Light Again...

[This is an article I once wrote for a Creative Writing competition. Only the first line was provided to us... ]

It wasn't a dark and stormy night.

Nobody cared why. Even though the last century had been just one dark and stormy night, today light was back.

The Sun had run out of the energy it had been using for a billion years. And had life on earth come to an end? Read on and find out...

An alarm sounded on Phoenix IX. One by one, the members of the crew woke up, entered the Refresher (which sterilised them from top to bottom, carefully destroying every microbe near them without damaging even a single human cell) and got to the control room.

Proxima Centauri had finally come close enough to the earth to provide light sufficient to start the photogenerator (a machine that can convert light energy to mechanical and other forms of energy). The development of the photogenerator had taken 5 million years to develop. Generation after generation had been trained to understand its concepts with 24-hr classes on the Phoenix IX, and the entire population specialised in microelectronics research. Every individual, however, was kept educated about real life on the earth through sophisticated virtual tours.

Phoenix IX was part of a major space shuttle system called “Omni-Phoenix.” The “Omni-Phoenix” had been launched from earth 5 billion years ago. It constituted of 12 sub-shuttles named Phoenix I-XII, each of which had been estimated to operate about half a billion years, and start to fail. Just before a sub-shuttle failed, it was to deploy the next sub-sub-shuttle. (Phoenix I followed by Phoenix II, and so on)

When the project had been initiated, it had been treated with immense scepticism. To start with, the prophecy of the sun's energy running out was never taken seriously. Even then, the project enthusiasts has managed to get the consent of 50,000 individuals from all around the world to operate the Phoenix, trained them meticulously and also put about a million people into low temperature hibernation. The prophecy has come true, the cynical had perished, and it was time to revive the world.