Anon
Once upon a time, an angel fell from Heaven.
Its halo burned like an iridescent fire around its body as it plummeted to Earth, growing tinier and tinier as the planet reached up with hands unseen and dragged the dying angel into its bosom, ripping out the very feathers from its wings, the screams of the angel resonating all around the world.
The angel struggled, and managed to pull free from the earth for just one moment, but its efforts were in vain. Majestic though the angel was, it could not escape the monstrous force of Earth.
The angel died in a pillar of smoke and fire, burning brighter than the sun.
Heaven wept for its fallen angel. The tears fell in curtains of red and green and blue that shimmered across the southern wastelands before they disappeared, silently and suddenly, as if they had never been there at all.
Trees for hundreds of miles fell and died, burned by the death-throes of the angel. The earth itself burned.
Man and beast sickened and died. Burns covered their bodies, and they staggered about for days before vomiting up their insides, killed by the very Earth that had birthed them. Those that survived were forever scarred, their children and their children's children harboring the legacy of the fallen angel within their very blood.
Trees. Angels. Animals. They are but a memory now.
Only man remains.
In a world teeming with thirty billion humans, where life matters little, and existence is nothing but an endless cycle of birth, loneliness, and death, the story of the angel that fell from Heaven has always given me hope.
The only other lives I have ever truly touched were those of the parents who adopted me. Not the ones whose sperm and egg mingled together long ago in some forgotten moment of passion, who gave me up to a life devoid of everything but lonesomeness.
They saved me from that empty orphanage where my name was Anonymous 112903. They named me Anon, and gave me their surname of Millions. I was welcomed into their apartment and their lives with open arms and loving hearts. They cared for me and loved me, and in return I loved them.
Father taught me about all the creatures that had died at the hand of man. He told me stories of the distant, legendary past in which such things as rainforests and oceans and trees and flowers and tigers and mountains existed in dimensions other than those of the holographic windows programmed to hide out the dismal, concrete world outside.
Mother taught me of the stars and planets and their names. She taught me of angels and demons and gods, of dragons and unicorns and all those things that exist no more, in this world which has no place for them. She read me ancient books, sang me ancient songs, all of which mystified me.
Mother and Father taught me love. They taught me how to be compassionate, to respect life, to respect myself. They taught me that no matter how battered and ugly and sick Earth had become, I was to respect it. I was to love Earth and man, and all of those souls, be they man, beast, plant or God, forgotten by a merciless humanity.
And, most of all, I was to love the Plants.
It was not common knowledge that the power plants were alive. That they felt pain and loneliness. That in them lived the seed of humanity, mingled with a forgotten visitor from the stars. The power companies made sure of that. To most of those thirty billion humans, the giant, glowing globes that powered their televisions and air filters and cars were nothing but funny-looking nuclear reactors.
The Plants were raped for their radiation. My parents taught me to care about them. They, too, were alive. They, too, felt pain. They, just like me, knew isolation and anonymity.
And then, Mother and Father were taken away from me.
They died in a car accident. It was to be expected, the way the skies and streets are clogged with furious humans to whom life is nothing special.
Mother and Father were knocked out of the sky by a speeding teenager, running from the police. Their engines could not react fast enough to take them out of the path of the oncoming bus which took their lives.
Once more, my life ended.
I could have turned to those base pleasures of humanity. I could have retreated into the cesspool underbelly of the never-ending city, lost forever in a delirium of drugs and sex and murder and mindless, senseless, endless euphoria.
But I did not.
My parents taught me to love the Plants.
And the Plants were the sole survivors of the life that they had given to me. The misshapen, deadly, alien creatures were the only beings that I could truly feel at peace with, my hands and forehead pressed to the glass walls of their spheres.
So I took the credits willed to me by Mother and Father and I went to school. I found work with one of the power companies. I lived in my own small, bare company apartment, with only the books and music and pictures to keep me company. My only companions were memories of all the joy and love that had once been taken for granted.
This was all around the time that the SEEDS was being developed. SEEDS, the space colonization program, would take two hundred thousand representatives of humanity to the stars, the stars whose names I knew, away from the dead, parasite-infested Earth and to some celestial never-never land, where once more there would be love and life and happiness.
I was happy with the Plants. Though they could not speak in terms I could understand, I knew that they were grateful for my companionship. For my love. For the kinship that we shared, being all alone and anonymous in a world that hated us because we were different.
