With the disappearance of Williams.
Not dead, at least. That was what people told themselves, because the alternative was too strange to sit with. He had simply ceased to be present.
In the forty-eight hours following his disappearance, the full broadcast was transcribed, translated, and distributed across every major platform in over two hundred languages.
Governments tried, in several cases, to suppress it.
They failed. The internet had already done what the internet does, it made the truth everyone's property, whether anyone wanted it to be or not.
And the truth was this:
A person had appeared in the sky, his body wreathed in a powerful aura and crackling with lightning, floating in the open atmosphere. It was unlike anything ever seen or recorded in human history.
He spoke of rifts , or perhaps he summoned them himself and gave a deadline.
The rifts would be unsealed, and what lay beyond them would be unleashed upon the earth. It sounded like fantasy. But enough proof had already been presented, in the form of Williams himself.
In summary
Rifts. Closed, for now. One thousand days.
People latched onto the lightning, onto the flying, onto the spectacle of a young man standing in open sky as though gravity had simply forgotten about him. That was the part that set hearts racing, that made children grab their fathers' sleeves, that flooded search engines with desperate, hungry questions.
But the ones who were truly listening heard the other part.
The countdown.
A meeting convened in Geneva the headquarters of an association comprising the most powerful people and organizations in the world, though calling it a meeting was almost an insult to its scale. Forty-one nations represented. The most powerful intelligence agencies present in some form, whether officially or through the carefully anonymous figures seated in the back rows. Economists, military strategists, two archaeologists who had apparently been studying something relevant for years without anyone paying attention, and Dr. Yemi Osei, who had not slept in thirty-one hours and looked like she had never been more awake in her life.
At the center of it all was a single question projected on the screen in clean, bureaucratic font, as though the plainness of the text could contain what it was actually asking.
WHO IS WILLIAMS AND WHAT DOES HE REPRESENTS?
Let's begin with what we have, said Director Calloway, standing at the front with a composed expression.
The file was embarrassingly thin for someone who had just rewritten the global understanding of human potential.
Appeared on the outskirts of a mid-sized city approximately six years ago. No documentation prior to that point. No country of origin. No biological family located. Taken in by a couple, the Adeyemis, currently under protective custody and, by all accounts, just as bewildered as everyone else. Enrolled in a secondary school. Unremarkable academic record. Quiet. Kept to himself. Described by teachers as thoughtful, and by classmates as a little odd but not unkind.
He wasn't built in a lab, said the woman from Israeli intelligence, not looking up from her tablet. We checked. Genetics came back human. Entirely, frustratingly, ordinarily human.
The abilities suggest otherwise,someone offered.
The abilities suggest we don't know what human beings are capable of, Dr. Osei said from her seat. Several heads turned. She didn't adjust her posture. Which is, I suspect, exactly what he wanted us to understand.
Silence settled over the room.
The countdown was the thing that kept people from simply moving on.
Entertainment cycles were short. Spectacle faded. But one thousand days, approximately three years, was a deadline printed on the inside of everyone's eyelids. You couldn't unsee it.
Then came the most dangerous element.
Fear of the unknown.
Fear was useful, for a while. Fear made people pay attention. But fear without direction became chaos, and chaos, as several people in that Geneva room knew from direct experience, was the most expensive thing in the world.
Outside the formal structures, something else was already happening.
The desire had been planted not by Williams deliberately, perhaps, but planted nonetheless. People wanted what they had seen.
The pull of it was visceral and immediate, cutting across age and geography and political belief with the indifference of gravity.
A child in Jakarta drilling push-ups at midnight because he had decided, with the total commitment only children possess, that he would be ready. A former soldier in Ukraine staring at her hands in the dark, remembering a moment three weeks ago when she had lifted something she shouldn't have been able to lift, and wondering. A sixteen-year-old in Atlanta who had been hiding something strange about herself for two years, who watched the footage seven times and cried without entirely knowing why relief, maybe. Or recognition.
They were everywhere.
And the question of what to do with them ,with all of them was the question the people in Geneva were dancing around with enormous, careful steps.
"If we do nothing,said Prime Minister Achebe, then development happens without structure. Without safety. People will push themselves toward things they don't understand, and some of them will be hurt, and some of them will be dangerous, and there will be no framework for distinguishing between the two."
And if we move to control it," said Reinhardt, finishing the thought she had left deliberately incomplete, "we become the enemy. We become the institution standing between people and their own potential. That story has been told before. It doesn't end well for the institution.
"Then we don't control it," said Dr. Osei. "We shape it."
She stood, moving to the front with the particular energy of someone who has been waiting for the conversation to reach a specific point.
"Williams didn't just show us power. He left us a framework. Think about what he said what he actually said, not the spectacle of it. He talked about preparation. He talked about readiness. He didn't say become powerful. He said be ready. Those are different instructions.
She paused, letting the distinction settle.
"He was saying, this is real, and it is coming, and the question is not whether you will face it but whether you will face it having prepared."
The room was very still.
We don't need to control people," she continued. "We need to give them something worth training for. A structure. A purpose. Because the alternative , a world full of people developing abilities in isolation, with no shared understanding of what those abilities are for
She shook her head slowly.
"That is the danger. Not the abilities themselves. The purposelessness of them."