Metal Organism Designed only for Cuddling

MODOC: Part 10 - War and Pieces

Part 10 - War and Pieces

           A satellite from an earlier age circles the quiet Earth. The Earth was not always this quiet. Once she communicated in thousands of languages across hundreds of tiny spectra, a rainbow of communication shouting out to space, that we are here, we are here, we are here... Those voices spoke with no unity and the fears and loneliness which allowed for retail therapy eventually gave way to wholesale slaughter. South America was the first to feel the sting of Envy.

           Now the Earth sits quiet, its communications by directed cold beam or submerged fiber-optic keep random signals to space to a minimum. Mankind's exposure to the stars, has left scars, not easily healed. Remnants of First Contact has left humanity with a fear of the stars, but a need for them. The cradle of humanity is aflame, set afire by Earth's greatest and most terrible creation, Man. But fear or not, dangerous or not, humanity must ascend or starve to death on a world too hot or too cold, whose air is too dry and rainfall far too rare, whose people are still too numerous, even with fratricide practiced all over the globe, with infrastructure just barely strong enough to keep its tortured billions working around the clock for a future most will never see. And these are still better times than mankind has seen in nearly five decades.

           This satellite hailed from a time when the world was changing and it looked as if mankind had learned the lessons it needed to mature and not a moment too soon. Scientists placed it in orbit to monitor the ever increasing and erratic world-wide weather patterns of the time. And for fifty years, it had an eye on the world and took photos of the world as it changed mostly for the better. Those photos were collected and studied by men and machines until the year 2073. And then the world was silent. 

           This satellite saw a happier world, prosperous beyond anyone from the early 20th century's expectations, those predictions of Malthusian doom would wilt under the bloom of the early twenty first century's super-economy of Brazil. Under the leadership of one of its first, in a line of female presidents, caused the country to soar to a level of economic prosperity never seen in its modern history.

           Preventing the last of its rainforests from being destroyed, Brazil capitalized on the rainforest's biodiversity with a new explosion of science, genetic engineering and pharmacology. In the year 2021, a viable cure for cancer cell development was synthesized from the seeds of a barely known plant found in a tiny fifteen acre section of the rain-forest, that was slated for demolition before the forest was saved. This plant was found nowhere else in the rainforest and its benefits caused nations all over the world to reconsider their primal forests and an explosion of planting and reforestation began. The world was rife with cancers from rampant industrialization and a lapse of standards due to the profit-mongering of the greediest of the world's remaining superpowers. This panacea was literally in the nick of time and made Brazil the envy of a world growing sicker by the day.

           The cancer cure was tightly held by the Brazilian government and scientific community and once the clinical trials were over, the Brazilian government created an agency to oversee the management of the drug, its licensing and distribution. Overnight Brazil became one of the most important destinations in the world. This caused South America to grow both in population and world-wide importance.

           Central America benefited from this overflow of popularity and these nations of the southern hemisphere finally achieved prominence in the world, befitting a country that had placed biodiversity higher than raw profit and easy exploitation of the rain-forest. Lamentations of what other cures might have been lost were shouted around the world, but Brazil's latest crop of scientists and explorers would canvas the remaining rain-forest for any insect, venom, genome, or bio-plasm that might have another amazing offering.