Aurora's Light

I wonder if Mom can see the sun where she is now..." Aurora wondered as she gazed up into the thick, dark clouds that blanketed the evening sky. She remembered that there used to be orange and purple-blue undertones when the sun set just years ago. But now, the sky stayed only a stale shade of gray morning until night, dusk until dawn, and day to day; the world had been unfortunately thrown into an eternal night where the Moon no longer shown bright but only waxed in and out briefly from behind thick rows of aluminum-laced clouds. It almost looked like the moon had been arrested and placed behind bars of Man's making, the man in the moon had been reduced to an inmate of the new sky.

Aurora only knew what time of day it was these days because of the little heart shaped locket she wore under her mud-caked denim jacket. Whenever the clock struck 12 it would play a little song and a small heart shaped crystal inside the locket would slightly glow. It was the only thing her father gave to her before he was arrested and expelled from the country for suspected crimes of conspiring to incite a rebellion and building machinery to reverse the world's governments Project X.

It had been one whole year since she last seen a blue sky. One whole year since she lost her mother in the riots that occurred after the first blackouts. All she knew at this moment in her life was that she needed to gather her things as quickly as possible and get back to the woods where she and her younger brother Cyrus lived.

They had lived there on their own ever since the planet was plunged into darkness and chaos when major corporations, world leaders and scientists got the not so bright idea to block out the sun to thwart climate change. what ultimately happened was what many people of the world thought would happen, but their cries of opposition and fear of the experimental project fell on deaf, wealthy ears. Where the people saw calamity coming, big business saw capital rising; the elite went full force into the project without any input from the public whatsoever. Aurora was 9 when it happened and Cyrus only 6, but she if not he remembered all too well the way the Earth grew still and black that dreadful day those planes sprayed clouds of thick gas into the once pure air.

She gathered her things and called out to Cyrus to hurry, they both knew to be out of the city and into the woods before the sirens went off. The city implemented those sirens after the first wave of riots in the country to warn people that the federally mandated curfew was in effect and one could be arrested or even shot if found on the streets once the sirens sang. Agriculture also suffered horribly and there were so many mass extinctions of wildlife all over the Earth. Birds no longer migrated south and there were mass beachings of all types of marine life, the Earth was dying and no one knew how to stop it. The back-up plans the scientists had in place to alternatively power the Earth as it cooled down failed miserably in the first two weeks due to mass power failures and looting. It was a very different and very dark world than what Aurora previously grew up in and she longed for the simple times she and her brother shared with their mom and dad before the darkness fell.

`She could tell the sirens were minutes away from ringing and thankfully she only carried little with her into the city to look for supplies, it took her only seconds to get back into the woods after so many times evading the corporate death drones and cyberdogs the city enforced to catch people like her who chose not to receive the chip the governments forced people to receive. She called out to Cyrus and grabbed her small pink backpack with an old shake-to-power flashlight/radio inside and a small journal of illustrations that belonged to her father. Few of the pictures in the book made sense to her, except for the one diagram at the end of the book. The front of the page showed a machine called "The Aurora Light" and she liked it because it reminded her of one of her fondest memories of her father as a child and the story about why he named her what he did. He told her that it meant light and that one day she would "wake up" and bring light back to the world. The back of the page had a strange map that looked like some type of tunnel system under the city, ending at the now crumbling research and development plant Aurora's father used to work for. The was also a small corner area of the page missing where the word "KEY" was sketched in big black letters with tiny red arrows surrounding the no longer visible piece.

She always thought how wonderful it'd be if she only knew where to find the missing piece and whatever machine it portrayed to power. She figured that if she could only find it, she could somehow turn it on and reverse if not completely remove the deadly clouds that smothered the sun and suffocated the skies.