Looking back through the various chapters of my experiences that shaped what seems to be the single most important mission humankind has ever had to undertake; my mission, it felt like both irony and destiny had conspired to thwart the long established notion that only the selected were meant to better their status in life. The selected were the cream of the social establishment in 2046. They are a refined group of over privileged individuals who survived the complete and utter annihilation in 2021 when the world as it was known was swiftly shuttling towards a compelling spiral end. The Earth was soon going to face a calamitous implosion brought about by man’s need for constant self-advancement over the instinct to save the future of his home world. For eons mankind believed that he was the most superior race in the entire universe. Man has only been around for a couple of thousands of years, many of which he spent living like an ape on a tree, yet he fashions himself to be smarter than the inhabitants of the Earth that came way ahead of him such as the roaches and the fish. But I digress from the most important piece of history in mankind’s seemingly never ending twisted existence.
We can do it today.
Before “the enlightenment of 2019” man engaged himself in the fallacy and notion that he was the only race with the ability to comprehend the meaning of life. The enlightenment of 2019 has been documented, enacted and re-enacted for decades so that the future generations do not forget how lucky they are to be able to inhale and exhale the clean air that has been gifted to them by the selected.
On the first day of April of 2019, a bright blue amber ray pierced through space and time illuminating the darkest corner of the Solar System. The ray was so bright that it dwarfed the white light from the sun, making it seem like a candle in in the middle of a dark stormy night. The Solar System with the 8 planets and several dwarf planets orbiting the sun was bright corner of the universe that fateful morning. For sure inhabitants of Proxima Centauri system, the nearest planetary system saw the illumination from the deepest corner of the galaxy. The genesis of the ray has never been fully established but all that is known to date is that that very day shifted the history of the Earth for eternity. All that has been understood is that the light emanated beyond the sun and neither was it contained between us and Pluto or the asteroid belt around Jupiter. It is the singular most important event that has or will ever occur on Earth. The ray was so bright that it imprinted the shadows of the health nuts who were up for their usual morning jogs into the very ground they were so busy running on. The lazy people who were too busy sleeping and had no time to keep up with the world were spared the agony of a bright death in the open. People in the open simply vanished out of existence like the sun blinking and leaving everything in the dark. They were like the negative photographic films of old only without the real images.
The luminous ray’s lifecycle only lasted for a few nano-seconds but the effect left behind was as real as the big bang theory that brought us into existence. Nothing quite like it had been registered at the time but advancement in technology since that day, have shown that the very same light led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. True to the nature of mankind, many believed that this event was an elaborate April Fools prank crafted by very intelligent Internet hacker. The amount of ignorance that the primitive man of the pre-enlightenment accepted as true has been studied by the greatest minds at the Climian Institute for decades yet the ‘stupid gene’ has never been utterly disconnected from the human genome. The institute was built so that man could be prepared for to make the ultimate sacrifice, give up the Earth for a better planet.
During the enlightenment, every audio and video recording device propagated the same message from beings beyond the Solar System. The sound that emanated from these devices sounded like a command made by Thor all the way from Valhalla. My grand pa swears upon the beauty that grand ma once had that it went something like this “Beings of the Solar System. You have never been alone. Why you have always believed that is because we live amongst you and have always been in control of the events that have been happening since the dawn of mankind. Nothing has ever been a mistake or a fluke of nature. We the Gayana, the original inhabitants of the Earth, have been preparing you to do what needs to be done. We have been observing you for thousands of years from our intergalactic posts strewn across the Milky Way with the hope that you will mend your ways. The Earth has reached its critical capacity. Mankind does not know when to stop increasing in numbers. You keep on procreating despite the fact that the Earth is not expanding. The Earth is not an elastic entity that can be forced to expand with the increase in population pressure. We have tried to control the population through various means, which you continue to defy. We started the Black Death that killed over 75 million people in Europe in 1347 when the Earth only had a population of 450 million human inhabitants. What will we do now that you number over 6 billion?
We started the Spanish flu in 1918 in the Americas, which wiped out more than 50 million human lives. The HIV/AIDS virus followed this in 1959 in sub-Saharan Africa and to date over 25 million have died and over 60 million confirmed infections throughout the world. The Plague of Justinian in 541 that killed over 25 million humans was not an act of nature either. The Roman Empire had to be trimmed to size. We brought about the Antonine Plague of 165 and curled over 5 million residents of Mesopotamia. We went further by introducing various viruses and bacteria over the years; cholera, typhoid, malaria, Ebola, small pox and many more. In a year, as many as 5 million cases of cholera are reported (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation). Despite all these diseases, you continue to show resilience that we have not been able to put out.
We went a step further introducing better weaponry to mankind so that you can wipe yourselves out leading to the outbreak of World War I. The number of deaths were over 17 million on the battlefields alone (BBC News). Improved weaponry was introduced after this war and the propaganda and greed furnaces were lit all over the world leading to World War II. This had a death toll of over 60 million people in the battlefield. This however barely scratched the surface, as it was only 3 percent of the total population ( Hitler Historical Museum ). All the wars, disease epidemics, genetic diseases and seemingly natural calamities that occur throughout the world are no coincidences as we cause all of them. To date, the rise of various terrorist groups has not been coincidental as we grew them and unleashed their tirades to the world. We have further contaminated the Ozone layer leading to the rise of global warming in order to curl the human race.
