An Article – Three Days
Photo credit: doctor_bob from morguefile.com
The end of the world was coming. It was an irrefutable fact. The coming asteroid wasn’t really the problem–it just contributed to the problem. For geologists had predicted Yellowstone Volcano erupting within the span of three days, give or take a few hours. The mega-volcano’s eruption would, without a doubt, wipe out most of North America, along with parts of South America. The resulting soot and dust would fly into the atmosphere and form a hazy veil over the sky, hiding the sun from the earth and lowering global temperatures to freezing levels. Light from the sun would also be hidden, killing off many plants as well. Sometime during these events, a large asteroid was also coming. It would hit Siberia, where almost nobody lived, but it would still send up more dust and soot, further cooling the planet. It was highly likely that all life on Earth would be killed from the resulting Ice Age.
Humans were probably the most concerned about it though.
Surprisingly, most people didn’t panic. Most were stunned when they found out, and were silent. People stopped going to work, under the reasoning that if the world was coming to an end within three days, waiting a month for a paycheck was pointless. As a result, radios and televisions stopped broadcasting, and homes didn’t receive electricity. People sat silently in their homes, the monotony broken only by the occasional stripper running down the street and yelling gibberish at the top of his–or her–lungs. People stabbed each other with knives simultaneously in a deal to spare each other from the volcano or cold; whichever came first. Attendance at churches and other places of worship skyrocketed. For the most part, humans were depressed and sullen.
But there were some who weren’t. There were conspiracy theorists who thought that everything was a hoax, and that everything was actually fine and the world was not, in fact, coming to an end. There were people driven to insanity by the stress of knowing everything they did was ultimately meaningless. And there were people who just didn’t care.
The latter group was the happiest. With the philosophy that since they would die anyway, they walked along the deserted streets smiling. When everyone else quit their careers, they kept working at theirs, finding it much more rewarding emotionally when their higher-ups weren’t watching them. While everyone was sitting in their houses, they were whistling and riding bicycles.
And when the end came, they went out with a smile.
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