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All This For A Packet Of Cigarettes 1:3

Three hundred years ago humanity experienced the biggest crisis in human history. On April 17, 2020, a trio of alien ships stopped just above the western continent. The starships were enormous, each of the three vessel’s almost the size of Texas. The flying islands covered the north; most of the USA and a bit of Canada. The two countries were subjected to a period of darkness that didnt see the sun for months. No one knew exactly what they were, no one knew what they wanted. And more so, they had no clue where to begin to even ask questions.

Despite the collective efforts of the American and Canadian governments, the aliens didn’t try to make contact right away. And there was no way for the humans to reach them, they had to wait for the aliens to make the first move and land on earth. So the US president issued an international law that forbid any nation to attack them with nuclear bombs in the case that whoever they were they might have wanted to be friends. Turns out they didn't want to be friends. Not at all. 

And one day--five months, two weeks, three days and eleven hours since the ships first appeared--there was a blinding white light in the sky that covered the earth and the next thing anyone knew all electronics stopped working. Cars broke down on the way to work, phones went dead during important conversations, Televisions went blank during local news. Computers, radios, satellites, they all just stopped working. Everything.

Forty-five minutes after that, while the humans were still trying to decipher what was going on, a wave of smaller, unidentifiable, ships came out of the bigger ones. Hundreds if not thousands of them. And that's when the explosions started. The smaller, fighter ships blazed across the skies, blowing up army bases, ships, the Navy, submarines, and every soldier.

Entire armies were wiped out in a matter of minutes. A millennia of history and human civilization wiped out in mere seconds. Hope, crushed in the race to rid the humans of their only defense.

And it didn't stop there.

They blew up all the capitals; Sydney, Berlin, Washington, D. C. , Paris, Addis Ababa, Hong Kong, Seoul.

The aliens showed no mercy.

Anyone who lived on that day would go on to describe it as 'The Darkest Day'. The end of days. There was death everywhere, splattered on the sidewalks, dripping from the ceilings, seeping into the ground.

The prolicide lasted only nineteen hours, not even a full day. But the impact was felt everywhere. There wasn’t a living organism on the face of the planet that didn't suffer as a result of the mass killing.

The following day was the quietest in history. The humans that had survived through it all mourned for their family, their loved ones. Mourned for the world they once knew. And three days later, they appeared.

Magnificent beings with an unmatched beauty. To the humans who were still trying to process the events of the last few days, they looked like angels. Saviors who had heard their pleas and came down to save them from the hurt, and not like the beings of mass destruction that they truly were. They looked human, they sounded human. They could have just as easily passed for human beings if it weren't for the intricate, white markings laced across their skin. Each one of them adorned with an ancient language written across all over their bodies. Their markings weren’t painted on, nor branded, it was a part of them. The closest humans could come to explaining it was that their markings were the equivalent to human fingerprints. Each one different. None the same.

The aliens came with arms raised speaking about peace and co-existing, and no one really knew what to think of them. One second the aliens were going after the humans, swatting them like flies and the next they wanted to ‘co-exist’. They said there was nothing for them back in their home planet and that Earth was big enough to sustain both species. The humans were wary, and when they asked what all that death was in the beginning all the aliens had to say about it was that they were making room for themselves.

The humans doubted them, firm believers that the aliens were planning something else. Something worse than what had already passed. But they didn't have much of a choice in the matter. The aliens had already taken everything from them. They destroyed their homes, re-wrote everything they thought to be true and washed away any slivers of hope for a future.

The humans had no other choice but to go along.

But before things could get better, like the aliens promised they would, things got worse. The world became divided, split between those who saw the aliens through the looking glass, seeing them as gods, who had come to make life