Earth Day 2080

“Is the camera on?” said James Botson, a news reporter with the New York Times.

He was then looking into a giant television camera, which was overlooking a field in Jasper, a suburb of New York City, in the United States. The level of anticipation was high. People had come from miles around to see what was happening.

Further afield, there was a unique object standing in the grass. It looked like a rocket, but it wasn’t something that you could quite look at. The entire thing was covered with a surface that fumbled the eyes. One didn’t know if one was looking at an alien spaceship or a waterfall.

People from across the world were tuning in to this broadcast. It was truly a thing to behold. The National Guard had already been mobilized, but they were keeping their distance, not wanting their own repressive tactics to be misconstrued.

Suddenly, the door of the spaceship opened.

“Look…here,” said Botson, standing between the people’s eyes and the spaceship, a general yell growing in the crowd now gathering. “The creature. It is coming out. It’s here. We’ll never see anything like this again.”

Suddeny, a foot lifted itself through the doorway of the spaceship, looking like a small, deformed human foot. It was wearing a white shoe and had no discernible toes.

“If that toe touches US soil, it will make history!” said Botson.

As soon as the toe touched the outside of the ship, there was a gigantic flash of white light that blinded everyone in the area. Almost instantly afterwards, there was a sense of intense heat that followed. Enough to melt steel. All the cameras instantly died as the Earth began to shake and the sky turned white.

The explosion started in the New York suburb and radiated to the entire northeastern United States. The quake could be felt as far away as China and as far north as the North Pole. The Earth quaked so hard that buildings began to fall all over the planet. The Earth opened, swallowing everything in sight in some places. There were floods and tidal waves.

The first confirmed alien species had arrived. And my, they were not friendly. The remainder of humanity began to regroup, looking for some way, any way, to recover. After an analysis by the Science Policy institute, it was discovered that the Earth had been knocked off its rotational axis by three percent. The earth was now on a collision course with Mars, one of the closest planets in orbit to the Earth.

The militaries of the world came together. What would they do to save themselves from this great evil? The people who remained were scared. They knew the risks. Due to the heat of the sun and the concomitant unpredictability of such a diversion in pathways, the entirety of humanity would likely burn up in the heat of the sun well before reaching the position of Mars.

It was an unavoidable risk. The ocean levels were rising already, due to increased heat. People were dying of cancer at elevated levels. Even with this terrible conundrum, the people were mostly complacent. There was a big hole in the world where the northeastern United States had been, mostly covered with ocean. As the Earth continued its trajectory to find the sun’s rays, a few at the very top of humanity’s totem pole hatched a plan.

“If we nuke the other side of the globe with an equally powerful nuke, perhaps we can push ourselves out of the way of the sun,” said one scientist.

“Would the Chinese be willing to allow us to do this, just to survive?”

There were a few quick debates on the subject as the world became more and more untenable. It was a month after the original incident when they decided to act. Taking a cue from the alien’s own tactics, they decided to place the world’s most powerful nuke, the Esprex 38, onto the tallest mountain range in China, Mount Everest.

“You’re willing to nuke Mount Eversest?” said another scientist. “You can’t do that. This is one of the landmarks of humanity, of society itself. We’ll never recover if you do that.”

Dissenting opinions were shunted away. The bomb was carried to the top of Mount Everest by Chinese military helicopter. Many sherpas living on Mount Everest decided to “go down with the ship,” as without Mount Everest, their entire livelihoods and reasons for living would be destroyed. The people were frightened, but that was the least of it. The world was still becoming less and less healthy. The seas were angry, and the sun was hot. There was little chance of survival if the people didn’t do something.  

The Chinese government, having little recourse but to act, decided on a detonation date. A month and five days from the original incident. The nuke was set off, destroying Mount Everest and much of China. In fact, the bomb was twice as powerful, and twice as damaging, as the original alien nuke that had been set off in the New York suburb.

The nuke was so powerful, in fact, that it created a fault that separated the Earth into two halves, one North Earth and the other South Earth. They were now completely cut off from one another, as all of the satellites had already stopped working.

On North Earth, they discovered that they were saved. They would soon be making it back to their regular orbit, assuming that they were not hit by an asteroid on the way. South Earth, however, was moving even faster in the direction of Mars, and ultimately the Sun.

On South Earth, the feeling was that of utter despondency. The people felt that they had been left without any choice in the matter. They prayed, quite openly in fact, for a resolution. The people made animal sacrifices to the gods. They could do nothing else. It appears science, the understanding of human suffering, had failed them entirely.

Within two weeks, North Earth was back in its original orbit. Though it no longer had a moon, it was still in a much better position than South Earth, which had been left without hope. In South Earth, reports spread about the notion the North Earth had purposely designed the Esprex 38 so that it would separate the two earths. The people began to believe that the separation was intentional, that the people of North Earth had sacrificed a whole half of the globe to save themselves.

That was the end. South Earth soon became uninhabitable for humans forever.