Pollution
Cezille07
Life is different in the thirtieth century. Luckily enough—or maybe, unluckily—Zick and Elena find a time machine. So what do they do with it? Try to improve their present, of course. And include in that list, lessen the pollution.
Disclaimer: As you know, I am a huge M.A. fan. I'll leave it at that. (You get it, do you? Must I spell it out every single time I write a "fanfiction"?)
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Chapter 1: The Thirtieth Century (Zick).
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I woke up as I normally did. I got up, stretched a bit to shoo off the sleepiness, and hopped into the shower. That being done, I headed downstairs for breakfast. Mom had the table set perfectly, and the meal made it all the more special. A capsule of semi-fried, synthetic bacon! And half a glass of my favorite drink, plant dew—that was one-fourth more than usual, and it was very clean too! My share was gone in a minute. Without waiting for my dad to wake up, I kissed Mom goodbye and set off for school.
But not before I picked up my best friend next door. I waited for her, as I always did, for a routine five minutes during which she did God-knows-what in preparation for the school day ahead. As before, it bought me time to de-clutter my bag...or my thoughts. At least there was a good use to it—well, everything had to have a use, in these times. And usually, it was the freest time I ever got.
Usually.
But I didn't know today was going to be...unusual.
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Cement dominated the entire city. Most probably it dominated everywhere else too. It was the cheapest substance around, I tell you, cheaper than food, or oxygen, or public transport, or entertainment, or...or....
The cement was the stuff of life. It was all the common people had to build with, to play with, to do everything with. All the metal reserves were depleted (technology was overdriven in the twenty-first century, they told me). There were no trees, no plants. There was no water. There was little food. There were no animals on the streets, in homes. Livestock was a precious resource a countable number of people owned. There was no color, no paint. No clouds—it was mostly fog, or the worse version, smog.
Elena came out at last. "Hi, Zick," she said cheerily.
I replied with less emotion. "Good morning." In a world as dull as this, even emotions seemed extraneous. And don't forget the microchip the government installs in each infant brain, to regulate our body amidst these conditions.
"You look down today," she observed.
"It's nothing," I answered quickly. Nothing was wrong. Everything was perfectly normal, as it has always been, too routine to be wrong. Or it might be that I'm getting to sarcastic about things. But I'm only ten, I ought to lighten up somehow, right? I shrugged the thought away. "Let's go."
We began walking. I took a deep breath...and coughed a bit. It was the least the air did for me. It often did a lot more, but I won't iterate through that list.
Like Elena always did, she shot me this question, "You okay, Zick?" And I answered her like I always did. "I'm fine. The usual."
It seems, though, that the word 'usual' was getting overused here. I am used to living in the thirtieth century. I know all the technicalities it required, what things were before, and how worse it could turn out after a few more years. I knew. Our teacher was the granddaughter of a historian, and she filled our minds with idealistic conditions we found hard to imagine.
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On second thought, what seemed impossible materialized right in front of us. Now this was hard to imagine, but it was real enough not to vanish after the first blink.
A metallic box, approximately two feet wide, three feet long, and six feet tall, slowly blurred into reality. It almost looked pulled right out of the craziest sci-fi movie. Buttons all over the rusty door, wires tangled around the body. Some electric sparks shot from it.
Our mouths hung open for a long time, and the first movement we both took was a disbelieving look at each other.
"Looks like a time machine," I mumbled.
Time machines were all the rage, with all the inventiveness and technology to be inspired from, but of course none of them really worked. According to the Special Theory of Relativity, if you travel at speeds approaching the speed of light, your perception of time slow down, while everything else around you proceeds normally. After you stop moving, you're in the future. Rather, it's still the present, but it's not the time you came from. It depends where you're observing from, yes, but the point is you've moved into a different time. It only worked in one direction, forward. Time machine programmers were racing to reach back into the past (perhaps to bring back here an essence of what was before, the bountiful supplies, mostly).
This one, it was entirely different. The material it was made of was metal. Metal. Its design and structuredidn't follow conventions either.
But who knows? What if this is the machine that'll really work?
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A/N: Yes, the Special Theory of Relativity includes that. (This is one of the fics Natural Science inspired for me.)
