Axis

part 1, On an axis

I wonder what the sun is like. To feel the heat tingling on your skin. The searing light beating down on you...The warmth. It's been two hundred years since the collapse. No one knows why it happened. Just one day, the earth stopped spinning. It took just one week for society to crumble. Produce either froze or burned away. Animals and humans skin turned to ice while others burned in the heat. Everything was either too hot, or too cold. Some survived, no one knows how many, but it was few. They were the precursors to a new race of humans. They lived underground, suffering,and over time, with a little extreme mutation, evolved. They were made into two separate races of humans. So changed from what they originally were that their almost not recognizable anymore. The only people unchanged live in the gray zone. A sliver of normality in between both sides. It is not a place of beauty as the earth once was, it is scarred from years of war. It is a muddy place where nothing grows and its only inhabitants are riddled with poverty. You see, both sides have started to like always being in the dark or light. And they want to keep it that way. The people in the gray zone have overtime figured out how to spin the earth again and now both sides are in an endless bloody battle to stop them from doing it. But since they both have such conflicting ideas. They fight each other, even though they are working towards the same goal. I am what people call a freezer(people who live on the dark side of the earth) and I am a trapper, I maintain the droids that hunt the animals that survived and evolved. I have been doing this since I was thirteen years old. And I live alone in a large holding facility for animals. Always keeping the machines running and watching over the food. "DROID #1465278 REQUIRES MAINTENANCE. OVERKEEPER PLEASE REPORT TO BAY NUMBER 7 FOR REPAIRS" I sigh as the metallic and robotic voice yells my instructions. I slowly grab my laser cutter off the desk next to my bed and put on my holo-visor as the machine whirs to life I grudgingly get out of bed. "Guess it's time for work." I grumble as I slowly walk towards the door. To an old humans eye the facility is pitch black and freezing. Icicles hang from the ceiling and frost covers the walls. My footsteps echo as they clang against the cold floor. Nowadays we can see through the blackness no matter how dark it is. Our eyes have changed over time, one down side to this is any light no matter how small could potentially burn out our retinas. Our body's have figured out a way to transform external temperature into heat. The colder it is outside the warmer we will be internally. But any large amounts of external heat would kill us in a second. I walk into bay seven and locate the malfunctioning droid. A couple of nightcows got out of containment the other day and must have chewed out the external wires as they were all over the place. Sparks flying and teeth Mark's cover the mangled electronics. I take out my ice cutter and carefully freeze off the mangled wires. A regular laser cutter or saw would produce to much heat or light and harm us, so we invented a laser so cold it crumbles the particles of any matter. I take out some replacement wires and fix them on. I stand up and open the manual controller panel and activate the droid with a couple taps of the screen interface. It shakes then stands up slowly activating its hunting systems. Its robotic legs creak and then it sprints past me at breakneck speed. I watch it disappear out the bay doors into the cold dark endless night.