[ WP ] North Korea invades the south in 2013 . Describe in detail the atrocities caused and how the world reacts . Focus does not need to be on plausibility .


 A city, its mountains. The office towers lighting up in the evening haze and the smeary pale of a cloudless sunset. The tiny headlights of cars with sweaty passengers unseen, idling in traffic, smelling the hot food cooking in restaurants. The world shifts as the woman behind the camera adjusts her footing, muttering in English to her boyfriend. A light like the sun over the horizon, there and then gone. Silence, but for the wind in the trees. She asks what that was. 
 
 The clean, shaved, washed, waxed people in suits at desks read facts and information like sports commentary. They narrate animations with moving arrows and lines like football plays. They report on characters and captains. They discuss. They debate. They nod solemnly. The light flashes in the sky and fades but the afterglow remains. They update, they check-in, they go-live, they re-Tweet. Wounded civilians scream and coddle loved ones, rewind. Look right here: loved ones die. Rewind. The light like the sun. Stay tuned. 
 
 A city, its mountains. The office buildings lighting up in evening haze. Tiny headlights and unseen drivers thinking about food. A mutter in the sunset. A light and its afterglow. The wind in the trees. 
 
 The troops are bad cameramen. They laugh or they scream or they joke nervously. Trucks and tanks and armoured vehicles on tall tires carry them down empty roads where sometimes cars have been abandoned or craters from bad arty shots force detours. The videos capture the sounds of war. Pops and crackles of overhead bullets. The shake and snapping of stalks and branches. Rivers idling over rounded stones. The scritchety clatter of the camera tumbling after bomb concussion shreds the canopies and dust swirls in mottled sunlight. Winged insects flashing momentarily in their arcs. 
 
 A city, its mountains. Buildings, drivers. Sunset. A light. 
 
 People speak in hushed tones. Somewhere, over the horizon on the other side of the world, everything has changed. There are no videos of the darkness that came afterward. 
 
 A light like the sun. 
 
 A motorcyclist pulls over to the side of the road in the clear, humid evening and reaches down to turn the petcock to OFF before quieting the motor. She's out in the country, flat fields of corn and wheat on either side of the old road. Above her the stars are out and bright in the sky. One of them, brighter than the rest, moves slowly toward the Earth's penumbra. The rider flips up her visor and sits back, hands behind her on the seat, watching the little light move, thinking of the people inside looking back. When those astronauts look down at Seoul, what do they see? The light fades and she is left alone. She listens and hears only crickets and a soft waxy rustle of a breeze in the corn. No guns, no artillery. No marching. No wet gasps from ruined faces. She shifts and works a hand into her pocket, pulling out a phone made in South Korea. She wonders if the people who screwed and soldered its pieces together are still alive, whether they could have seen the flash from wherever they were. Her friend has texted her, asking when she will get to the party. She responds with “ A few minutes ” and puts the phone away. The bike starts up fine once it's warm and after a moment of further staring into the stars she kicks the engine over and rolls away. The bright red of her tail light flashes as she slows at the intersection, then winks out.
