“No one knew what had happened. It was like the world hit pause and when it pressed play again, it had forgotten to include them. Them is a broad spectre, that will need to be explained, but if you will allow me to explain the first day, to give better context.”
…
It was a normal Monday morning. She brushed her hair and pinned it high on her head, then put on a smart blazer and a quick gloss of pale lipstick. Looking in the mirror she winced as the word dowdy popped insultingly into her head. She shrugged and not wanting to be late for the first day back from holiday, got into the car and started driving. There was nothing memorable about the drive, it was a normal day, normal weather, normal radio station. People always expect for there to be signs or something out of the ordinary that you can later think back on and say, ‘that was a warning sign!’ But it was unextraordinary day. She parked and picked up the big brown bag filled with stationery, paper and a few books and began trudging toward the big glass doors. The school was large, being two story and had around six to seven hundred children attending. She saw a few kids milling about the stairs as she entered the building and smiled as she passed them. She loved the half wall wooden panels, with a dark moss green painted wall above. The numerous artworks and posters which were framed along the hallways always made her smile and feel a comfort from the building. A lot of schools didn’t have beauty anymore. They expected graffiti and kids to ruin beauty because they couldn’t understand it. She knew that kids needed to experience it to begin to appreciate it. It made more sense then locking them in overcrowded rooms with cheap paint on the walls and cheap uncomfortable seats and desks. Instead of trusting them, just condemning them because a few decided to break things or draw on the walls. So they remove all the nice things because sometimes they get ruined, not realising that by doing that, they are destroying the beauty for an entirety. It was a catch twenty-two and which was why she had chosen the beautiful school to work in, over the overcrowded city school. She quickly made her way to her large wooden desk and unpacked her bag. She shook her head and wrote her name in capital letters on the blackboard with the piece of chalk. Most schools had gotten rid of their blackboards when the white boards became available and then the smart white boards, but she felt that the old classic blackboards were magical. She loved the chalk and clapping the erasers together, it made her nostalgic and brought her a simple smile each day. She was startled out of her contemplation by the bell ringing and she heard the students starting to fill the hallways and make their way to their classrooms. Looking at the students, so filled with life coming through the door and finding their seats, while whispering with joy to their friends and moving desks to sit closer to each other, she regarded them warmly. Recognising quite a few of them from the previous years and she remembered a few of their teachers discussing them over lunch due to their attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or that they didn’t communicate in a normal way due to autism spectrum disorder. Luckily a few years previously, these conditions were recognised in both genders. It made it easier to recognise the problems and work through them to give the child the best chance at an education. She shuddered remembering, the first treatments when they had caused so many problems by trying to drug away the individual habits of the kids. The poor children would be given things like Adderall or depression tablets, because they couldn’t be understood. Thankfully, it was recognised as a bad system and the school, instead made changes to the education system to try make adjustments to encourage healthy learning for its students. She was recognised as a late diagnosed autistic and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder person and she remembered how her teachers had yelled at her because she had bounced around subjects and not communicate clearly to them, because she didn’t know how. They had called her lazy, because her IQ testing had come back very high, but she kept getting distracted by new more interesting subjects. The truth was that the school learning had bored her and she was much more skilled at learning on her own. This annoyed the teachers and later on in her life any boss which tried to have authority over her. She was a very independent learner and task maker, which made people who thought they knew best get angry at her. She was working at a higher level and could not understand why they got angry when she corrected them or disagreed and told them why they were mistaken. It also was needlessly frustrating at having a person with a low education level thinking they were better because they had somehow gotten a higher paying job and were actually a problem because they couldn’t understand the work. Then they would then take credit for the smart things the people who could not communicate in their lies or unnecessary narcissism which they called good communitcation. She shook her head out of her reverie and waited for the talking to die out as the second bell rang, to indicate children should be in their seats. Taking a breath, she took a step forward, seeing an eyeroll on Cassandra’s face, a yawn on Douglas and a frown on Simon’s and said, “Good morning class,” and in the few heartbeats between the good and class she blinked and just saw empty desks. She stood stunned, expecting them to appear again. But she shut her eyes and opened them and they still were not there. She breathed out and looked around, turning to see if they had somehow gone behind her. No, nothing. She got on her knees and looked under the desks, then out the window, then out into the hallway. Down the hall all she saw were other teachers looking in panic. Finally, one of them broke the silence and asked loudly, “Where the fuck have, they gone?” She felt her brain starting to speed to a solution, but she didn’t know where the kids had disappeared. She saw a sudden answer and flipped the fire alarm. The sound rang out and she felt another teacher’s hand grab her arm as she twisted out of the grip.
