The sky isn’t working, and it hasn’t been for a while now. Mum remembers when it used to be better – when we didn’t have to run inside and shelter in the Lead Room. She says it ended when they dropped a dirty bomb on Oxford. The army was called the Irregulars, and for the longest time no one knew where they came from or why they had done what they had done.
When people did find out it didn’t make much sense. Tactical sacrifice – making the environment inhospitable for invaders – that was the idea. Mum says it didn’t work anyway – that they had encounter suits or something, and that the only people who found the place inhospitable were the ones who had lived there all along.
The funny thing was, the invaders did turn around, but not because of some huge barrier that we had thrown up in their way. No, it was that they looked at the burning coal we had turned our home into, and they didn’t see of what help they could be.
For sure, some aliens that had arrived in the past had wanted to annex us into their huge empires, but these guys were tourists that were coming here to see if they could set up a trading post, and they received a pretty resounding no. Yeah, we have the world for ourselves, but what’s it worth? We might pull through this. I hope we do. Sat here inside The Lead Room, I don’t know.
The cold grey inside. The cold grey outside. One day I hope to be able to forget that the sky isn’t working.