Anna's World

Anna sat on her bed, staring at her political science book. At least this way if her mom walked by it looked like she was studying, but her mind was in the other room, listening to her grandmother. Nana was telling Anna’s younger cousin the story Anna had heard countless times before. It was about the sun.
Anna had been born after the collision, in 2153. She never knew what Earth was like before 2122, when the Great Asteroid hit. So for her, living in a world without the sun was normal, but for the older generations who had grown up with it, the change had been difficult. Many who had money moved to the Southern Hemisphere, where it was eternally summer, and more like it had been before. Anna’s family, however, didn’t have enough, so they were forced to stay here in Virginia, where property was cheap and, for her dad, jobs were plentiful. They were lucky, because he was a botanist. After the collision, he easily found work in one of the many research facilities helping scientists figure out how to grow various kinds of plants. Without sun and seasons it was hard, her dad said, but every day he would come home and tell them about new varieties of plants they had bred that were easier to cultivate in man-made environments, or other new developments and improvements they had made. Already, they were able to grow a limited number of plants, but it wasn’t enough and not enough of a variety. They still had to import a lot from the south.
Keeping animals however, was much easier. Farmers had learned how to grow sod, and animals were kept in large indoor facilities with artificial UV light that farmers turned on and off to simulate day and night, something Anna had only experienced once when she got the chance to go to the South. Anyway, she thought that the meat tasted fine, but Nana always complained. She said it was too tough and would only eat the expensive kind from the South. She often told them that all the meat used to be like the kind that they got from the South, tender and better tasting, yet less expensive. Anna figured that they were doing a good job, considering all the obstacles farmers had placed in front of them, and would just shrug her shoulders.
Land was very scarce in the South, with people vying for space to live and space to farm. Since pretty much all of the farming had to be done down there, many of the governments in places like South America and parts of Southern Asia had declared a certain percentage of their land to be just farmland and land for animals to be grown on. Also the tourist trade had boosted many of their economies, which meant that the United States was no longer a superpower in global politics, which her Nana said had taken a lot of getting used to. Hotels and tourist shops were everywhere they could find a space. Anna had seen the sun once. Her school organized a 3-day, 2-night trip to Australia when she was in 10th grade, about 2 years ago. Anna had only been able to go through a scholarship and lots of fundraising, but it had been worth it. She had the most wonderful time and saw so many new things. She used up four rolls of film while she was there, she just couldn’t help it. All the colors! That was what impressed her the most. There were flowers and plants everywhere. They even got to visit a place called a "garden", which was a place where they just grew plants. They had special ones for food and ones for flowers. They got to eat apples right off the tree, something that Anna found to be absolutely wonderful. It tasted so much better than the ones that her father brought home from work sometimes. The weather was so different also, it was unbelievably warm, and people had darker skin! Anna even got a sunburn, something she treasured as a souvenir even though it hurt a bit and then wore off after a few days. The sun was the most spectacular part. It was so bright you couldn’t even look at it! It was light all the time too. Instead of using the dreary false lighting they had at home, all one had to do here was open the window, and bam! instant light. It was the most fabulous thing she had ever experienced. When she returned home it was dreary and cold again. Now she knew why her grandmother loved the sun so much and why everyone moved to the South after the collision. She told anyone in her family who would listen about her trip, but when Anna talked to Nana she started crying after looking at the pictures and hearing Anna talk about the sun. Anna had felt bad and slunk off to her room, and she learned to not talk about it in front of Nana again.
Finally she couldn’t stand it, so she got off her bed and stood up, then shivered. It was always cold around here. Even in her house with the newest insulation they could afford. The cold penetrated everything. She pulled on a sweatshirt and went out into the kitchen where Nana was and sat down at the table.
"...play all day until nightfall. Night is just like this, except in the summer it used to be warm. We could stay out later then, but the bugs, little animals that flew around, would always annoy us. Night only lasted half a day then, and the sun would return, bestowing it’s light on us for another glorious day. We slept during the dark hours, and business as usual was carried on during the day. Every three months, the weather would undergo a gradual change. The darkest and coldest months were called winter, and they were like what we had here, except when the sun was out it would shine on the snow and everything would be washed with a brilliant white light. You almost had to wear sunglasses on those days. Summer sunlight never compared to that light..." she broke off as her breath caught in her throat, and Anna could tell by her misty eyes that she was picturing how it must have looked when she was young. Anna’s younger cousin stared at Nana, enraptured with the story as Anna herself had been when she was younger and Nana had described the sun to her. Nana started up again.
