July 12, 2024

5:18 PM (CST)

KTXB Evening News

20 minutes after The Blink

Andy Waller is not a world-famous newscaster, not by a long shot. If you asked someone in New York or California who he was, they wouldn’t have a clue. But ask that same question in one specific corner of northeast Texas, you’ll find that everyone knows Andy Waller’s name.

And if they don’t, they certainly know his face. Perfectly symmetrical, clean-shaven, distinctly charming, Andy’s youthful face appeared every night on TV screens throughout the local area just before Wheel of Fortune, where, for the last five years, it had stolen the breath from middle-aged women sitting beside their snoring husbands on the living room couch. Andy Waller had become a household name for countless families throughout the state, a man who sat right across from the couch and read the events of the day out loud with that devilish grin flashing out at his audience.

Today, however, Andy is not smiling.

“We—We’ve just got another video,” he stammers from behind a BREAKING NEWS banner along the bottom of the screen. His voice no longer has that over-enunciated confidence inherent of newscasters. Instead, he has reverted back to his native Texan drawl. “This one was sent in by a viewer from Mount Vernon a few minutes ago. Can we switch over to that one?”

A moment passes, Andy’s face awkwardly motionless in the center of the shot as the news crew works to pull up the video, then the screen cuts to black.

It starts with a view of a Little League game filmed from the bleachers. The field is old, the borderlines between sand and grass blurred in several places from wind and time. A chainlink fence surrounds the field’s perimeter, and beyond it grassy Texas fields extend to a wall of forest far in the distance. Small shadows of cottonball clouds drift effortlessly across the world. It is a perfect summer day.

The metallic ting of a bat striking a ball, then the sound of parents cheering and clapping as a young boy runs tottering toward first with everything he’s got. Just before he reaches the base, the camera drops and gasps fill the stands, the same sound you expect to hear when one of those Little Leaguers gets hit by a foul ball, but when the camera pans back up it is like four hours have passed in the span of a few seconds. Twilight now blankets the scene in a hazy dimness that causes the camera to auto-adjust its focus. A blurry flock of small birds takes flight over the field, followed by a handful of bats zigzagging through the air at the mistaken belief they overslept their circadian alarm clocks. The cameraperson aims upward and zooms in on the Sun, and it is immediately clear that something is wrong.

Though at first washed out from the brightness, the camera shortly begins absorbing more and more detail as the Sun’s glare diminishes. What started as a perfect circle has morphed into a gibbous shape, like the moon a few days after it is at its fullest. As the shape continues to deform, the sky begins to darken, the clouds changing from white to gray and then to almost black. In less than half a minute, the Sun has become only a fraction of its former brilliance, the progression resembling a sped-up video of the moon’s phases. From full to gibbous to quarter in the span of a few seconds.

The crescent Sun wanes further, its last sliver glinting like firelight along the blade of a new scythe. Beads of light flash and pop along this strange hairline curve in the sky, sparking briefly against the ever-darkening backdrop, and then it is gone.

The video goes black, but concerned voices can be heard from the parents in the stands. Were it not for these whispers, people watching from home might think the video has ended, but it hasn’t. The camera zooms out to show the field now bathed in the harsh glow of tall stadium lights. On the field, the Little Leaguers stand with gloves hanging limply by their sides, all of them staring straight up at the stars.

All but one.

The kid who’d been headed for first moments earlier is now rounding third, too focused on scoring a home run to realize the world just ended. He slides across home plate and jumps to his feet, fists raised and a triumphant grin on his face as he looks to the stands, then his gaze shifts upward and he begins to cry.

This is where the video ends and Andy Waller’s perfect face returns to the living rooms of Texas. Rather than charming, though, his face is haggard and haunted. Shocked. Afraid.

“Uh,” is all he manages to say before glancing slightly up above the camera. He stands up and walks out of frame, leaving an empty desk in the shot. A minute passes like this. Indistinct voices mumble in the background, doors creak open and clang shut, footsteps shuffle around just out of view.

When Andy returns, his eyes are somehow even more haunted than they were, like he hadn’t believed the videos and reports coming in until he looked outside for himself.

“Uh,” he repeats, then clears his throat, remembering the hundreds, maybe even thousands, of unseen eyes currently fixed on him. “I just looked out the window and, uh, the sky is dark. This is real. The—The Sun seems to have . . .” Andy trails off, eyes again drifting back behind the camera as all thoughts of TV broadcast etiquette leave him.

He doesn’t know that his segment is already in the process of going viral, that, because it is one of the earliest and clearest videos shared of the Sun’s death, it is already being posted to Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and being sent to other news stations around the world, where it is shared again and again. He doesn’t know that his face will shortly be one of the most famous faces not just in Texas, not even in the United States, but in the entireworld. He has always wanted this kind of fame, has always secretly prayed for the day his face would be beside the likes of Anderson Cooper and Lester Holt, and his prayer to be a celebrity television star will be answered a dozen times over before the week is out.

Andy has no idea that in the next few days, his brief segment will become the most watched video on the Internet, breaking records as the fastest growing viral video in the history of the world.

He also has no idea that it will be one of the last viral videos mankind will ever produce.