Happiness, however, is a fickle thing. Happiness tends to come into your life when you are not suspecting it, and then when your heart is full of its warmth and beauty, it pulls away, leaving you to realize just how dismal and miserable existence is.
On my way back to my apartment, I was attacked, knocked unconscious, and drugged. When I awoke, I hung suspended in the amber fluid that sustains Plants, alone in my glassy sphere. Alone and pregnant in a giant sensory-deprivation chamber where there was no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste. Nothing to feel but the pressure of liquid against my skin.
The company had impregnated me with the germ of a Plant. Two of them. The things growing inside of me were partly human, partly Plant. Those tiny seeds were to blossom into the guardians of the colonists. They were to walk amongst man, interact with man, masquerade as man.
But their powers were to be just as terrible as they were .
The power to level cities. To put craters in the moon. To fend off alien aggressors. To destroy the world.
And I had been chosen to bear the future saviors of mankind because I was anonymous. Because I was all alone in the world. No one to look for me when I disappeared, no one to tell what had happened to me. It was just myself, my books, and my memories.
The seeds grew into embryos, then into fetuses, and finally I went into labor. All of two months had passed.
My beautiful sons were stolen from me. Ripped out of my body and plunged into a tank of the Plant fluid, sealed away in the recesses of the SEEDS ship.
My darling children, who would one day grow into beautiful men. Who would quarrel, as siblings are expected to do, but whose spats would prove deadly. My sons, who would perhaps one day save all of humanity.
My progeny. My legacy. They, who inherited the stars. They, whose children would live on to colonize other worlds, worlds where the rainforests and oceans and love would again exist.
I returned home. I lay down on my bed and injected myself with a massive amount of the drug that the company had used to knock me unconscious.
I died, then. The darkness that is between death and birth overtook me, swept me up into great, stygian, angelic wings. Borne aloft by the wings of the celestial being, I soared away.
Goodbye to the rotting Earth.
Goodbye to the cold, empty Universe.
Goodbye, Vash and Knives.
May you find Paradise, out there amongst the stars whose names I know, but will never, ever see...
Trigun copyright Pioneer Entertainment, Ltd.
"Anon" copyright R. Pingitore, 2001.
Once upon a time, an angel fell from Heaven.
Its halo burned like an iridescent fire around its body as it plummeted to Earth, growing tinier and tinier as the planet reached up with hands unseen and dragged the dying angel into its bosom, ripping out the very feathers from its wings, the screams of the angel resonating all around the world.
The angel struggled, and managed to pull free from the earth for just one moment, but its efforts were in vain. Majestic though the angel was, it could not escape the monstrous force of Earth.
The angel died in a pillar of smoke and fire, burning brighter than the sun.
Heaven wept for its fallen angel. The tears fell in curtains of red and green and blue that shimmered across the southern wastelands before they disappeared, silently and suddenly, as if they had never been there at all.
Trees for hundreds of miles fell and died, burned by the death-throes of the angel. The earth itself burned.
Man and beast sickened and died. Burns covered their bodies, and they staggered about for days before vomiting up their insides, killed by the very Earth that had birthed them. Those that survived were forever scarred, their children and their children's children harboring the legacy of the fallen angel within their very blood.
Trees. Angels. Animals. They are but a memory now.
Only man remains.
In a world teeming with thirty billion humans, where life matters little, and existence is nothing but an endless cycle of birth, loneliness, and death, the story of the angel that fell from Heaven has always given me hope.
The only other lives I have ever truly touched were those of the parents who adopted me. Not the ones whose sperm and egg mingled together long ago in some forgotten moment of passion, who gave me up to a life devoid of everything but lonesomeness.
They saved me from that empty orphanage where my name was Anonymous 112903. They named me Anon, and gave me their surname of Millions. I was welcomed into their apartment and their lives with open arms and loving hearts. They cared for me and loved me, and in return I loved them.
Father taught me about all the creatures that had died at the hand of man. He told me stories of the distant, legendary past in which such things as rainforests and oceans and trees and flowers and tigers and mountains existed in dimensions other than those of the holographic windows programmed to hide out the dismal, concrete world outside.
Mother taught me of the stars and planets and their names. She taught me of angels and demons and gods, of dragons and unicorns and all those things that exist no more, in this world which has no place for them. She read me ancient books, sang me ancient songs, all of which mystified me.
