(Author's Note: written for @Ambassadors Aim to Engage Day #6 challenge - "Rage against the Dying of the Light. Word count 383)
The Great Freeze
First week
Some of the reindeer herders were actually rather pleased when the sun went out.
"At last!" said one. "This will give the ice a chance to reform. My reindeer are well and truly fed up with Global Warming. Too many insects in summer, and too much ice instead of snow in the winter."
"We'll be right," commented another, with a touch of smugness. "We're used to living in dark and freezing conditions, for months on end."
"And we might still be able to save the polar bears," added a youngster. "How long do you think this is going to last?"
Three months later
"Well. It's certainly warm enough down here," said the deputy manager of one of South Africa's deepest mines to his wife. "Too warm, if you go deep enough!" he laughed. His wife smiled back perfunctorily. She didn't dare tell her husband that she hated it down here, not when they'd been so lucky to get a place. She'd overheard him telling one of the other deputy managers that they'd had to seal off the entrance to the mine. The facilities down here simply wouldn't support any more people.
It was the darkness she hated. The rooms they lived in, carved out of rock, were provided with a low level light from the mine's generator, just enough to see your way. The lights were kept on all the time now, although dimmed slightly at 'night,' after mass hysteria had ensued, the one and only time they were turned off completely.
"I know it's not what we're used to," said her husband, firmly pushing aside memories of a large airy house and huge garden with a swimming pool out the back, "but we'll be right, you'll see."
Five years later
The microscopic survivors drifted mindlessly along the ocean floor, going this way and that with the current.
After the sun turned into a dark star, the first hundred or so metres of Earth's oceans had gradually frozen solid, trapping in the remaining warmth and ironically keeping the rest of the ocean liquid. Although there was no light for photosynthsis, there was still plenty of food floating around if you weren't fussy, and water bears, or Tardigrades to give them their more formal name, weren't fussy at all.
