One day, which very well may have been a Thursday, the sun went out.
It was really very distressing. One moment it was there, and then – ffftt – gone. Pretty shocking stuff, especially for the half of the planet that was in the middle of a perfectly good noonish.
Some peopled wailed. Some people cursed. Some people rent their garments and lamented.
Most people were pretty pissed off. “The damned thing was practically new,” they said, and they were right. You’d never see this kind of shoddy worksmanship back in the Precambrian.
There were a lot of decisions to be made in those first few dark hours. Hard ones.
First off, who the hell was going to pay for this. Some folks maintained that we ought to track down god, the universe, or whoever and give them the bill, while others insisted that we should probably get the sun fixed under the table before we ruined the solar system’s collateral. In the end the latter prevailed, if only because nobody could remember our landlord’s contact info.
Options were considered, dismissed, debated, discouraged, pushed forwards.
But the obvious first solution was duct tape. It was cheap, it was durable, and if it didn’t look like it was working we could always add more of it.
Ten billion rolls coalesced in the sky, spherical and mad. Ten billion more were added to get it looking real nice and round. Then we threw in a hundred billion more and everything was starting to look almost normal when it rained and half the sun came unglued from the other half. The whole damned thing nearly fell apart.
So it took a bit after that to work out whose fault that was – obviously someone else’s, it was decided – and then we were ready for the next plan, which was to send some people up to the sun to try screwing it in a bit more firmly.
The problem was, they got a bit confused. It’s righty tighty, yeah, but which right? Whose right? So while they were figuring that out the damned thing got so loose it nearly fell out – and then everyone was so embarrassed that they tightened it so far it got stuck fast. Christ knows how we’ll ever replace it now.
I won’t lie, after that happened things got ugly. Blame gets thrown around when things are bad, especially if there’s nobody obviously screwing up, because that means it’s EVERYONE’S fault and that’s just no fun at all. Who’d forgotten to check the bulb? Who hadn’t bought spares? Who’d been leaving it on all the time, day and night? What, did you think the sun was free? They don’t grow on trees, you know!
Eventually the problem ate itself: nobody really knew why the sun had gone out and therefore it was either everyone’s fault or nobody’s. Therefore, we blamed nobody. Selfish bastard.
With that important business settled, we tried to plug the moon into the sun to see if that’d help. It didn’t. The sockets didn’t match. Frankly, I don’t know who came up with that one, because I’m not even sure they use the same kind of gravity. We’re lucky we didn’t burn out anything or start a fire. You can’t just mess around with celestial engineering like that; this is how people get bolides dropped on them. Leave that sort of thing to the experts.
After that little episode things picked up. More solutions at greater speed, but fewer and emptier results.
We tried shouting at the sun. Didn’t work, didn’t make anyone feel better, caused noise pollution.
We tried begging the sun. It didn’t have ears so that was never really a good idea.
We tried threatening the sun. This made as little sense as the last thing, but felt a lot better.
We looked up the manufacturer to see if we could order a new sun, but they’d gone out of business several billion years ago due to industrial entropy and the whole field of solar construction was still in a state of perpetual collapse.
We even tried making peace with the fact that the sun had gone out and working on adapting to the new understanding: that things were going to be very dark and inconvenient for a long time. That lasted about five minutes before we all went nuts again.
Finally, when all hope was lost, when we’d just about given up on ever seeing another morning, someone suggested turning it on and off again and hell, what do you know, there it was.
Probably should replace the cord though.