The sun went dark some 150 years ago. It only took Mercury out and plunged Mars into a deep winter. On Earth we had been preparing for centuries. The few that were left, anyway. But at the end of the… “day”… we were left in the dark, with only artificial lights to keep us from going blind.
Agriculture survived, as long as we had a power source we could power UV lights and grow enough to make a living.
Housing had to be moved underground, closer to the planet’s warm core.
All things considered, the apocalypse was rather… cozy, if not a bit dark.
A few centuries passed, and scientists started believing that the sun could be restarted. While its core still held, a massive chain fission reaction could be induced from the core towards the outer shell, converting helium back into hydrogen.
To achieve this they would need, however, to deplete the planet’s Uranium resources to build a massive fission bomb.
Some wanted to live in the familiar darkness, even if there was chance at a literally brighter future. Another camp feared that without Uranium we would be defenseless against some future alien invasion. And then… there were some that wished for an even darker world. They wanted to end humanity, save it from further misery. The world’s largest nuclear device could do just that.
Democracy had crumbled in the later stages of civilization. There weren’t anymore proper governments but a series of decentralized population pockets that had different organizational structures.
It took decades but a consensus was reached. They would attempt to restart the sun.
It took five more decades and half the planet’s iron ore to build the device.
And then one… night… they launched it.
They say it is always darker before dawn. But, what if for generations nobody had seen a dawn?
They didn’t account for one thing: in the centuries without UV radiation, bodies became very weak against it, eye lids softened, and eyes became more squishy.
The experiment succeeded but… anyone looking at the sky in the first few decades become blind, no longer being able to handle the sun’s brightness.
The world got even darker…