Fighting for Today

Epilogue

 What happens when hope dies? Betrayal burns thick in the air and everywhere you look there is grey. Disaster is around every corner. Humanity is at its weakest. The government died and left a disaster for the corporations to clean up. The corporations didn't do much better while they were in charge. I think that was where everything went wrong, but my mother said that it started long before that. She would always tell us to be better than those that came before us. This was her bedtime story to her children.

 We had finally done it. Us, humans, had finally destroyed our most sacred gift. Mankind had decimated our planet, our home, and our precious inheritance. Humans were the only ones to blame. Our planet had finally given up on us. We were its keepers, and we had failed both the world and all that lived on it.

 Many things occurred at our hand to cause this disaster. Natural resources ran dry. All the deforestation led to toxic air. World War Three led to radiated wastelands. Some of these wastelands covered entire continents. Finally our decisions had consequences and a new illness swept what little land we had left. We could not stay in such harsh conditions any longer. If human kind wished to stay alive then we had to find another place to call home, but honestly we didn't really deserve it after all we had screwed up our first chance. The corporations stepped up to the plate and took their opportunity to become our savior despite being part of our downfall.

 The corporations had found a second chance. They had already named our new planet Initium. It had been in the works for a while. When they realized that they had lit the fuse to our powder keg, the corporations aligned themselves together to start working on another option. In a rush of exploration, they had happened on the new planet. After probing it with several machines and the results firm, they started human explorations. Some of the missions were com casted across live feed. People had found hope again. All the searches had come up with no intelligent wild life, and since time was running out the corporations were careless.

The shipments to colonize the planet were successful, and then it was the survivors turn.

 Sadly there weren't enough life boats off of our sinking ship and too many people were left behind, but that was an unavoidable tragedy as the corporations stated.

 I was on one of the last upper class ships to leave. My father thought it best to stay for as long as we could. I was only thirteen at the time. I remember watching out the window with my brother in my lap as our broken planet shrank from sight. A quote I had learned in one of my history classes came to mind, "Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," by Oppenheimer. You weren't the only one, I thought to myself, we all had a part in watching the world burn.

     The journey to Initium was long and hard, but when we arrived it was breathtaking. The plant life was vibrant with color. Colorful trees stretched so high in the sky that you couldn't see the light of the suns from under their canopy. The plant life was wild. It was almost like our rainforests back home, but even ours wasn't this untamed. Our compounds were gleaming metal centers in the vast jungle with the new oceans barely visible with their pink gleam.

    When we believed we had finally made a new place for ourselves and adjusted to our new life, that's when they came. The Original species, as we began to call them, came back to claim their planet again. They attacked from two fronts, underground and from the air. We didn't stand a chance. When they finally took the last of our compounds, all the people that were left scattered to find refuge. My brother and I ran along with the rest. We were fortunate enough to escape. Now we live in hiding and continual fear of being captured by the Originals. We weren't the only ones in our universe, and this time we were invading their planet. We were the aliens, and as Columbus was to the Native Americans so was the aliens to what was left of the human race except this time we were the Native Americans.