INKWORLD

CHAPTER ONE

June 1, 2091

I have always wondered about the state of earth, how it would look like now. Had the ink covered every available surface? Were there any survivors on earth or had the ink killed them all? Ten years had gone by so it was logical for me to believe there were no survivors, but that didn't quell my curiosity. I had to be sure.

Several times I thought of sending people back to earth or even sending satellites but my suggestions had been shut down. People believed life on earth had ended and we had to focus on the life we now had on Inkwell.

I suspected another reason why they refused my suggestion was because they didn't want to have hope and then watch it get dashed to pieces.

The governors also thought that if people began thinking of what had happen on earth, it might lead to unrest among people. A lot of people would begin wondering: Were their families alive? Their friends? Their colleagues?

"We have gone through a lot. Planting that seed in the mind of the people would only bring about a disastrous outcome. People would want us to send a team down to earth. People would lose focus on building Inkwell. People would be waiting on a result that we all know the answer to deep in our hearts, there will be no survivors.

"We barely even survived while on earth. We have to focus our energy and attention on building Inkwell, we still have a long way to go. We can't be stuck in the past, we have to move forward," one of my advisers had told me.

I wondered if moving forward meant forgetting our past, if it meant cutting away all ties with earth.

I knew many people didn't want to think of earth, it was the place where they had lost so many things. It was the place where they were sure their lives would end terribly. They had been given a chance to live a new life. I knew many of them didn't care much about earth, they were only too eager to forget about it.

But I also knew there were some among us, some who still wondered, who still hoped that earth was not completely gone.

It was odd to still think there was life on earth. While we were still there, several lives had been lost. What would have happened in ten years? That was the question on my mind.

I wondered how earth would look, empty with only animals and plants that had adapted to the ink. Barren, the way planets were showed in sci-fi movies. Or had the ink come alive and taken over the planet?

"You have an imaginative mind, you know that?" Caleb would say to me whenever I said that.

I imagined the silence and how the ink would have claimed earth as its own. I wondered if earth would lose its colours. The green of the grass, the blue of the sky, the brown of the soil, the different colours of flowers. Was that going to be taken over by the colours of the ink? Black and blue like we had on earth.

I remembered living in Lagos before the ink took my parents. It had always been a noisy place. Although the estate where my parents lived in had been quiet, I was always fascinated whenever we left the island to the mainland. The sound of conductors calling for passengers, the sound of cars honking in traffic, of people yelling. I imagined all of it gone. How would Lagos feel now? Like a mother whose children had all left home to school. Like a school on holiday. Like a graveyard.

All those abandoned buildings and cars laying empty. A hollow emptiness spreading all over earth. I wondered how it would be if we went back to earth. Would it be like the movies we watched of a human coming upon an empty planet? Would I even recognize earth? Would I be able to stand what it had become? Thinking of it left me with heartache for the lives lost, curiosity and a whole other whirlwind of emotions.