Mother and Father taught me love. They taught me how to be compassionate, to respect life, to respect myself. They taught me that no matter how battered and ugly and sick Earth had become, I was to respect it. I was to love Earth and man, and all of those souls, be they man, beast, plant or God, forgotten by a merciless humanity.
And, most of all, I was to love the Plants.
It was not common knowledge that the power plants were alive. That they felt pain and loneliness. That in them lived the seed of humanity, mingled with a forgotten visitor from the stars. The power companies made sure of that. To most of those thirty billion humans, the giant, glowing globes that powered their televisions and air filters and cars were nothing but funny-looking nuclear reactors.
The Plants were raped for their radiation. My parents taught me to care about them. They, too, were alive. They, too, felt pain. They, just like me, knew isolation and anonymity.
And then, Mother and Father were taken away from me.
They died in a car accident. It was to be expected, the way the skies and streets are clogged with furious humans to whom life is nothing special.
Mother and Father were knocked out of the sky by a speeding teenager, running from the police. Their engines could not react fast enough to take them out of the path of the oncoming bus which took their lives.
Once more, my life ended.
I could have turned to those base pleasures of humanity. I could have retreated into the cesspool underbelly of the never-ending city, lost forever in a delirium of drugs and sex and murder and mindless, senseless, endless euphoria.
But I did not.
My parents taught me to love the Plants.
And the Plants were the sole survivors of the life that they had given to me. The misshapen, deadly, alien creatures were the only beings that I could truly feel at peace with, my hands and forehead pressed to the glass walls of their spheres.
So I took the credits willed to me by Mother and Father and I went to school. I found work with one of the power companies. I lived in my own small, bare company apartment, with only the books and music and pictures to keep me company. My only companions were memories of all the joy and love that had once been taken for granted.
This was all around the time that the SEEDS was being developed. SEEDS, the space colonization program, would take two hundred thousand representatives of humanity to the stars, the stars whose names I knew, away from the dead, parasite-infested Earth and to some celestial never-never land, where once more there would be love and life and happiness.
I was happy with the Plants. Though they could not speak in terms I could understand, I knew that they were grateful for my companionship. For my love. For the kinship that we shared, being all alone and anonymous in a world that hated us because we were different.
Happiness, however, is a fickle thing. Happiness tends to come into your life when you are not suspecting it, and then when your heart is full of its warmth and beauty, it pulls away, leaving you to realize just how dismal and miserable existence is.
On my way back to my apartment, I was attacked, knocked unconscious, and drugged. When I awoke, I hung suspended in the amber fluid that sustains Plants, alone in my glassy sphere. Alone and pregnant in a giant sensory-deprivation chamber where there was no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste. Nothing to feel but the pressure of liquid against my skin.
The company had impregnated me with the germ of a Plant. Two of them. The things growing inside of me were partly human, partly Plant. Those tiny seeds were to blossom into the guardians of the colonists. They were to walk amongst man, interact with man, masquerade as man.
But their powers were to be just as terrible as they were .
The power to level cities. To put craters in the moon. To fend off alien aggressors. To destroy the world.
And I had been chosen to bear the future saviors of mankind because I was anonymous. Because I was all alone in the world. No one to look for me when I disappeared, no one to tell what had happened to me. It was just myself, my books, and my memories.
The seeds grew into embryos, then into fetuses, and finally I went into labor. All of two months had passed.
My beautiful sons were stolen from me. Ripped out of my body and plunged into a tank of the Plant fluid, sealed away in the recesses of the SEEDS ship.
My darling children, who would one day grow into beautiful men. Who would quarrel, as siblings are expected to do, but whose spats would prove deadly. My sons, who would perhaps one day save all of humanity.
My progeny. My legacy. They, who inherited the stars. They, whose children would live on to colonize other worlds, worlds where the rainforests and oceans and love would again exist.
I returned home. I lay down on my bed and injected myself with a massive amount of the drug that the company had used to knock me unconscious.
I died, then. The darkness that is between death and birth overtook me, swept me up into great, stygian, angelic wings. Borne aloft by the wings of the celestial being, I soared away.
Goodbye to the rotting Earth.
Goodbye to the cold, empty Universe.
Goodbye, Vash and Knives.
May you find Paradise, out there amongst the stars whose names I know, but will never, ever see...
Trigun copyright Pioneer Entertainment, Ltd.
"Anon" copyright R. Pingitore, 2001.