"Wow, Kendra, you've got a spring in your step today," Aaron remarked. They were rounding the corner into their section of the office.

"Yeah, I think the grapefruit thing is working," Kendra said, gesturing with her coffee mug. "It's my second week, and… oops!" She lost her grip on the mug.

They both watched it tumble to the floor.

Five seconds is a long time for something to be falling.

"What the…?" Aaron said.

The mug bounced off the carpet and spun lazily, like an astronaut's wrench, sending a slow spiral of French Roast into the air.

"What's happening?" Kendra cried, as her feet started to bicycle. She had lost her footing on the floor, and started to float.

—

Rob Thurman, Director of Engineering at Fowler Magnetics, was unused to speaking in public. The hastily assembled outdoor podium and stand, with a bouquet of microphones, stood between him and at least a thousand people. A newscaster (he'd forgotten her name already) stood near him. He cleared his throat and began.

"Um, I'm Rob, head of engineering at Fowler, and they gave me a statement to read, but I'll get to the point. TL;DR: we're fucked."

The crowd gasped. The producer started furiously giving the slit-the-throat signal to cut audio. No one was watching her.

"The execs are all in their copters to get to higher ground, but there is no higher ground. Or lower ground. We have maybe a day or two left."

He held the podium to steady himself.

"Anyway, last night, we achieved a pretty big milestone. Anti-gravity, not just at the molecular level, but ten milligrams of metal. Big enough to see it hovering in the air. But then the harness started floating too, and we shut everything down.

"Or at least tried to."

He tightened his grip on the podium.

"As far as we know, the antigrav material is, via tunneling, passing its nature to other matter in a slow chain reaction. The rate of spread will seem random, and—"

His grip was even tighter, and the crowd cried out as his legs billowed up from behind him.

"And—"

Now he was nearly upside down, and the podium was starting to drift with him. He panicked, trying to swim down, toward the newscaster.

"Don't touch me!" she screamed, backpedaling off the stand.

Behind them, glass shattered and steel groaned as an office tower started to give in to upward forces the engineers had never planned for. Horns started to sound in protest as their cars lost touch with the roads.

—

Humanity lasted less than a day as the atmosphere itself vented out into space. The Earth itself had a tantrum of quakes and eruptions, without witnesses, before the forces holding it together were gone.

In a few days, there was nothing left of Earth but an expanding cloud of particles, all wanting nothing to do with one another, finding their own path to infect the rest of the universe.