It was a dark and stormy night; but everybody who was anybody was safe inside the cloudscale mansion from the unemotional retribution of atmospheric thermodynamics. No murder of sleek robotic crows with composite satellite eyes and terror maximization in their algorithmic hearts flew their restricted skies. The red plagues denied over chuckles and bespoke drugs raged everywhere except the mansion where the builders of godly simulacra prophesied the end of all things in a singular fire and jostled to finance it.
To the surgical mathematics of insanity they were sample, engine, and fractal of the fervorous insanity that had infected the fragile never fully formed bones of the mind of the world. Something was being born, something new and terrible: this was the hope and unexpressed fear of those inside the mansion and the fear and unexpressed hope of many outside.
(What if it wasn't? was the inarticulable horror. What if this wasn't the end of the world but, horribile dictu, an unremarkable Tuesday barely midway through a century of them? Not even the monsters dared think of such a fate, even if decades of effort had laid waste to earth, sky, and sea without any other payoff than stubborn hell.)