Renewal

Reunification Day

The Braileind Household

City of Averra, Nightenlaye

Third of October, Year 258 since The War

Reunification Day

I had decided that I dreaded this day long before I ever had to experience it.

Therefore, I was greatly surprised when I woke up and the world wasn't falling apart yet. Then again, the sky was only just turning into the violet shade of day, so there was still time.

Outside, mothers were already screaming at their wayward daughters and sons to get ready, and apparently someone named Patrick still had his bed unmade. Tragic.

I stared up at the ceiling blankly, listening to the sounds of my own mother moving about downstairs. I could get up...or...sleep...

"Waverly!" I jolted upright at the sound of my mother's voice and dejectedly rolled out of bed and into a pair of soft slippers. I shuffled down the grand staircase, nearly tripping twice, and found my mother waiting by the bottom, in the foyer.

"I need my beauty rest," I grumbled.

She only barely stopped herself from rolling her eyes, "You don't believe in this whole thing anyway."

"Correction, I find it statistically improbable." I paused before adding, "I'm a believer in the math, and normally you are too."

"I'm a believer in science, and science says this is more probable than you are inclined to believe." She gave me a peck on the cheek and continued past me up the stairs, "Your tea is in the kitchen!"

In the kitchen of soft creams and pale wood, I found my father with his coffee, my tea, and the hologram cube already blaring the news. Or more precisely, my father absentmindedly drinking my tea instead of his coffee next to it as he was so absorbed in the hologram that his nose was nearly touching the nearest half-translucent figure. Not entirely unexpected. France lifted his head at my entrance, but then settled his head back down as he continued his nap in the sun.

I set about making another cup of tea as I half-listened to the news.

Nothing surprising there either, just more on the stupid Reunification Day. Statistically speaking, even if all of the data were correctly interpreted from those absurdly old devices, after factoring in all possible sources of error the probability of the big event happening sinks to less than 10%. Of course, the scientific community refuses to acknowledge this and instead just says that their data-mining techniques are impeccable. That was never in doubt. The question is, how accurate were their machinery so long ago.

I peeked at my father. He was still utterly entranced. How he works with that stuff every day and still is so fascinated by the basic nonsense the news people down in Comms broadcast was beyond me. I learned that "history" so well in the academy that I could recite it all. From memory. Still. It's been two years. Four since I took that class.

All this hoopla started like a billion years ago, or if you want to be precise, the people back then called it the year "2102". At that point, 11.8 billion people graced the surface of the quickly-dying planet, and when faced with the double trouble of overpopulation and the possible disappearance of genetic diversity, the scientists did what they did best: suggested a completely ridiculous idea. The best part? They talked the world leaders into actually doing it. It takes some seriously bad decision making to send half the planet's population into space.