Melancholy

The year is 3004, and what you’re looking at is Earth, or what’s left of it anyway. Completely uninhabitable for humans now, due to a massive outbreak of a virus the likes of which never seen before, Earth from space still looks like it would sustain life, still has water, and is very green. But the oxygen is toxic, poison to us now. The year was 2992 when we were hit with a pandemic. England was the first to get hit. People poured in by the hundreds, swamping hospitals. Medical facilities were overwhelmed by the numbers of sick that were coming in. Not only that, doctors and nurses that were trying to treat started to get sick. The symptoms of the virus were excruciating. The beginning was massive headaches; really bad stomach pain; diarrhea; trouble breathing. The second, and final stage, was internal bleeding; kidney failure; liver failure; seizures and cellular break down. You could tell the sick by the scars all over their bodies, bleeding from the eyes, nose and ears; it was like watching something out of a horror movie. They looked like zombies. It was a sad sight. Millions lost family and friends in the pandemic. The virus quickly spread all over the world. We were being wiped out; man’s first taste of facing extinction. Every country, every state, every city was forced into quarantine. The sick were kept in confinement, and just waited to die. There was nothing that could be done for them. They mourned for their dead, sick or dying loved ones. It was a very trying, emotional, and heart-crushing time for all of the survivors. And just when it seemed like all hope was lost, a miracle happened. Something none of us were expecting. Ships started appearing all over the world. At first we didn’t know what to think. But after they landed, it was clear to see they were here to help us. They had this scanner that could tell if you were sick or not. It turned out even some of the ones who were thought not to be infected were, but were hosts and immune to the symptoms of the disease. They would give these hosts shots, and everyone else that was screened, if it came up positive. If the reading was red or yellow, it was positive; green, you were uninfected. If you were green, you were also numbered and boarded onto their ship. Yellow, you were not too far gone, and with the shot, you were able to be saved. If you were red, you were too far gone, and were left behind. It was a glorious day for some, but for most, it was a day they would never forget, because most of them left behind family members, friends, and loved ones. The looks on their faces were of despair and heartache. The alien species seemed to be unaffected, and emotionally closed-off to the event that was taking place. They never uttered a word, unless it had something to do with their mission: rounding us all up, or when they spoke to each other. Their language was something we’ve never heard before. When they spoke to each other, we had no idea what they were saying. But when they spoke to us, we understood every word. They had translators they talked into, and they didn’t sound like robots. It was their actual voice. Their method for getting things done was more efficient than ours. The rescue was quick. It took us a month to get a good quarantine, though we don’t know how long it took across the globe. Some countries may have had good resources to conduct a good quarantine. In all, it probably took several months for the world to have everything in order. It took the visitors seven days to have us all boarded up, and on our way to our new home. It would have taken us maybe, several thousand years to get to their home planet. They found a wormhole a little past our moon, and we were there in a matter of days. Before we entered the atmosphere we were all amazed by how much their home planet looked like Earth, but we found out real quick, it wasn’t Earth. This was their planet. “We’re the indigenous people of the planet.” Indigenous people, that’s what they called themselves. The Serene, they didn’t go by kings or presidents, they had a structure of high councils. There are five members of the council in all, three were Serene. One was human, and the other was from another race that lived there. Every two years, we would appoint a council member to represent the humans. To most people, the councilmen were more of a messenger than anything else. They told us when new rules came out, different standards… anything that the High Council thought should be announced or changed. It was passed down to our representative, who passed it down to those under him. It got passed down to who was under him, and so on, and so on… until it reached us. The high council had zero-tolerance for law-breakers, so it was important that they got any changes, and new information to us fast. Everything and every way they ran things was like a slap in the face to a free-spirited and free-willed people, who loved to be unique and do their own thing. But the council made that impossible. The council was ran like so: There’s only one High Council member that really runs everything. His people referred to him as meek, and that’s what he went by. Their whole planet, he ruled. It’s not like different countries, different leaders on our planet. Meek was ruler of all.