On January 1, 2042, the clouds came and never left, all around the world; literally, enveloping it the way you might envelop a potato in tin foil before burying it in the embers of a dying fire.
Sudden darkness but for electric light.
The moon: gone.
The sun: invisible except for its heat still passing through the clouds.
Welcome to permanent night—
for a planet plunged into a grand cosmic terror:
of families huddled, praying to gods expected at any moment to burst through the greyness and show their divine faces;
(“Lord, hear our prayer!”)
of metaphysical suffering and suicide;
(“Does anything still exist beyond the clouds? Do I exist?”)
of dead politics;
(“…but we didn’t vote for this!”)
and of scientists, sleepless and wide-eyed, crazed with lack of understanding but willing themselves toward comprehension of the matter at hand, or above, where the clouds, it was discovered, were not clouds at all but an unknown material, seemingly impregnable. Seemingly because humanity’s ingenuity had always overcome, and this time too there were those who, shaken from despair, began to seek for a solution, a means of breaking through the cloud layer, a means of escape…
The one to achieve it was A. Strugatsky, of the Eurasian engineering firm Strugatsky Inc.
His method was a giant xromithite drill
ing through the cloud, he imagined himself a modern-day explorer, a Marco Polo crossing into China, a Yuri Gagarin conquering outer space, a Charles Darwin discovering ev—
The drill had penetrated(!). They eagerly removed it, and as Strugatsky and his companions peered through the opening:
a rope dropped through;
and the following appeared in neon red script on the underside of the cloud layer:
1
2
3
[…]
967,987,734
967,987,735 NEW HIGH SCORE
“Arkady,” asked one of Strugatsky’s companions, “what is this’s meaning?”
“This’s?”
Below, humans and other cognizant Earth creatures stared awestruck at the message from the heavens, even as Strugatsky himself could not hold much of a thought in his head, saying, “What rope next up we best do dally notmore,” and his companions agreed in a chorus of positive grunts, then one after the other climbed the rope. The further they ascended, the greater the mental and psychological changes they underwent, until, upon reaching the surface of the cloud layer, they could nought but drool while taking in the raw and ancient Earth-nature of their surroundings. Somewhere deep within their rapidly evaporating psyches they perhaps felt that this was wrong, that there should be no Earth in Earth’s sky, but forgive them, for they were now sprouting tails, losing their bipedalism, then scales, losing their mammalianness, and had memory-failed about the hole out of which they’d climbed (which had anyhow disappeared) and soon were but single-celled and swimming in warm water, heated by the Hell below, in a world much like theirs used to be, so many billion years ago…
so many revolutions…
evolutions…
ago,
Level 1, said the skygodlightscarything, and the score counter reset to zero.