The Stars Returned

It was a shift. No. More of a slide, not quite a landslide but a definite movement of the earth beneath our feet. And so it began. Tiny cracks, fissures really, appeared in pavements, on walls, both those already built and those under construction. The builders and maintenance men shook their heads, confusion knitting fuzzy brows together like mutant caterpillars. This went on for a few months and nothing seemed able to stop it. So the people ignored it and got on with their humdrum lives, humming and drumming in some semblance of synchronicity that presumably kept the world turning.

The first collapse was quite spectacular. For weeks, the new, colossal headquarters of OneTech had been groaning and moaning. The architects and builders had been called in. They tapped walls, took measurements, even used seismic regurgitators but all their poking and prodding revealed very little. 'Just the building settling into place', they said. Then, just a year after the topping off ceremony, a year after the founder became the first Gazillionaire in the world, a year after all the competitors lights went out, it happened. At 5am on a Saturday, so fortunately there were no drones occupying desks and coding codes already coded and decoded numerous times. The shiny building, its pointy spire reaching up towards the moon and the ever decreasing number of stars in the universe, imploded. That is to say, it didn't explode in a shower of glass imported from China. It folded in on itself, level by level, floor by floor, until it disappeared in its entirety into the earth, leaving nothing but a giant crater.

Over the course of the following year, other buildings followed as pharmaceutical companies, food conglomerates and fast fashion enterprises vanished into the earth, swallowed up, never to be seen again. Some people took to underground shelters constructed during the rise of dictatorship across the globe. There they would live out their lives consuming diluted versions of the luxuries they had enjoyed and discarded during their time above ground. Others created communes where they ploughed, sowed and scattered, raised animals for protein and raided landfill sites, repurposing the spoils. Two new and independent societies were created, undergrounders and overlanders. Technology became a distant memory, sickness and injury was treated naturally as people re-learned the properties of various plants and herbs. Animals were revered. The stars returned.