The Signal Mankind Was Looking For.

3 weeks ago... the sky was lit up with fire.

There was no warning, no reason or rhyme. The night's sky was awash with flames of all spectral colours. Red, orange, white, blue, green, black. All of the colours we could and couldn't imagine were in our eyes, looking up into the now locked off abyss of space. No-one took note of the new things we saw... We were too busy running and acting out of fear.

Me? I hid. I hid deep. Down in the sewers. a few of us did. There were five of us. In the cool darkness of the now dry sewers. We'd know if it was safe... The water would flow again...

It didn't. We were scared... We got to thinking. What if the fires had taken away all the water? What if we were slowly dying?

We had to go and see.

We looked out of the grates... Nothing. the world above was silent. No cars, no birds, no anything.

As we tried to leave our new home... We felt the heat... Some of us collapsed at the new sensation. This wasn't like anything we'd felt before... We could maybe consider this type of heat in the Sahara, or on Venus... We ran back inside... Trapped.

We couldn't leave... And our food was almost gone.

All of what I've said was a week after the solar flarestorm. That's what they call it now...

Benny, a man from up the road where I lived... He couldn't take it. He'd come down but... At the prospect of being entombed, he made a break for it.

In the light of the day, we saw him wither and burn. My sister, Dorothy, was never the same after seeing that. She feared leaving... And we were all hungry.

The fights began. Some of us wanted to go to the seaside sewer pipes, see if the ocean was gone. We knew it wouldn't be safe to touch, but just to see if we were the last in this brave, dry world.

The others? They wanted... Something else. Something darker. Myself, Dotty and Marcus. We ran from them.

We hid on the other side of town, in the back of town, the new town. It was cooler still there...

Much cooler.

We found another group who'd had the same idea as us. It was cool enough there to at least walk the streets, even for a minute or two.

But they didn't.

They'd... Seen someone walking the streets.

Something.

Sam, their leader, told me about it. They were on a food run, a local shop right on the corner, next to a sewer line. They went into the shop, got what they needed. What amazed me, first off, is that the national grid was seemingly still running - he talked about the fridges and freezers being on. Imagine, there was electricity up there. News, radio. None of it down with us.

Cut off...

Anyway, as they left - this was about 500 yards away. They saw it. a humanoid shape, bathed in fire and ash. Walking the roads. It saw them. It tried to run to them, but... They were quicker. The thing ran with an awkward gait, as if not used to it's own body. It was yelling a deep, gutteral yell, that enough would have frightened them, but... The whole package was something more.

We lived together. We worked hard to scrape something together. We had to take back the surface.

We managed to make it to a sewer access station, a maintainence byway. It had a small fridge, and outside was... a dry riverbed. Doesn't seem like much, but... It was enough to make me finally realise that there was no going back.

We scraped together as much technology as we could. We made "Cold suits" - reinforcement against the heat. Gunpowder was useless, we realised, even if we'd have found some. So we had to improvise, yet again. Like the cavemen, we made spears. Good spears, too. But not so effective in hindsight.

Myself and Marcus tested the coldsuits. They were great. Felt like a summer's day. Hot, but not explosively so.

It was quiet... Dead quiet. Except...

Huge, monolithic structures stood on the land. Easy enough to see without vegetation to hide them. We didn't know why we couldn't see them before.

Turns out... They were new. Brand new.

They were the prototype thermal towers, the first ones. Not so different than those we know today. Just... Fuller.

We investigated the towers. They were too hot to touch, and seemingly denser than any ore of metal we'd ever seen before.

Marcus made the mistake. He threw something at it. A rock, something small. It sounded off against it with a dull thud... And something moved inside.

They were bigger than Sam had described. Almost 2 feet taller tan us. They didn't attack, or even do anything. They woke up, fell from the towers and stood around us.

"Survivors." One said. "We've been waiting.".

The voices echoed in our heads... Telepathy. A new way to communicate.

A firey body to resist temperature extremes.

Huge statures.

Humanity had ascended. We'd had been left behind.

As they told us... I still can't believe it.

We managed to co-exist. Their technology and our... well, we had nothing, but they wanted to see humanity live again, as it was. they helped us, and we're grateful.