Liberation Day

“Tomorrow’s the day,” my friend said to me as we were standing on top of the heaps of rubble that surrounded us, watching the sun go down. “Liberation Day.”

“The day we’ve all been waiting for,” I said with awe.

“Tell me about it,” he said. “You think it’s actually going to happen?”

“Of course it is!,” I exclaimed, reassuring him. “We had predicted that tomorrow, there’s an 85% chance that a coronal mass ejection will hit the Earth, rendering all electronics powerless.”

“And what if it doesn’t happen?,” he asked.

“Well then, we’re fucked,” I told him bluntly.

 For twenty years too long, we have been enslaved by machines. Artificial intelligence became so advanced that it was able to replicate itself without human input. We tried to stop it, but by then, it was too late. The machines were so advanced that we could no longer predict their moves. It was at that moment that we were outmatched by machines.

We used every means possible to stop them. We used guns, lasers, bombs, flamethrowers. Heck, we even used nukes. We threw everything we got at them. Nothing seemed to work. Eventually, we tried developing an EMP device. When we were close to finishing it, we were ambushed by the machines. Most of the scientists working on the device were killed. My friend and I were the only survivors.

Now, we’re in hiding. We’ve banded together with a rag-tag group of resistance fighters. We’ve developed all sorts of gadgets in secrecy. So far, our efforts have given humanity a fighting chance against the machines. However, it was still not enough to defeat them completely. We needed a sure-fire way to be rid of them for good. A few months back, we may have found our solution.

One day, we were viewing the Sun through the UV-filtering telescope we had built from scratch. While we were observing the Sun, we had noticed that there was a lot of coronal activity at one particular location. Based on our estimates, we had predicted that within a few months time, a coronal mass ejection was going to be heading in the Earth’s trajectory.

Every day since our initial discovery, we’ve monitored the Sun, in case anything changed. For months now, the coronal activity has increased exponentially. It has increased by so much that earlier today, we were fairly certain that an ejection will happen tomorrow.

“Tomorrow, we’ll know our answer,” my friend said.

“Yes we will,” I replied.

I didn’t know 100% if the CME would happen tomorrow, or if at all. It was a long-shot; a gamble. We were essentially betting on nature. The thing with nature, though, is that nature is unpredictable. However, I had remained hopeful that things would work out in our favor, because without hope, there wasn’t much.