“They know the fire alarm! They will go to the parking lot, come,” She looked at the startled teachers who were still looking at everything in confusion, “Come!” She yelled and ran toward the parking lot. She watched in despair as only teachers emerged from the building. Not a single child. When all the teachers were in the parking lot, she noticed the distressed principal Mrs Newert make her way through the thirty-seven teachers. She would have laughed if the situation was any other, at the squat little grey-haired prim and proper Principal of the school climb awkwardly onto the yellow Mazda’s bonnet, having to adjust her skirt five times to allow her legs to move in the right motions. But the scowl which she was sure she had rehearsed a million times in the mirror stayed plastered to her face as she looked out at them.
“Where are they?” She called out. Her voice was strong, but the question was not an answerable one. Everyone stayed silent. They shifted nervously, trying to think of a reason why every single student had suddenly vanished. There was no logical situation in which it could be fathomable.
Feeling awkward and not sure what to do, she stepped forward to stand in front of the principal and clearing her throat, “Maam, I blinked and a full class of students were gone. I don’t know where. We might need to contact the police or someone to try find them. I don’t know where they could have gone.”
“Ok,” Principal Newert agreed and looked determined, “First step I want five of you with me to the office to contact the emergency services. The rest, please start a finder chain. You walk from the back of the school to here, checking every inch for those children! Broom closets, stationery closets, everything! Every inch of ground must be covered, even the basements! You, you, you, you and you with me!” She had pointed at her and she quickly followed the resolute and determined principal after helping the woman off the bonnet of the car. They could hear the teachers beginning their searches of the back of the school. Julia as known as Mrs Newart, quickly dialled the police and looked at us with near tears. “Engaged,” she said in almost a whisper.
“Try the fire station, ambulance, anyone!” Carl commanded, startling them as two others started calling all the emergency lines. They shook their heads, then Alice quickly turned her radio up, “the different zones and country reports have not stopped. All children from around seventeen to just born have been reported missing. Please be alerted that we are aware and have begun an emergency broadcast, please refrain from contacting police or emergency services. We are,”
“Stop, Julia, apparently it is not just here!” she yelled to her in her office.
Connie wheeled in a television from the AV unit and plugging it in, started flicking through the channels. All through the world were similar broadcasts and all with the exact description. One minute there and in a second they had disappeared. A police officer gave a theory, of the kids playing a world-wide prank and that they would show up soon. A scientist suggested a time warp where quantum physics describes that with the object, time does not exist, only when the object is entangled with a clock, the time unfreezes the object. So, everything exists in the singular state and when entangled with an external timestream then has the ability to change and create increased change based on the forward momentum, creating unfathomable changes to the singularity. Apparently, the kids due to them having greater forward momentum and due to the theory of relativity they had higher frequency, so they both exist and don’t exist at the same time. But this was met with confusion so then they had other rationalisations. Kidnapping, but could not be explained by the sheer size of the world. The rich immediately started advertising their kids’ photos and saying that they would pay millions of dollars to get them returned. The poorer people just knocked on doors constantly in weeping messes to try find their children. The governments, the scientists and every person in the world were sending out hopeless messages and theories, not realising that nothing could be done. Whatever had done the unthinkable had achieved it by something far better than the people’s minds could comprehend. This wasn’t just a random kid here or there, it was all kids on every country. It was world wide panic. It didn’t stop at birth, any woman who was pregnant, suddenly was not. So, it happened that every child from conception to around what could be gathered was seventeen, had been taken away. A list of missing was compiled and analysed and the resulting number of missing children was around two billion. She remembered a doctor on the news saying that he was in the middle of a caesarean and holding the baby in his hands, suddenly it was gone. He had thought he had suffered a stroke and began closing the woman’s abdomen to find his nurse didn’t have the baby. He freaked out and the weeping mother was trying to find her baby and slipped off the gurney. There were similar responses as women in labour suddenly just stopped feeling anything and their bodies just rescinded. Pregnant women suddenly stopped feeling their child or any symptom. They did tests and all said, no, they were not pregnant. All children were gone. There were numerous news reports and questions which no one had answers. They tested young women to see about fertility prospects and they had been found to have no eggs. The hormonal balances and everything else had not been affected, only that the eggs were no longer apparent in any female tested.
The world was barren of any human future.
