fear-mongering

In this merciless world that momentary slackening got me where I am today. After 3 months of planning, I was about to smuggle my biggest shipment to date in my whole career.

If this goes well I would have become untouchable. A 23-year-old kid from a poor family was about to become so rich the police couldn't touch him. If other people from Ethiopia heard you say this they would have laughed at your face.

At the time I didn't know this kind of feat from someone with my background wasn't possible. In the euphoria of making it, I forgot the advice Kebede told me to question everything around you till I understood.

As I came to know it the bastards up the food chain didn't like this because a kid like me who was wet behind his ears was going to become their equal and from my trajectory if they let me slip this once they would regret it.

So they tipped off the government about all of my assets including my next big shipment with the help of some of my subordinates.

My expanding smuggling empire deflated like a balloon against a force that knew my every operation. After pursuing me for two weeks I escaped their grasp which made them give up but with two bullets lodged in my hip and spleen my health detreating fast with the little money I had I was waiting for death to take me and like this l stayed like this thinking where it did go wrong and the things I should have done after much thought. I came out more sharp in the mind and spirit but my body couldn't recover what was lost.

A day like most others I was lost in thought when I heard an interview of a climate scientist with CNN. He explained that he and his team had discovered the driving force the global climate change and it wasn't greenhouse gases but a change in the core of our planet which alarmed most people.

After the interview, I changed the channel to other international news stations like Aljazeera and BBC, but they were talking about it too.

This news seems to have taken the world by storm. I went on YouTube to see more sources and all of them point to the formation of some kind of substance in our core since the 1600s and it has been growing at an exponential rate. This news was even more pushed by big companies to help themselves.

All this talk led to more questions about the substance's origin and whether it is going to further grow if this leads to the extinction of life as we know it. At the time I thought this was just fear-mongering.

Later that day as I was about to go to bed the mother of all earthquakes hit my house. Things started to come down and without wasting any time a ran to the streets to find collapsed buildings all around me even my collapsed right after I got out. This was confusing to me because Ethiopia has never experienced any kind of earthquake.