The Event

The Beginning

                  

It's the end of the world.

            I don't mean that in the cute little, 'my life is over', kind of way, or even in the 'end of life as we know it' kind of way. I mean it literally. As in, this is the end of the world. Point. Blank. Period.

We've known for a while that it was coming. It all started with weird reports coming from NASA. They called it meteors first. Of course there were the few nut jobs who immediately thought it was aliens, and the people who loved to joke about it being little green creatures with big black eyes. Hell, before this happened, joking about aliens was hilarious.

Now?

Yeah, not so much.

            They figured out they weren't actually meteors when they began to slow down. Meteors don't slow down, and they don't fly in a formation and then begin to rotate before stationing themselves just outside of our atmosphere either. That's when we started to put a little faith in the people who we used to call nutcases. The people who always warned us that they would come one day.

            The military tried to make contact, but when there was no response, they tried to shoot them down too. Fun fact: alien space ships have protective force fields. Duh. So when shooting them down didn't work, and trying to play nice with them didn't work, that's when we knew.

            This is the end.

            Seven huge, and extremely creepy looking, ships hovered ominously over all of our planets continents. Waiting. For what? We didn't know for sure, but we were pretty sure it was for the right time to vaporize all of civilization into pure nothingness. Fun right? Nope.

            They were here for months. Months that we calculated, and pulled our hair out, trying to come up with a plan to combat our unwelcomed guest. All the world's greatest minds came together, working as one cohesive unit, for probably the first time ever, to come up with something. Anything. Everyone had their theories, but no one actually knew what was happening.

            By the time they had been hovering for six months, the urgency kind of started to slack off. People managed to start having conversations that didn't revolve around them. People went to work, went to school, had birthdays, and got married. Basically we all went about our lives, minus the few disaster preppers who had pretty much been waiting for this moment their entire lives.

            We started to think that maybe, just maybe, they weren't here to murder us by the thousands. Maybe they were friendly, and they were just waiting so long to show themselves, or to make contact, so that us jumpy humans would have time to get used to the idea of the fact that we are not alone in this universe. Maybe they are just giving us our time to cool off, and relax a little before they finally speak to us.

            Of course that wasn't the truth.

            Humans are painfully optimistic beings.

            The event changed that.

            Actually, the event changed everything.