Higher Vibrational Frequency

The alien ships came in their hundreds and blocked out the stars.  Of course the planet panicked.  Governments sent all their available teams into space; they questioned, cajoled and when they got no reply they threatened to attack.  Nuclear arsenals were put on standby, the news was filled with horror stories of alien probing and the National Guard was put in place on a global scale to stop widespread looting.  After a couple of weeks the people got bored with watching the sky and went back to their lives.

Shopkeepers replaced their broken glass, office workers were offered extended deadlines and banks got some of the money that had been withdrawn back into their coffers.  The seriously paranoid began to emerge from their underground bunkers.  They needn’t have bothered.

It began as a beam of bright white light as if they’d been x-rayed or retinally scanned.  Some people feared they might be microwaves and removed their tin foil hats believing it preferable to be the subject of alien probes.

Two days later concentric rings of colour washed over the planet and people came out of their homes to watch the show.  That would prove providential not a mistake.  The planet became a morgue although morgue was an inefficient term to describe what happened.  All life ceased as far as it was true to our perceptions; yet it remained indelible, imprinting itself in stone.  Everything was entombed.  Everything still lived but nothing moved.  If there’d been ears that were capable of hearing, they would have heard screaming.

The spaceships departed and the world turned on in eerie silence only broken by the whispers of the wind.

Some parts of the planet fared well after they left.  Old growth forests began the process of regenerating and the deeply grievous wounds inflicted by miners filled with water and became lakes after rain.  Rolling fields of grass started making moves on the arid deserts and the Polar caps stopped thawing to re-form new floes.  The earth replenished.

Not so the structures. Cities broke down crushing the inhabitants, cars rusted and slowly crumbled to dust.  Gardens advanced out of orderly beds into tangled weaves that grew through the pavements, rubbish dumps simmered in the heat, anything that didn’t degrade became naturally buried.Many of the human chrysalis outside and prey to the elements began to disintegrate with the years.Heads and arms fell off, some canted over on their sides and began to erode.

It would be five hundred years before the alien spaceships returned.  The bright white light rescanned the planet then went away.  For another hundred years the planet thrived.  This time when they returned a warm blue light was directed at the seas.

If fishing vessels were more than sunken hulks that supported coral the fisherfolk would have heard a profusion of cracks.  At first it was planktons, crustaceans and tiny fish that broke free from their sedimentary homes then the smaller aquatics.  The heavier and larger leviathans had become their own sandbars but after much thrashing they swam away into the churned up debris of their struggle for resurgence.  Soon the oceans teemed with life and unmolested by the two footed apex of predators populations grew.

Again there was a pause of one hundred years.

The oceans teemed with fish, in fact they had not been so lively for thousands of years.  Creatures nearing extinction like humpback whales had hearty pods.  Salmon choked the rivers so thickly the water was hard to see and flathead and flounder coated the ocean floor like carpets.  The next washes of colour were in quick succession, yellow released the insects then the world was daubed in green.

The insects were heralded by the sound of a finger round the edge of a wine glass, a high pitched ringing that increased exponentially in sound.  Not a creature was missed – not even mosquitos.  Somehow the aliens knew that even with their interference each and every thing had its place in life.

The fauna returned at varying intervals, some taking longer to crack.  Their casings had been made from sparkling corundum and semi-precious gemstones built to withstand their prolonged captivity.  If the wind had paid any particular notice of its surroundings it would have been entranced by the grace bestowed upon them in their confinement.  A twig falling from a branch broke a tourmaline deer and it took its first tentative steps in hundreds of years.  It scented the air and found it sweet and without pollutants.  A jade jaguar burst forth with a snarling roar and stalked a family of tiger eye tapirs.

The final act in the alien strategy could understandably be considered the return of humanity.

After eight hundred years the aliens returned for what would be the final time.  From outer space the planet was a luxurious blue green ball.  Ultra violet lashed the planet down to the core checking on the mending of the wounds.

A heated argument must have been taking place because five times a flash of red reached the upper atmosphere and five times it was cut off, then they went away.

The world turned, the animals grazed and hunted, the insects buzzed and spread pollen round the globe, the humans remained entombed in their prisons of stone.

On a far distant planet in another galaxy the alien ships came in their hundreds and blocked out the stars and the planet panicked.

Back on Earth the statues of the dominant species were becoming prone to the vagaries of time.Over the years many of the softer statues of talc, sandstone, slate and marble were uprooted by growing trees or trampled by wandering animals.  They would never return from entrapment.  Others made of tougher stuff like feldspar or granite were like strange ancient totems that dotted the globe.

In the grand master plan the rebuilders had anticipated many deaths but had underestimated the sheer tenacity of those below.  All living things had a vibrational frequency, some much higher than others, and the brief pulses of red had been sufficient to help a few.

It was an unusually warm summer day and the bees were buzzing around the nose of granite man when his casing went snap.  Continents away at the base of a sandstone pyramid an alabaster child heard a noise like a ping.  In China the basalt fingers on a grandmother gave a crack.  Small pieces of rubble fell off the statues.  The man twitched his nose, the girl’s ear heard the trilling of a bird and the grandmother wiggled her fingers.  They would have to learn new skills; making fire, hunting meat, making clothes and preserving food for the winter season.  Skills that were lost with technology.  It would be a tough learning curve but humans were intelligent and adaptable.

More than three quarters of the population was gone and many more would forever lay dormant but these few and several million more; wise and useful human beings every one of them emerged into the light of a brand new day.