WHAT WAS LEFT

1

After the great pollution, producing plastic was forbidden all over the planet. The government built new places to live, up in the sky, high above the real ground, where the air was good enough to be transferred into oxygen so that we could breathe. Everyone lives in air bubbles now, the real outside would be too poisonous for our lungs. The great pollution happened over a century ago, but there is still no silver lining on the horizon, that the planet is going to recover. There are still people who won't accept the damage our ancestors have made and try to clean the oceans, those people are called the WAROP's.

WAROP stands for Waste-disposal And Rescue Of Planet Department. My dad was one before he went missing. And even if my mother won't allow me to, I was going to be a WAROP too. My dad put all his effort in this project, because he wanted his kids to live on a better planet than he did and since he didn't come back from his last excursion, I am the one who will keep up his legacy and his will to change planet plastic into the green one, it was before.

Today is my first day at the WAROP's and I am slightly nervous as I put on my decontamination suit and my oxygen helmet. As a trainee, I am only authorized for fishing for plastic waste in the ocean, the more experience I get, the higher my range of duty will become. My dad was a level 10 worker, which meant, that he was allowed to go on diving excursions into the sea and explore the world underwater. Because not only the world we walk on has changed, also the world deep under our feet has been damaged. But the creatures of the sea did not all die. Although there are no turtles, dolphins, sharks, seahorses or common fish left, a few of the under-water-residents were able to adjust.

When I was younger, I couldn't sleep or had bad dreams, after dad showed me pictures of some of those "fish". They had become as toxic as their environment and most of them were very dangerous. Huge jellyfish in neon-colors, Giant shark-like looking fish with red glowing eyes and toxic saliva, Snakes with scales and heads like dragons and the worst of all: the spiders. They looked like a mixture of crabs and tarantulas in the size of a dog. As older as I got, the more I shared dads excitement to explore the "new world" and try to rescue what was left of the old one.

"It's never too late to make a change.", I hear him say in my head, as I follow the other workers outside.