We have the technology and the ability to wipe you from history but our Supreme Council believes that we need to offer you a chance to save yourselves from being a footnote in the history of the Milky Way. The council consists of our foremost leaders in various fields of interest. Your resilience in the face of all that has been thrown at you reminds us of our own humble beginnings as the only inhabitants of the Earth. As a result, we have granted you the permission to relocate to a bigger planet to continue with your existence. Over the years we have slowly given you tidbits of advanced technology to enable you explore the world around you. We enabled your first mission to the moon and consequent missions of sending unmanned crafts to other planets and deep into space in order for you to realize on your own that there are other inhabitable planets beyond Earth so that your departure seems natural. Progress in this front has been slow in coming hence the drastic move we have taken. We will provide you with the necessary forms of transportation to ferry the entire human race to your new dwelling. However, should you deem it necessary to challenge us, the Earth shall be bombarded with an aerial nerve agent that is genetically engineered to target the human genome and wipe it out. Remain calm and await further instructions”.
Since that fateful April morning, the world drastically evolved. At first, every human activity on Earth appeared normal. This took nearly three months until a second event occurred that changed the Earth’s troposphere for eternity. The vaccines for malaria and HIV/AIDS virus were suddenly and simultaneously discovered by the most brilliant scientific minds on Earth. This was a medical breakthrough that had been pushed for many years by the medical community. This led to a worldwide boom in business as everyone flocked the pharmaceutical companies for the vaccines. The global economy came to a standstill as lines as long as the River Nile, my grand pa told me of this river, as it no longer exists, were formed outside these establishments, each person seeking the vaccine. What followed can only be described as the single most unfortunate event in the history of mankind. At first the vaccine seemed to work perfectly to the extent that people reverted to their old Sodom and Gomorra ways. People stopped using any form of protection, be it against the virus or malaria.
Two months after the end of the vaccination process, hospitals started experiencing new cases of malaria and HIV/AIDS virus. These could not be controlled as easily as the initial cases as they were more aggressive as if they had been genetically wired to detonate at the same time. Additionally, all the people who were vaccinated started experiencing flu like symptoms. The world later came to realize that the vaccines had been provided by the Oblaculates a rogue faction of the owners of the planet Earth who felt that the Supreme Council was being too generous in helping mankind yet we are the ones who have continuously destroyed it at every chance we’ve gotten. The Oblaculates carried out this deed in order to weed out the chaff from the face of the Earth.
What followed was better than what the Oblaculates had hoped for. With the constant rise in fear of possible future attacks by the Gayana creeping in to their psyche like tentacles from a giant alien squid and with the ever present fear of not knowing who they were, the world disintegrated in to chaos and panic with everyone looking out for himself. The situation escalated from a simple altercation between neighbors to full out war between countries, each accusing the other of being the Gayana or Oblaculates. The situation deteriorated to a point where no one cared about mutual destruction as each dropped an atomic bomb on the other, which was followed by a similar response. During this period, the Gayana were conveniently absent from the picture. It is believed that those who were residents of the planet were conveniently beamed up to the back of the moon where they sat and watched as mankind got rid of itself. The destruction did not bother them so much as they had advanced technology, which they could use to return the Earth to the way, it was prior to the wars. The Oblaculates were viewed as heroes by a majority of the Gayanas as they singlehandedly managed to get rid of the “problem” that the Supreme Council were reluctant to act upon.
I arrived on Earth in the middle of the war in 2021. My parents are not Gayana hence was not lucky enough to grab a front row seat to view Man’s final days, the continued curling of the human population through mutual self-destruction. My parents were neither rich nor well-connected members of the community hence we were not locked away in a shelter or a private island away from reality like the selected. My story begins in a mountainous roadside town in the eastern region of what used what used to been the continent of Africa. This was initially a vibrant continent full of hardworking, peaceful and jovial people who understood what community was all about; sharing and caring. The enlightenment scared them as much as the next community but years of living together in a humble community taught them the value of friendship and appreciation of the simple pleasures that life offers. The community never bothered to seek the vaccines as they believed that the universe balanced itself out thus if one’s time was up they should not fight destiny.
However, they were soon to find out that even though they resided in a remote area of the planet, away from the rest of the self-destructing beings, they still shared the Earth with other human beings. The country was forced to engage in a brutal war which they were not party to its formation; it was either you pick a side and join in order to survive or be attacked by both sides of the war. The government was forced to conscript every able-bodied man, woman and adolescent into the war. Both my parents and my siblings were forced to join the army leaving me under the care of my aged grandfather who even though had seen better days, still had the energy to chase after me whenever I was naughty.
