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BEFORE READING: Please note that my grammar isn't the best, coming from a European, non-English speaking country.This story isn't meant to be realistic in any way, it's speculative fiction! Oh and sorry if the story is too cliché, it is my first writing and i've put effort into it. Quote from Wikipedia: Last thing about the word count: it may be more or less, because the word count in MS Word and some onlines ones showed different results. With that being said, here is my boring ol' story: _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ PERISHED A SHORT STORY Roughly 20 years ago, the S.E.T.I. Organization started another day, hoping to find extra-terrestrial life.The day was going normally so far, until working hours were over and when the curious astronomers got home.The media started freaking out along with the space community because Pluto had disappeared from Earth's skies.Space agencies pointed the JWST at the position where Pluto was when it disappeared, then they found something very sinister.An unknown, massive, Jupiter-sized object with the density similar to that of the element chromium.People were scared, an the whole scientific world went to sleep that night with a tear in its eyes.Everyone felt sorry for the big-hearted dwarf planet. The night is finally over.The Sun is rising and The Moon is setting.Before the Moon went past the horizon, people observed a purple glow, which turned into a hole/disk soon after that was observable from the surface by the naked eye.Many telescopes around the world pointed their lens at the glow before it vanished.The glow faded away and nothing happened.Scientists rushed to record this anomaly.However, the military were the first to spot something.Right when the glow vanished, they spotted a spacecraft, a very small one by human standards.And it was heading to the surface.Troops were armed, tanks were prepared and missiles were ready to fire.The craft reached the surface and landed near the Washington Monument.The exit hatch was opened and the off ramp was lowered and out came the supposed aliens, although they were a bit different than people thought they were. People expected the aliens to look like something from the movies, but these were quite the opposite.They were around 1 – 1.5ft tall and had very short limbs along with four fingers, implying their home world has higher gravity than Earth.They were able to speak English with the help of some phonetic altering technology they didn't know about at the time.They asked the humans if their system was attacked by 'Furzak The Destroyer'.People didn't know what they were talking about.The friendly aliens came from the Gliese 581 system, planet c to be exact and have mastered all means of interstellar travel.They described this 'Furzak' they were talking about, and there were some uncanny resemblances.A Jupiter-sized mechanical four-fingered claw operated by millions of sentient drones.I just can't imagine the amount of kinetic and mechanical energy required to move something like that around.Einstein and Newton were probably rolling in their graves. Both humans and aliens didn't know Furzak's true purpose, but from the stories they told them, it's only purpose is to wreak havoc on Gods creations.Wether it could be stopped or not was a complete mystery, but they decided not to ramble about it too much.It was time to take action immediately and save themeselves from impending doom. A scenario like in the Independence Day movies was coming true, however, their alien friends decided to help them get away and get as many of them far away from here to another planet of their choice.From that day on, they named their stubby friends the Zanmi people. Planetary evacuation began immediately.Within a matter of hours; trains, planes and ships were overflowing with panicking people, along with traffic jams on motorways hundreds of miles long.Everyone was panicking, yes, but all people were heading to the nearest space centre used by their local space agency.Large SSTOs carrying up to a thousand people flew to 3 secret, large, unfinished but functional colonial ships made by many collaborating governments of the world.From smallest to largest: the Idaltu, Median & Carthage.All together, these ships could hold a Rome's worth of people.It took us about a month or so to load up the ships with people, going slightly over capacity. Back on the surface, their alien friends took of with their small spacecraft and reached the colonial ships.The captain of the ship Carthage gave them their coordinates to one of the best leading candidates for human life: Kepler-62f, 1200ly away in the Constellation of Lyra.They charged a laser based on the cockpit of the craft, then proceeded to beam up a section of empty space.Lo and behold, a purplish disk opened similar to what they saw when the Zanmi first came here.It was a wormhole.The people that made it onto the ships felt sad and heartbroken to see billions of people simply left there on what is going to be just remnants of Earth.Just think of the billions of lives, not just human, but plant and animal ones they were leaving in harms way. The colonial crafts fired up their engines for the first time and headed dead straight into the massive wormhole, large enough to fit all 3 ships, keeping in mind that Carthage, the largest of the spaceships, was twice or three times the size of the Imperial Star Destroyer in Star Wars, making Carthage around 4km in length. Before all 4 ships (including the Zanmi ship) could pass through the wormhole, it appeared, wormholing its way here.Its size was incredible.To put it in a perspective, if the palm of a hand was the claw, the Earth would be the size of a quarter.Thats how big it was.It joined those enormous four claw fingers and turned them into two, grabbing their beloved Earth by its north and south poles, firmly gripping and stopping the rotation of the planet.Buildings were flung east at 465 m/s and all the bodies that were left there, dead or alive, became giant .44 magnum bullets, or Mach 1.366 tumbleweed. It was too late.They weren't able to see the initial destruction and the aftermath.They entered the wormhole emotionally wrecked, all 4.3 million of them on these 3 ships.Before their brains could process the emotional pain, they arrived at their destination, landed in their drop pods, set up base and continued living on this unforgiving, CO2 infested world in sorrow for the next few decades, waiting for the next generation to outgrow them, knowing no world in the universe could replace their beloved and now destroyed Blue Marble. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ I didn't know wether to put this in the Lounge or the Fan Works, so move if needed!