Trojan Egg

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Happy New Year!


And then nothing. The calls for Happy New Year died off as the lights around the city disappeared. In one moment, every single light in New Zealand turned off. Cheers turned to sarcastic screams until the darkness continued. As people throughout the country reached for their phones, only to find that their phones didn’t work either, panic began to set in slowly, like a cold hand on the back of their necks.
People everywhere turned to their significant others around New Zealand with the same thought on their minds.
“Does this mean we don’t have to go in to work tomorrow?”

Two hours later, in Australia, the same thing happened. Darkness reigned and immediate fear spread throughout the country. Of course, most of the Aussies had already called in sick the next day, so they don’t have to worry about that.
Slowly, one by one every country plunged into darkness, with no way to reach out to connect with anyone else. It didn’t even stop at mobile phones, everything that was controlled by batteries or by electricity just stopped working.

You might think that humanity would be able to go on and adjust to the new world. You would be wrong. Humanity had forgotten what it was like to be able to look at cat pictures and porn whenever they wanted. The backlash was fierce. A lot of teenagers left their bedrooms and had to find phallic shaped stones to relieve themselves again.
There was no way for countries to communicate at first. The cups on a string technique didn’t work after the string slipped into the ocean. After a while, smoke signals and messenger pigeons came back in favour.

It was three weeks post-darkness that before anything else happened. It seemed that in those three weeks, everything was getting back to a better place. The air was cleaner, there was less crime and people had less anxiety thanks to the loss of social media.  All in all, it seemed like a positive thing that the world had gone dark.

It wasn’t until the sun went out as well that the world started to worry. One morning, when the sun didn’t rise, people woke up later than they should have and stared into the darkness of the sky. It was as though the world just turned off and no one thought to mention it to the tenants.
Calls for calm could be heard all over the world. Politicians yelled as loudly as they could from their bomb shelters and panic rooms.

The white knuckled grip that most people had on sanity was lost when, after a couple of hours of complete darkness, a white streak appeared in the sky. Shooting through the sky, from north to south, it was a bright and cruel light. There was no warmth as though it was from the sun. It was sharp and aggressive. It didn’t matter where you were on the planet, whether it should have been day or night. It was night everywhere at that point, and the light was a complete ring around the world.

The bravest pilots in the world volunteered to fly up and have a closer look. They went without expecting to return, but they reached the light. They could have touched it if it were tangible. The pilots returned to Earth, with no issues. When they emerged from their cockpits, they were whiter than the bright light in the sky. Of the ten pilots that went up, only one was able to speak.
“It’s not a light,” he managed. “It’s a crack.”
The pilot didn’t say anything ever again. In fact, none of the pilots ever managed to get over the shock of what they saw.
In fact, it took another twenty-one pilots flying up to the crack to get any other information. Most pilots went mad, one or two crashed into a barrier that wasn’t visible to the naked eye, but eventually one woman returned to Earth with a clear head.
“There’s more out there. Another world. I don’t know what it is, but it seems…bigger out there. Like we are in a dollhouse and the real world is out there,” she shrugged. “I know it seems weird, but it’s true. And if that is accurate, then whatever this world is, is in a marketplace of sorts.”
“How are you unaffected by the crack? Others have gone mad.”
“You get used to madness when you’re the mother of three boys under 12,” she replied nonchalantly.

With this information, leaders, scientists and the celebrities who needed good PR met up to try and figure out the answer to the newest brain scratching questions.
“What is the other world?” they asked.
“How do we conquer it?”
“Is this the end?”
“Is anyone going to eat the last cookie?”

There were no answers that would satisfy everyone. Arguments ensued, and they continued right up until the crack in the sky started to widen. Humanity everywhere decided that it wasn’t worth arguing about after that happened. It almost seemed that there was no point to anything, thought many people.

The crack opened wider, and the moment it started to open, it never stopped. The two halves of the sky seemed to fall away, leaving the strange new world to replace the old, traditional blue sky.
It seemed that logically, this would be the time for humanity to panic more than ever before. However, that never happened. There was no fear or panic. Because something deep inside all of humanity stirred and woke up sharply. It was an urge that the humans of Earth hadn’t felt in years. It was as natural as breathing, as strong as their heart beats and as unwanted as a venereal disease.

“Do you feel it?” whispered the humans in the darkness, afraid to speak too loudly, and afraid to admit it.
“The burning in the pit of your stomach? The urge to go out…there?”
Though it wasn’t spoken about, everyone was feeling the same urge. There was something in the air that was calling to each and every person. There wasn’t a single person out there who wasn’t feeling the urge.
Top doctors and scientists studied themselves and decided that there was only one answer. It was a long forgotten evolutionary response. Like nipples on a man, or wrinkly fingers after being in the bath too long. This response was more along the lines of our need to reproduce.
“Imagine every single person on the planet feeling their biological clock ticking. It’s like that, but instead of having children, we are feeling the urge to go out there and, well, we don’t know yet. But I don’t think it’s to go out and make friends,” the scientists agreed.

The scientists were right, the urge to go out into the new world built very quickly. It didn’t take long before people started trying to spread into the next world. After all, the new world just outside of the old one had light, power and more. When they say the grass is greener on the other side, they didn’t realise that one day it would be referring to a world outside of the Earth Egg.

For once, the world’s rulers agreed on something. They couldn’t fight human nature for much longer. They had to organise the hoards of humans who wanted out of the egg.
And so, it was agreed. With no sunshine, and no power, this world was going to die and there was nothing left for humans here. They would enforce a new law, that within the next week, the whole 8 billion people on Earth would have to move out en masse into the new world. If they happened to see someone new or different looking, then all people were instructed to do whatever they thought they should. This direction was purposefully vague so if everything went wrong, then those in charge could feign ignorance. But in truth, every man and their dogs (who weren’t at all interested in these developments. They had their ball and treats. All was right in the world.) knew that as soon as they encountered whoever was in the new world, they would infect and destroy the new people.

The day came quickly, and people moved into position, filling planes with nothing more than the shirts on their backs. There was a thrum of anticipation in the air. Silence reigned supreme as the planes set off.
“Do you feel that?” some whispered, as the urges grew stronger.
“I mean, yeah. But I really wish I was at home. Today is my day off,” some complained.
“We are literally going out to forge a new world?”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t wish I wasn’t on my sofa with a glass of beer and Bake Off on the telly.”

It wasn’t long before those invaders found the original inhabitants of the new world. They didn’t even hesitate, and it was a matter of weeks before the human virus spread through the world and had killed more than half of the people on my planet. We are still working on a cure, but this human race turned out to be a lot harder to completely eradicate than we first thought. They multiply faster than we expected, so every time we think they are now under control, they start again. Our people even tried to talk to them and come to some sort of an agreement. As if that was going to ever work. Knowing the history of humanity as we now do, most of us have given up ever hoping for peace. The Trojan Egg wasn’t something any of us had ever expected. But that, I suppose is the moral of this story: Don’t trust the humans. Just when you think you can be friends with them, they will hide in a vessel disguised as a gift and destroy everything. It happens more often than you might think.