A Simple Explanation
by: myself

For years, scientists have been trying to crack the enigma. In the meantime, chaos was ensuing. Some people blatantly ignored the situation. However, there was a vast population that was more responsive. Religious groups claimed the end had come. Politicians took advantage of the situation to push their own agendas.

For a long time, the years had been getting shorter. At first it was just a few hours at a time. But within a standard decade, that few hours’ difference had jumped to days, then weeks, and even months. The world’s governments were doing their best to make up for the shortening years.

The thing was, nobody had noticed. At least, not at first. Only the most efficient scientists noticed an astrological difference from one year to the next, but as the difference became more pronounced, more people took notice. Soon, it became apparent to the more naked eye. The seasons seemed to run into each other as each grew shorter and shorter by leaps and bounds. There was a worldwide panic at one point when farmers all over the world assumed the harvests would be on time, but by the next year most had learned that normal had been assassinated, throwing out the almanacs and going directly by the stars. The change in schedule for crops meant big changes for the economy, too. Some countries struggled to stay above the poverty line.

There were many theories, besides those involving the apocalypse. One idea went as far as to claim that the Earth’s orbit around the Sun was decaying, and that as we got farther and farther away, the years would change more drastically while the atmosphere absorbed less and less of the Sun’s energy. Eventually Earth would fling itself off into the cosmos, taking our frozen remains along for the ride. Supposedly nobody told the scientists in charge of that particular theory that being farther away from the Sun would signify a longer year, not a shorter one. Or, they’d never heard of Global Warming.

Amid all the crazy and complicated ideas running around, nobody thought to do the simplest thing. To ask the planet itself. Had someone done so, they would have known that the Minimum Gravitational Speed Limit for that particular section of the Milky Way Galaxy was 130 miles per second, as apposed to the mere 20 miles per second in the previous speed zone. We’d been going about 18, which was under minimum speed anyway, but the difference was small enough for Earth to get by with a few warnings. However, in the current speed zone, Earth had to speed up pretty heftily to keep from getting some serious tickets. Earth already had enough points on its planetary license to get suspended, and it wanted to avoid trouble.