There were many different questions and we got too many of them wrong. That’s how we ended up in the zoo.
We are free-range humans. We are the only humans left. We are not on Earth. We are on a planet whose proper name is unpronounceable by us according to the aliens who left us here. We call the planet Here, Prison, Earth2, Re-earth, Zooplanet and many others names. We haven’t been here long enough for one single name to stick.
It looks kind of like what I remember Africa looking like when I saw it on television back on Earth. Lots of arid land with occasional fields of tall grass and little tiny lakes scattered around, lots of sun.
We’ve got three suns and sixteen moons. The suns are weaker so we don’t cook. They add up to a constant summer. The moons make for a much brighter night. Both days and nights are twice as long here but we’ve adjusted.
We sleep half the day and then half the night. The protective atmosphere here is not flawed. We tan here with no burning and no skin cancer.
The aliens came down to Earth and left a puzzle for us floating in the middle of the ocean; a giant geodesic dome floating in international waters. They made a lot of noise leaving it there. Our weapons had no effect. We watched the ship leave and turned our attention to the white dot floating in our ocean.
One by one, the countries sailed out, surrounded it and stared. For once, the UN came in handy and volunteered to be first to go into it.
Inside the dome were a series of simple puzzles that became progressively harder. The puzzles were relayed back. The world got busy.
The first six were completed in days. Prime number sequences, geometric and logic proofs, a couple of theoretical physics equations. Then they got hard.
We made it up to question twenty. Hawking died while trying to figure it out.
After no more puzzles had been solved for sixteen months and a few of them had been answered incorrectly, the aliens came back.
Twenty-three million of us were collected at random. We simply woke up in the cargo hold of the arkship floating around our former home, a mathematically fair cross-section of ages, races, nationalities and gender. Family ties were not taken into consideration.
As the Earth grew smaller, we saw it flash a number of colours.
We were told later that the Earth had been sterilized and cleaned for its new tenants. That meant that every human not on board the ship was dead.
I miss my parents. We all still have nightmares. Some of the women have given birth, though, and a new generation has been born here.
There was initial fury, insanity and sadness after we left The Hold.
The silent surroundings and lack of predators are calming. You can't die from exposure to the elements here. It's always good weather.
There are still some among us that see parallels between us and the Native American Indians rounded up and put on reservations.
Most of us have taken to thinking that we were rescued.
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