It took eight minutes for us to realise our sun was gone. Eight minutes and we were suddenly looking at a night sky, full of stars. The birds stopped singing. Insects stopped chirping. I could hear the mutterings of confusion, slowly descending into panic. Day had turned to night.
After ten minutes, it started to get a bit cooler. On the other side of the planet, some people hadn’t noticed yet. News began to spread. Rumours began to spread. No one had any idea what was going on. The sun simply wasn’t there any more. Some people claimed they’d seen the sun getting smaller. Others believed that their deity of choice was punishing us. Others still believed this was some sort of government hoax to make us all scared. No one knew.
Hours drifted by, and temperatures were starting to drop globally. Not as suddenly as everyone expected, but you could feel the difference. Two hours, and people at the equator were beginning to need coats. Governments did their best to try and keep everyone calm, stating that they had plans and the like. We would survive, they’d claim. They had a plan. We just needed to wait while they figured things out.
People didn’t want to wait though. People believed what they wanted to believe. Cults popped up from nowhere. Religious temples and churches began driving people towards them, preaching all sorts of insanity. With or without the help of religion, there were riots everywhere. Many just wanted to protect themselves and keep their families alive. The governments were acting too slow as they tried and failed to keep the peace. In the mean time, the rich and wealthy locked themselves away, watching from their underground bunkers.
What was there to do though? With no sun, plant life would not be able to sustain us all. This entire planet was already beginning to starve and freeze to death. Underground living would only be able to accommodate for a tiny part of the population, and many countries didn’t even have the technology to build new living spaces.
Food and warmth were the biggest issues. They often combined into the same issue. One group of idiots thought it might be a good idea to burn fields for warmth, while others wasted fuel trying to make themselves too warm.
As resources dwindled, we began screaming to the stars, begging for help, begging for anything to save us. Those who were left, at least. Mainly those tied to the rich or famous, or lucky enough to be tied to a country’s military. The majority though were linked via religion and cults, surviving through pure luck. In only a month, society had collapsed, much like the rest of the planet.
But on the second month, Something happened. A curse or a miracle. We were not sure.
Something heard our pleas. The pleas of the few remaining of our kind.
The ships were large. And dark. They circled above us ominously. They landed in open fields, as close as they could to settlements. They weren’t like us though. Large, armoured beings. Heavily armed. Scary.
A lot of us were scared. Were these scavengers? Had they destroyed our sun? Were they here to eat us? These were questions we couldn’t answer. Questions maybe we didn’t want to answer.
You see, not all of us trusted these visitors. Those who did not trust them were left behind. Despite the visitors’ soft spoken words, begging us to let them save us. They had room for us, they said. They could give us a new home.
No, the religions and cults shouted. These beings were demons, they shouted. In the eyes of many, the visitors were not our salvation, they were our doom.
Beliefs trumped the chance to escape. Many of our kind stayed behind. Choosing to remain on a sunless rock.
I’m one of the minority, the ones that chose to go with the visitors. They are taking us away to safety now. I hope that I am right and that those who remained behind are wrong. For they cannot be saved now, and we are at the mercy of these strange beings that took us in…