Day 0

A Chapter by Kobachi

Prologue

When someone asked you what you thought the future would look like, what comes to mind? Do you think of flying cars and extremely tall light-blue skyscrapers as homes and businesses? How about hyperspeed, teleportation, time travel, or the ability to make anything out of thin air? What about, I don’t know, hoverboards, hover shoes, hover...dogs? Well, to be honest, I would’ve been right there with you when I was very young.

It seemed that back then, everyone was hyping up the future like a new revolutionary video game, or a birthday present that you can only open until it was the last present left. Everyone at my school was predicting what the whole world was going to look like. Robots, edible metal (if you're into that sort of stuff), and projecting the images in your head from just thinking about them. When I was five years old, I thought Earth was going to be “one cool place”.

Thirteen years, one-hundred and eight-five days, six hours, two minutes, and seven seconds have passed, and I have now finally realized to throw all those ideas and expectations out of my 35-floor crumbling apartment and into a barely functional paper shredder that’s just sitting on the side of the road. You, and I, were dead wrong.

Hi, I’m Koby. I’m eighteen, and I have decided to keep a Personal Log, or as some nerds call it a “Diary”. This is to give information back to my local headquarters when I am discovering new things. However, I love to talk to myself very frequently, and sometimes those friendly conversations will turn into frustrating and stressful rants. It’s a good thing I’m on the “Personal” mode, because I think my higher peers will have trouble deciphering whether or not I’m doing my job correctly. I guess I owe you an explanation as to how I got here today and what has happened over the years. To put it simply… Planet Earth is dying. Many people are speculating what exactly is causing this problem, but I feel like I’m the only person that knows the true reason why: These people are stupid. Now, yes, maybe I shouldn’t be so broad about this, because everyone on this planet isn’t stupid. It’s more like the people that I’m working for are stupid: The SCI.

Several years ago, almost the entire planet was bought by the SCI, or the Sufficient Control Incorporated. Don’t ask me how, but it is summed up into “The SCI has money to spare”. After that, the SCI divided each continent into a “sector” as well as giving each a sector number. The more efficient the continent is for the SCI, the lower the sector number is. For example, North America was renamed “Sector 1” and Africa was changed to “Sector 6”. This gave SCI employees the opportunity to focus on other sectors that had higher sector numbers, like Africa or Asia. They paid more attention to reducing crime, providing medical supplies, and creating energy resources to make them have a more efficient workforce. That meant that very little would be contributed towards places like North America because the SCI thought that we could maintain our own sense of capitalism with little to no help. Now, this plan works… in theory… if you only care about making money. In actuality, it was a trainwreck. Because they focused on helping the “least efficient” countries, which was all fine and dandy, they just assumed that since the SCI was a North American company, they should take most of all the materials from the U.S. and give them to everyone else because they thought we would “live without having to bend down and cry mercifully at their feet”. Not to mention that North America isn’t 100% efficient… God, this word is so f*****g terrible. We still have poor areas, obesity rates, and coal dependency in America. What makes them think that everyone has their own personal butlers just to ask for a bottle cap opener?

This plan ultimately failed, as almost the entire country of the United States protested against it, and even the other countries were not appreciating the half-assed effort they put towards the program. Various orders of food packages were missing, the water was not even close to clean or sanitary, and the medicine they received were barebones and unlabeled. Most of the time when the people complained, the SCI just shrugged their shoulders and clocked out early. So what did those stupid-a*s SCI scumbags do? Well, they cancelled all their plans for doing work for other countries and kept the names because they thought they sounded cool, I guess.

The next few years to come would be absolutely horrible. It was like the only thing that the SCI did right was twiddling their thumbs in succession. During the plan, they practically left Antarctica to rot since it was given the name “Sector 0”. Some global warming here, some melting ice caps there, and a polar bear extinction thrown in there for extra chaos, and you got yourself a problem. One, massive, giant, enormous f*****g problem. The whole country completely melted, and it set off a chain reaction affecting the climate for the entire world. Africa was cold as hell and places like Greenland were so hot you couldn’t go outside for more than 15 minutes. There were plenty of other problems that varied in how they affected the world, like terrifying and dangerous weather, certain species of animals rapidly dying, and the overabundance of water in oceans. They were all effects of the Antarctic fiasco, and they didn’t stop.

Days felt like weeks, and weeks felt like months, and months felt like… well they didn’t feel like years… it was more like decades. The SCI were getting slammed with the rest of the world, and the SCI didn’t really care until they heard the only news that they would ever care about by a group of scientists that came to a jaw-dropping conclusion: Earth was going to explode in nine months. To sum it up, they said that due to the overall state of the overwhelming temperatures and weather patterns, certain elements like chemicals and molten lava, would suddenly rise from the inner portion of the planet to the surface, causing Earth to become “naturally unstable” (from the scientists, not me), leading to the Earth exploding and dying. It was only then that the SCI seemed to give a s**t, but there was little left to do. They couldn’t correct any of their mistakes because they were too long gone.

Five months before the Earth was predicted to go off like a ticking time bomb, the SCI started another program. A space program to be more specific. It’s called The Return for Us Humans, or as I like to call it the “TRUHhhhhhh”. Hmm… I thought that was a good one. But I guess it’s a lot less funny now because I have officially enrolled in this program. This program is specifically designed for adults, like me, to explore our mostly unknown space to find another place to live life on with some technologically advanced space pods. We will be given a stash of food, water, and some other stuff that you could pack to take with you. The reason why I signed up? I want see a much better future on a planet that maybe, just maybe, a stupid corporation won’t destroy. I want my future, the future I wanted back when I was a child. I’m labeling this segment as “Day 0” because we leave tomorrow. We leave to seek new planets that have a similar atmosphere as Earth. That’s the only way that we will survive. It may be difficult and maybe even impossible for some, but I will see a future worth living in.

Alright. I have to go to bed. I leave at 5:37 a.m. and I need all the sleep I can get. If I continue, I will probably wake Alex. I’ll talk about her tomorrow, but for now...

End tape.

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