"In summer, it was so hot we wore shorts, which are like cut-off pants, and shirts with short sleeves. We left the windows open all the time, and some of us even had air-conditioners, which made the air cool in your house or car when it got really hot. It’s like the weather in the South, and they have night and day like we used to. Also we didn’t have school in the summer. We had five days of school and the two weekend days off, for 9 months. Then we had three months of complete freedom..."
Anna’s thought trailed off as she thought about that. Many times she had wondered if she would have liked that. She went to school continuously, but they had more breaks than her Nana did. They had a break of a month for Christmas and New Year’s, and they had a month off in August, leftover, Anna figured, from her Nana’s time. They also had a shorter school day, by about an hour. She figured she was probably lucky to have been born when she did. She loved going to school and seeing her friends. There were only about 20 people in each grade, and she frequently couldn’t see her friends outside of school because the weather was so bad. As a consequence Anna read a lot and drew, most often flowers and sunny days, not the never-ending snow they had here. School had been canceled before frequently if snowstorms were bad, but the routes to school had been built underground since then, so there was no excuse. Even after the collision, there had been so much confusion and chaos and change that schools weren’t operated for a while. After about 5 years however, people realized that they needed public education, and as the government slowly got control back and relief efforts were well underway, schools started coming back, and by the time Anna was six years old she was enrolled. She was graduating this year, and wondered what she was going to do next year. Her mother stayed home and took care of her, her younger brother, and her 3 cousins while her aunt worked (her uncle had taken most of the money and fled to the South soon after the collision—Nana had always said he was a scoundrel). She didn’t want to be a housewife, but as a result of her family’s lack of money, she figured she would have to go to the local "community college". It was really just the high school that had gotten together some books and some old college curriculums and been certified since none of the bigger colleges were functioning anymore. There just weren’t enough people in the North. In the North and the South, while many of the programs centered on agriculture, and botany, there was still a slight variety. People still had to run businesses and carry on with ordinary life, and Anna had decided that she wanted to work in a bank. That’s what her aunt did, and Anna thought that it sounded better than working with plants, like her dad, or staying home like her mom. However, another thing that fascinated her was space.
She had been required to take an Earth Science course in ninth grade, and from there she was hooked. She took a free mini-course in Astronomy after school the next year. Perhaps the reason she was so interested in it was that this way she could understand what had happened to her planet, to an extent at least. She learned from old texts and from people like her Nana what seasons were, and what night and day were too. When she had been young, she didn’t understand what had happened to Earth when the Great Asteroid hit, she just knew that somehow it had caused the Earth to get pretty messed up. Turns out, that there were regions on Earth that kind of had what they had all over the Earth now. There were regions on the very top and very bottom of the Earth that had six months of darkness and six months of light, and were always cold. It was because of the tilt of the Earth. However, it wasn’t as extreme as the situation now. When the Great Asteroid hit, it didn’t make a full impact—instead it glanced off the side of the earth in Russia, leaving a gigantic crater and total anarchy there for a while. However, it hit hard, hard enough that it caused the Earth’s axis to tilt in such a way that the Northern Hemisphere was tilted away from the sun, and no sun light could reach about 20 degrees above the equator. When it first happened, and scientists determined the cause for the crazy weather after the collision, they thought that Earth would orbit the sun like it always did, and the North would have six months of sunlight, then the South. Something unexpected happened. Observers watching the night sky realized that they weren’t seeing the stars they expected to see, even taking into context the extreme tilt of the Earth. For reasons that scientists still hadn’t been able to figure out, the Earth’s axis wobbled in such a way that the Northern Hemisphere was always tilted away from the sun. Scientists had been trying to figure out the reason for many years now, and the closest they had come was saying they believed it had something to do with the fact that the sudden change in the tilt of the Earth’s axis had somehow speeded up precession to the exact amount of time it took Earth to orbit the sun. Anna herself wasn’t sure, but it seemed like that was as logical of an explanation as any.
Another program the government had started in earnest was looking for new, more hospitable planets to colonize. The technology that had come out in recent years allowed people to travel many light-years in a smaller amount of time, thus allowing scientists the chance to seek out and explore new galaxies that before, were unreachable. Anna found that truly exciting. The thought of living on a new, undeveloped planet with sun and unending possibilities….she reveled in that dream. There were always clips in the news about a new planet found that could be a possibility, but for some reason or another the half a dozen or so they had found weren’t suitable. Oh well, Anna knew that someday they’d find a planet and she’d go there, but for now she had to be content listening to her Nana talk.
"...you’d look up and all you’d see was blue...a beautiful periwinkle blue like in your crayons but more vivid. And there would be fluffy white clouds that looked like cotton candy. You just wanted to reach up and grab a handful to keep with you and stick under your pillow at night..."

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