Year: 2452
I look out at the planet below me from my space station “Enceladus”. This is something I’ve done thousands of times previously, but I still marvel at its incredible beauty. The blue oceans, the white clouds and the occasional specks of green at the poles.
It’s beauty belies a harsh truth. What was once a planet teeming with life when I was born is after seven degrees of global warming, largely a lifeless hell. Large megacities clinging to existence in a poisoned, chastened world. The tides still come and go, but the seawater is a toxic acid. The great forests of the Amazon and the Congo, have long since turned to dust. The only life left at the equator is microbial.
Fuck them.
It could have been all so different. They could have listened and done something all those years ago. Not that I care, not really. The world’s disaster was my opportunity. Now, many of those miserable souls in their cramped, polluted cities pay their rent to me. It’s so beautiful. You see, if they don’t pay up they are kicked out to a certain death.
It took centuries for me to reach the top. I am what they call an “eternal”. I was born in Dublin in 1979. Now that I’m here, that’s where I intend to stay. Y ou see I heard about the threat to the planet all the way back in the 1980’s.
Mark's Writing Corner 