The opposing forces that in the process opted not to take any prisoner alive eventually overran the government. This resulted in a mass murder of biblical proportions. The soldiers lived out their worst fantasies on the innocent civilian populations; they de-boned the residents and used their flesh to light up fires that the Gayana see from the moon without the aid of telescopic equipment. Fortunately for me and several other children who were under my grandfather’s care, our guardian had lived in the town nearly all of his adult life hence knew all the channels and shortcuts, even those not appearing in the maps. A few hours prior to our town being attacked, our guardian smuggled as out up into the caves of the mountain next to our town. We were forced to endure the blood curdling wails of the town’s people when the opposing forces arrived. We could not do anything as the group consisted of one frail old man surrounded by little children not one older than six years. The cave became our home for the next 15 years as we could not bring ourselves round to live in the deserted town at the foot of the mountain. To us, the town was haunted with ghosts of the people who were mercilessly massacred during the purge.
Years of frequent blasts from the atomic bombs dropped throughout the world served to generate shock waves that changed the movement and position of the Earth’s tectonic plates deep within its core. This served to open up fissures in the Earth’s mantle, which started oozing out magma. This had a catastrophic on us as we were forced to constantly inhale the toxic methane and hydrogen sulfide gases that permeated through the caves where we were forced to stay day and night as we could not stay out in the open for fear of being captured and decapitated by the armies that constantly roamed the countryside. As a result, most of us developed chronic respiratory infections such as tuberculosis, bronchitis, asthma and pneumonia (GOV.UK).
In 2045, a “second enlightenment” was experienced. The Gayana offered the remaining remnants of the formerly “mighty” human race a chance to redeem themselves in the eyes of history by giving them a way out of the hell we had created for ourselves. The only catch was that we all had to accept to be assembled in one area of the Earth by December 24th 2045 for the departure to the second planet. At first most of the surviving population was reluctant to agree to the deal, as the Gayana are the ones who orchestrated man’s downfall. As a result, only a few people turned up on the said deadline date. These came to be known as the selected as they were comprised of individuals who ran the opposing governments. They are the ones who sent out foot soldiers to fight in their wars while they were sheltered behind radiation proof safe zones as the foot soldiers killed each other in the battlefield or died due to radiation exposure. Our guardian taught us all these hence we were well informed of our surrounding.
Unfortunately for the selected, years of living in safe havens deprived their bodies the chance to work up an immunity towards the changing atmosphere. Their exposure to the uncontrolled environment left them weak as they contracted radiation poisoning hence faced a slow agonizing end. The Gayana then embarked on a mission to actively seek out survivors who lived in the radioactive zones to relocate them to the new planet, which we later came to learn, was the Kepler-186f. This is an Earthlike planet orbiting a red dwarf star 500 light years from the Earth. We would be accorded the opportunity to be the first human beings to set foot on a second habitable planet.
The Gayana located our hideout despite our best efforts to conceal it. To our surprise, they were not the murky creatures whose appearance would be the brightest highlights of a Steven Spielberg horror movie. Rather they resembled the Mayan people whose civilization vanished mysteriously from the face of the other, leaving no traces or clue of where, how or why they went. They were surprise to see us all living rather healthily despite the contaminated air. Upon administering various medical tests to see whether we were viable enough to propagate future human generations, the Gayana discovered that the various respiratory diseases we were afflicted with as children living in the caves made us immune to the atmosphere and radiation. Our curse turned out to be a gift after all. Most of the selected died or were not deemed suitable candidates for the undertaking hence would be forced to inhabit Mars as a consolation. We were herded in to a shelter in the safe zone awaiting shipment to Kepler-186f in a few days.
So here I am, a pioneer of the human race seated at the cockpit of what I previously only imagined existed waiting for the ominous chromium at the base of the control board to run to zero. The space ship is equipped with dark matter drives that convert dark matter from the atmosphere to dark matter energy to help propel the engines in to over drive. The spacecraft will move at a speed of warp 10 meaning we will spend approximately 50 hours between the Earth and Kepler-186f, a total of two days and two ours. We are assured that the planet is uninhabited by any form of civilization that is capable of retaliating against mankind. We have become the aliens that we always feared would invade the Earth claiming that “we come in peace” yet we have come to take over your world, usurping your authority and taking over your lives. As the chromium runs down the count, the dark matter drives begin to ionize the dark matter around the space ship raising the temperature of the rocket’s engine to 1000 degrees Celsius. I feel a slight deep in height as the platform begins to fall apart and glows bright red as the rocket is thrust up into the ionosphere leaving a bright red trail of ionized gas. May God be with us.
- Hitler Historical Museum . “World War 2 Death Count.” 1999. Hitler Historical Museum . <www.hitler.org/ww2-deaths.html>.
- BBC News. “Viewpoint: 10 big myths about World War One debunked.” 25 February 2014. BBC News. <www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25776836>.
- GOV.UK. “Respiratory Tract Infections.” 14 April 2015. NHS. <http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Respiratory-tract-infection/Pages/Introduction.aspx>.
- Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “The Five Deadliest Outbreaks and Pandemics in History.” 16 December 2013. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. <www.rwjf.org/en/culture-of-health/2013/12/the_five_deadliesto.html>.
- Star Trek. Dir. J.J. Abrams. 2009.