Earth

The Sea

How, oh how, had he gotten here? In this storm of storms, on this planet of planets? The blue spray of the irradiated waves splashed against Toby's helmet. He breathed in deeply and dived under the waves. Was this so different from his weightless training? The long hours in the pool with his heavy suit on? Toby took himself back to that time. The controlled environment where, be anything amiss, he would be pulled out of the water within seconds. He took himself back there, that controlled environment. By now he had reached the bottom of the ocean he was trapped by, and he began to walk along the sandy floor. Toby sighed, fogging up his helmet. Earth was so very different from Mars. It was hard for Toby to believe that humans like him had once lived here. A time where living on Mars was but a dream. A time where only a select few went to space. The idea nearly made Toby laugh, but this was his history. The history of humans, the destructive species that messed everything up with a nuclear war. Toby's thoughts were interrupted by a popup on his screen, which for ease of access was built into the glass of his helmet. The popup read; "oxygen supply running low, immediately move to a spot with accessible air." Toby frowned to himself, as this meant he would have to return to the raging surface of the ocean. Nonetheless, in a situation like this Toby could not afford to get Hypoxia. He started swimming to the surface and once again his thoughts wandered, this time to the urgency of his mission and the continually decreasing amount of time he had left to complete it. Toby thought back to two weeks ago, when he had been dispatched for this mission. He recalled being briefed by the Chief of Earth studies, who had told him about how an Earth-Rover had done some soil tests which had come back with negative radiation marks, shocking everyone. No radiation in the soil? Impossible! But it was real, and it was Toby's job to locate the rover, which had stopped transmitting shortly after the discovery. Toby's head broke the surface of the water and he gasped in shock. In the time he had been on the seafloor the storm had cleared, and in the distance he could see not the usually irradiated brown earth, but the green of trees on survivable land.