Company Policy

Justin Connors
Ms. Marcus
English 10
January 11th, 2019

Company Policy

The old man and the boy went to the beach
The boy stepped on a shell and asked the old man, “Why don’t we throw shells away”
And the old man replied, “Everything has a purpose, even the trash.”

     Bright lights flashed on all of the monitors and the sound of a warning siren was deafening, but there was nobody working. There was nobody in the office, on the floor, in the section, or in the entire bunker. What was supposed to be humanity's cradle in a treacherous new world sat empty: its Sirens blaring to empty hallways, and its computer screens displaying to empty cubicles.
Slap! Slap! Slap! The sound of soles slapping the pavement echoed in the quiet alley. The world was burning as Allan Collins rushed to the safety of the bunker, and he had to save it. Well not exactly. In fact, it was quite a splendid day in the small remote town of Castiglione Di Sicilia. The birds were chirping, the Vespas were buzzing, and the coffee was boiling. But under all that, the earth’s core was burning as well, at a deadly level. Allan had sprinted past old ladies with their shopping bags hung over their stick-like, suntanned arms as they grasped for more vegetables. He’d passed school boys playing football in the courtyard and now two hundred meters from the bunker he realized that he couldn’t fail. Before he entered the bunker he stopped to empty his pockets into the trash can, in compliance with company policy, and then he descended into what might possibly be his last home. If only he has stopped to check what he’d thrown away, he would’ve realized he was missing something.

     As Allan descended the spiral staircase that led to the locked door of the bunker, the first door having been left unlocked, he suddenly realized that he’d never taken the time to memorize the password and had left that to his secretary. Luckily he remembered that she’d emailed him all the passwords earlier. After entering the bunker and making his way to the office he realized there was a problem. Aside from the sirens, there wasn’t any noise. No footsteps, no keyboard sounds, and none of the expected hysteria surrounding the coming end of the world. The readings on Allan’s screen were out of this world. The earth’s core, but specifically the area under Sicily had warmed up to within one percent of complete combustion. Allan’s life, his family's life and the small town of Castiglione Di Sicilia had at most ten more minutes. He glanced at the world clock at saw with dismay that the rest of the world had about thirty.

     Allan had one task, and that was to single-handedly cool down the earth and stop the unregulated heating of the earth’s core. It seems pretty hard but Allan had training. In fact, he’d had forty years of it. He got to work, pressing a plenitude of buttons all with their own unique purpose, all of them trying to do the same thing, cool the earth. Those nine minutes were the fastest nine minutes of his life and with one minute left on the clock, he was confident that he had saved the world. All he needed now was one more machine to go operational and the world would be saved. He reached into his pocket for the instructions and after feeling around in his pocket for a while realized one thing, he didn't have them. In fact, they were nowhere to be found. There were thirty seconds left and Allan sat in vain, there in the deafening silence of his office, the sirens had shut themselves off, their purpose fulfilled, his not. He fiddled with his glasses for five seconds, looked at a family photo for ten seconds, wondered what was beyond for five seconds, and then counted down for the last ten. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero… The sirens had started in New York.

     Diary Entry, January 24th, 3010:
     I woke up today with quite a pain in the back of my head and sweat on my forehead as if somehow my head was heating up from the inside. Oh well, it’s probably nothing. Albert says it's because I've been spending so much time studying this new species that we scientists and historians have come to call humanity. We've found their relics littered throughout space and we hope that we’ll soon be able to pinpoint their exact location and check them out for ourselves if they’re still there. Hopefully, they're peaceful, unlike the Vulcans, because everyone knows how well that went. Yesterday one of our probes found something quite interesting in what we believe is the Milky Way Galaxy. It was a sliver of a thin white material floating in space. We have no idea how it survived in space for so long, who it came from, or where it’s from for that matter, but the inscription was the most bizarre little thing. Scribbled on this white material was a group of shapes that looked like PASSWORD, and it was followed by little illegible symbols. Nobody can decipher this code as it’s in what seems to be an extinct language. Boris is currently prepping the time displacement apparatus to travel back to a selected date in the universe to see if he can spot any inhabited planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. He’s traveling back in time because we’re not completely sure if the planet still exists. I think the date is Friday the first of October 1948. Who knows, maybe Earth isn’t just a bedtime story after all.                                   -A.C.

Cummins, Elanor. “Earth.” Popular Science, www.popsci.com/sites/popsci.com/files/styles/1000_1x_/public/images/2018/08/earth_from_space_hurricane.jpg?itok=kle6n6V0&fc=50,50.