside an…