Story 12. Written by Jim Waitlord

Imagine the sun, right? It's the thing that gives us light and keeps us warm. Well, he started acting. Not like a bad kid, but it's like... it's getting bigger. And hotter. It's like, "we're gonna fry it soon." Scientists, clever people, they saw it coming. It wasn't a "puff" thing, it was a slow steam, but it's still pretty scary.

This one guy, Aris, wasn't in the "let's go to Mars" idea. He said, "Earth is our home, the best place we've ever lived. We won't leave it here for a dusty rock." It was his idea to really move the Earth. You'd think that's crazy, wouldn't you? It's like trying to push a house across a football field.

But, Aris, he was a smart cookie. He came up with something called "Dimensional Echo Drive" - real science fiction stuff. It would basically push the Earth, but instead of rocket it would push into a different dimension. It was like, "Okay, Earth, let's just push it over there real fast," and then, poof, the push's gone. No one knows what's really going on, but it worked. Well, at least it should have been.

They started small, and these little machines came up and down from nowhere with strange lights. A bird even passed through one of them and came back like a comic book. But Aris had found something, and everyone knew it.

So the whole world, every country, is involved in this. It's like, "Okay, we have to move our planet or we're finished," and suddenly everyone was working together, all of them pulling in the same direction. They built this huge machine like a giant metal compass and stabbed it straight into the Earth. Very big, very complicated.

On the day they turned the switch, it was a little nerve-racking. At first, nothing happened, and then you felt it. Everything seemed a little easier, a little longer. The days were long, the seasons looked a little different, and fortunately, the sun was not so bad anymore. We moved!

It wasn't smooth sailing, remember. Things were going weird. The plants were confused, the animals began to do strange things, the ocean was raging. It was as if the Earth was in more and more pain. So they had to gather more smart people inside, plants, animals, and oceans, to calm things down and understand what was happening. It's like they were whispering to Earth, "It's okay, we got you."

The years passed and we were all used to the new course. The sun was no longer angry, and things seemed more or less normal, if you know what I mean. Aris, he's very old, and he was quite peaceful. One day he looked at the Earth and said, "We didn't just save the world, we changed our story. The real trick wasn't just the machine, we all worked together, and that was what it did."

And that is the truth. We didn't run to Mars. We stayed here and made things better. It was a mess, but it worked. And we all remember when we moved the Earth and how important it was to stay and work together during the fight. That's a good story, isn't it?

Extinction Delayed