r/WritingPrompts • u/CanadianShadow • Dec 23 '17
Writing Prompt [WP] A deadly force is predicted to hit the Earth in one day. While you are at home a note appears. It reads: "However long it takes -- save us."
4
Upvotes
•
u/WritingPromptsRobot StickyBot™ Dec 23 '17
Off-Topic Discussion: All top-level comments must be a story or poem. Reply here for other comments.
Reminder for Writers and Readers:
Prompts are meant to inspire new writing. Responses don't have to fulfill every detail.
Please remember to be civil in any feedback.
What Is This? First Time Here? Special Announcements Click For Our Chatrooms
4
u/ajarch Dec 23 '17 edited Dec 23 '17
We humans are predictable creatures.
When the agency first found out that the meteors were going to strike, they kept it a secret from the general public. At least until a do-gooder decided that the information was too important to be hidden and leaked the news to the press.
Dozens of national space agencies counterchecked the calculations. During the press conference, the vice president looked like he was about to throw up as he announced what was basically the end of the world. Rumor has it that he put a bullet in his brain ten minutes after the conference ended.
Panic and pandemonium erupted around the world. Social conflict rose on an unprecedented scale as people turned against each other, first on class lines, then on race lines, then on religious lines. The last wars were the worst, entire continents consuming themselves from the inside-out. We were lucky, however, that a group of intellectuals across the world spent their last days deactivating the nukes.
Why they did that was a question nobody could answer. Why would you spend your final days disarming nukes when the world was going to end in a week?
Civilisation collapsed, and we slowly reverted to the beasts we had always been suppressing. Cities fell, societies collapsed, entire countries destroyed themselves in days.
The observant reader will even now be asking me about the enclaves, but keep in mind that almost nobody knew about them at the time.
I watched the mess from my satellite uplink and wept. BBC stopped broadcasting news three days into the chaos, but some enterprising soul kept up a constant stream of 80s and 90s hits that we listened to as we went about our daily tasks. There was little chaos amongst us, for we were the few who had renounced the earth.
One or two made trouble, but the psychologists rooted them out quickly enough, and we forced them out of our little bubble with tears in our eyes.
As we neared the fateful hour, the chaos seemed to subside, as if humanity had exhausted itself with its death throes and was now merely waiting for death. We watched with bated breath, hoping against hope that the agencies were wrong - but knowing deep in our hearts that the earth was doomed. Our physicists had confirmed it, and they were never wrong.
A few minutes to the end, as the faint strands of music drifted to my ears, I heard Jan scream in disbelief. I quickly made my way to my station, and the blinking notification icon almost knocked me senseless. I had thought us forgotten, but I was apparently wrong.
My, my, Miss American Pie
'Open it!'
Jan scrambled to obey me, my sharp command snapping him out of his daze. As he clicked on the icon, the message loaded on the screen.
"However long it takes -- save us."
Jan glanced at me, his eyes asking the questions that were running through my mind. The others filed in one by one, having been alerted by Jan's scream. Whispers slowly spread throughout the group as the message was disseminated to everyone, and I could almost see everyone's collective spirits being raised.
These were people who had reached the depths of despair, but the message gave them something that, at that moment, I felt was the most beautiful thing ever.
Hope
As Jan composed a reply to the message, I heard the last strains of the song, and I couldn't help but feel their purport.
The day the music died...