May 15, 2013
Me and my classmates sat in a semi-circle on the rug, fully engaged in our teacher’s words. She was teaching us about the solar system, a model drawn on the whiteboard. My classmate, Olivia, raises her hand. “What would happen without the sun?” My teacher, Mrs. Hazel, clears her throat before saying, “Without the sun, there would be nothing to give energy to plants, which means that there would be no humans. It would also be extremely cold.” Olivia ponders what my teacher just said before saying, “The sun seems great. What if it got too bright, though.” Mrs. Hazel easily replies, “Then it would be too hot, and the plants would still die, which would not be good.” Why would the sun ever turn on us?
When I get home that day, I ask my parents to take me to the park. I feel the sun on my skin and take in all the fresh air. The weather is perfect, it had rained a little bit earlier in the day and the grass still feels wet, with green leaves hanging on to the trees and the sky an attractive light blue. As we’re leaving, I proudly declare, “The sun is my favorite thing in the world!” I think about Olivia’s questions. The sun can’t actually change, can it? Why would it? I run back to my house, my parents following me. We arrive at our house just as the solar power company is leaving. “Can the sun really power the TV?” I ask. My mother, the conservationist, explained this to me this morning. The worker looks at me, the sun shining on his dark glasses. “Yes, the sun powers everything.” My mother looks up at the sun, her hand shielding her eyes from the brightness. “Lets go inside.” Even though I wasn’t even 6 years old, I knew that my mother was anxious to go inside. I could see her cringe when the man with the dark glasses had said “the sun powers everything”. Still, I ran inside to watch Sesame Street, with Big Bird incidentally talking about solar energy.
If you had graphed the sky and the following months, you’d find that there was no correlation. The sun was absolutely unpredictable - there were rare moments where the sun was actually pleasant. There were moments where there was no sun showing in the sky, with temperatures well below zero, killing many people in the North and wiping out entire land and marine species. The sun was playing with us, it had many different ways of torturing us. Scientists and government leaders tried to deny any cumulative trickery, but even they started to lose faith in the sun at some point. Eventually, the intense heat came. It got so bad that on the hottest days, dead bodies would burst into flames. I guess that’s nature’s form of cremation. The brightness was worse, though.
While the heat obviously caused heat stroke, heart attacks, e.t.c., it was probably more harmful to abiotic things. The brightness was even more ruthless and barbaric, though. It took away vision from many of us, led to the ban on non-autonomous vehicles, and caused persistent, never-ending physical and emotional pain in every single surviving human. There has been lots of speculation about how spoiled humans are and if common sense is a blind spot. Many social scientists claim that people have been blinded with their technology and never had a chance to learn how to survive in a world without it.
09/19/2030
Today, almost the entire human race was annihilated, leaving the Rebuilding for just a few thousand strong, lucky people. As I filled out my work packet for English 101, I started getting a barrage of notifications. TAKE COVER!!! ITS ABOUT TO HAPPEN! THE SUN IS NOTHIN COMPARED TO US! I’d been hearing about it for weeks, but now that it was actually happening I just sat in silence, stunned. I can’t believe it, the sun actually turned on us. I whispered that to myself until the increasing noise stopped, followed by a boom.
Side note: inspired by Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
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