>>4407843Earth doesn´t exists anymore. Well, it is still there, but there is nothing there worth anything any more. It was a terrible thing, so sudden, so unstoppable, and worse of all, so natural and random.
It had happened before, of course. A few years ago, a huge solar flare reached far beyond mars in distance, if not direction.
As we, the survivors, stared at the massive flare washing over the Earth and turning it to a blackened sphere within seconds, some fainted, and one literally died right there and then from the shock.
We had been semi-randomly rescued from all over the world, starting a few weeks before the flare. The shock of the lights (that now we knew belonged to our rescuer´s ship), the sudden paralysis, the impotence as their little drones picked us up and took us up into the ship. It was just like a bad movie about alien abductions, complete with the probing. Oh yeah there was lots of probing and measuring and what not as our would-be rescuers made sure they had collected healthy, genetically and physically, specimens.
Then we faded out, and next thing we knew, we woke up in a very clean, very sterile ...habitat, for lack of a better word.
It wasn´t (isin´t) very different from a bug cage (oh yeah, I was a biologist, so I know what I´m talking about), stacked one over the other on a shelf, with just the transparent floor below us and the roof above us keeping us from those in the lower and upper, transparent cages.
We were all very neatly stacked by the "window" when the solar flare hit the world. Everything and everyone we ever knew was gone forever. There must have been some sort of observation probes on the surface, because on small, split screens on the corners of the window (it could have been a monitor, actually, come think about it) we could see various corners of the earth get burnt, charred and ..well, not even the probes survived when the flare hit them.
