Disclaimer: This is a short story I wrote for an assignement I had at school.
Silence reigns in the streets, no more noise, no one speaks, there is no more to say, even the dogs no longer bark.
My name is Kali, which is kind of funny because in Hinduism I have the same name as the goddess of destruction. I will soon be 18 years old and I was born in South Africa in Durban to be precise. I was born into a fairly wealthy family so I was always used to having what I wanted and this is important because when this pandemic broke out I was not prepared at all.
More or less 6 months ago, on November 18th or maybe 24th, 3078 I don’t know too well, a new problem was detected and it was not a virus this time. It was a gas, well, it is a gas. Somewhere in the United States scientists have created a gas that puts people to sleep, literally, people do not just fall asleep but their bodies too, all of their organs, one by one. The gas is so light that it has covered the planet in less than two months. There was somehow enough to envelop the whole earth and kill half of the population or maybe more in any case there was surely enough to kill all my family and my friends. Only animals weren’t affected. We don’t have any more information than that the whole world is dying like our bodies and that we have absolutely nothing to fight it with. It’s an unbeatable fight. We have no weapons to defend ourselves and it’s all our fault. In my opinion, this is human stupidity. We all wonder why? Is the universe finally punishing us? But why now? There are a lot of questions and my answer is; We had to face the consequences of our actions one day or another.
But even in such a situation there is some hope. NASA started a project a while ago, that of colonizing the planet Mars. That’s right this plan has been around for a very long time and it’s just starting to be achievable, in fact the first men have already been to Mars and the mission worked, except now we need to send a much larger number of people there.
It was like playing mission impossible. I found the information on a old advertising screen that was still working, it was written in capital letters to go to Washington DC, the exact coordinates were 38 ° 52 ′ 59 ″ N, 77 ° 00 ′ 59 ″ W , to “go to Mars and be saved” and there was a countdown for how long we had left to go. The advertising was very simple, when I started looking around I realized that it was the only ad we could see. I think NASA hacked all the screens in the world so that we could receive this information. In fact, I quickly realized that it was the only current information about the world that we could find. On the advertising screen it said that there was a week left before the launch of the shuttle which would go to Mars, in real time it would have taken me only 2 hours to go there but now I don’t even know if a week would be enough. Luckily, the internet is still working, because I figured out how long it would take me to get there and right now it should only take me five days, but you never know. I packed a bag with very few things and I left. I decided to walk to the train station because it was impossible to go by car as there were a lot of people who fell asleep in their cars. It was only the third time I had been out but I had exactly the same feeling as the first time. I had the impression of walking in a surreal painting as if it were a photo except that this photo made no sense at all, a modern and intelligent city but where nothing was in its place, as if a group of children had passed by and had left a huge mess behind them.
Trains continued to pass because they have an automatic pilot and rechargable at speed (so they are immortal). I had to wait for four trains to find one where I wouldn’t have to step on a dead body to get in or just be surrounded by dead bodies. I went straight to the airport and was a little surprised that I wasn’t the only one waiting for the next flight to Washington. I guess I wasn’t the only one who had left home without even thinking, because I knew there was nothing else to do anyway. Getting on the plane was like taking the train and then I just followed the other people until we got to our destination.
In the end it took us four days to get to the station, I didn’t talk to anyone, I think I was at the stage where I didn’t feel any emotion. I was just tired… When I arrived I was asked to fill out a form with my personal information and then I was just left in a room and that’s where I spent all my time before I left. I did not go out, I spoke to no one. What’s the point of bonding with people if you don’t even know if you’re going to see them again in an hour. There were not many of us. I think we were around 4,000 which is really few for an initial world population of 12 billion people. Not much happened from the time I left home until I got into the shuttle that was going to send us into space. Before entering the shuttle they asked us to put on spacesuits, on each of them there was a number mine was 1419. After that we all sat in our designated places and that’s how my departure to another planet happened. The ride was turbulent. Time passed very slowly as we went at supernatural speed. We weren’t in the same cabin as the pilot and his crew, so no one understood what happened when all the lights went out leaving us completely in the dark. From there it all happened very quickly.
I’m not going to make the suspense last, I never arrived on Mars nor all the passengers who were in this shuttle. The shuttle exploded, it tore into a thousand pieces, I didn’t feel anything but the cold that hit me with a very hard bang. I guess we are now destined to float in space forever and I don’t mind that idea.
Messy Teen Girl 
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