Avatar belongs to James Cameron.

This story is rated T for some profanity.

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I woke up one morning, groggy, like I was under a sedative. Oh, wait. I was. Why was I sedated? Think. Think…Doctors were working on my waist for some reason…Leaning on one elbow, I looked down and saw bandages around my midsection. My mind whirred, looking for something to connect the bandages with. The war in Venezuela. The one that nobody really pays attention to nowadays. Just like all the other wars. And I was a casualty. Not dead. Paraplegic. I had been shot through the small of my back. My legs were now dead weight. This was gonna be a permanent reminder of the hell I had been thrown into. Just to check, I tried to move my toes. Nothing. I couldn't even feel my feet or legs on the bed. I collapsed back down on the hospital bed and sighed. I closed my eyes in my medically-induced stupor and went back to sleep, as if nothing had happened. Maybe it was all a nightmare. Maybe I'd wake up soon and walk out of here.

When I was lying in the V.A. hospital with that big, gaping hole blown through the middle of my life, I started having these dreams of flying. I was free. No dead-weight legs to hinder me, or even to walk with. I was king of the sky. I could see everything below me. But the landscape was burned. Ashes. Maybe it was from the war. It was really weird, because it felt like it was more than just a dream. It just felt so real. So damned real. But why? Sooner or later, though, you always gotta wake up.

Seriously, for goodness sake, Jacob, you are a Marine. You tell somebody about that kind of stuff, and they'll say exactly why you're paralyzed. You're just too touchy-feely for the Marines or you really DID go insane, didn't you? So I kept it to myself for the year after my discharge.

I wished the war could be a distant memory, but it was permanently burned into my brain. About twenty years ago, the drug cartels that nearly ran the entire country of Colombia decided to venture into Venezuela to get more land to grow their marijuana, poppy and coca plants. They wanted more room to make the drugs and ship them to wherever the demand was. This basically destroyed the US's relationship with both Colombia and Venezuela, since Venezuelan officials pretty much folded like a bad poker hand when the drug cartels moved in. But who was gonna do anything about it if the smoking barrel of a gun was their way of logic? Even the police force was under the drug lords' control. There'd be no questions, no chances for the resistance to back off. The traffickers would just shoot, and that was it. The drug cartels certainly knew how to use force to get people to stay quiet about them. And to make them even more intimidating, they'd just kill random people for no reason to show they really weren't messing around. Police officers, civilians, foreign officials, tourists, military, you name it, someone in each type of group had died thanks to the drug lords.

And these people didn't just die. The drug cartels brutally murdered their victims and dismembered them. For the cartels, killing was almost an art form. Like a stylistic horror movie. High-ranking officials like mayors, ambassadors and rival drug lords routinely found severed heads on their doorsteps. Or people found brutalized neighbors hung by piano-wire nooses from lampposts. Nobody bothered to clean the mess up either. Not when it meant going outside. The cartels were smart enough to lie hidden but waiting. Waiting for that first sucker to try to get the bodies down from the lampposts. One dead body led to five or six more people being killed by gunfire. It was all intimidation, and it worked too. People eventually figured out that having the stench of decay floating around was better than becoming targets.

This type of house arrest was rampant in Venezuela. Drug cartels basically lay siege to neighborhoods, claiming them as their own. Most of the time, people weren't any safer in their houses. The cartels seemed to enjoy kicking down peoples' doors for no apparent reason and killing all the inhabitants inside. Then they'd just leave the dead to rot.

This had been going on for about two years before the US decided to intervene. So was it any wonder that dysentery and cholera were running amok in Venezuela?

Enter the US Armed Forces. And me. We were there to bring back peace and quiet, especially in Caracas, since that was the city the drug lords were after. They were smart enough to go for the capital of Venezuela so that the government would collapse if they succeeded. And come hell or high water, they did. On top of that, the people in the drug cartels were incredibly smart. You don't just get good at drug dealing by being stupid. They knew how to stay hidden, how to bribe their way out of trouble. They knew exactly what to do when they got caught with red hands. There was nothing that could prepare me for the guerrilla tactics that they used for the entire eight months I was there. Every day, I was on edge, trying my damnedest to figure out whether the guy I was staring at was really just a civilian or a drug trafficker. They all looked the same to me, with that don't-mess-with-me expression. And I only had a split-second to decide. Needless to say, I came back to the US a disheveled nervous wreck. And a paraplegic. Diagnosed with "mild post-traumatic stress disorder." I was still alive, but I wasn't sure if it was any better than being dead. Most of my fellow Marines came back in body bags. If it wasn't because of the gunfire and shrapnel, it was because of disease. Venezuela had become the cesspool of the world.

Paraplegia has this profound effect on its victims. They get to live in a wheelchair for the rest of their lives. They're as tall as everybody else's waists. In a word: it sucks. With all of the wonderful advances in modern medicine, I could get myself fixed. They could fix a broken spine. Make me walk again. Oh, wait. The money part. Yeah, veteran's benefits won't cover for that operation. Not in this economy. Not only is it too expensive, but it's also considered a "cosmetic surgery." Insurance-wise, that translated to having to pay for the entire operation myself. So I get to live in a wheelchair. Forever. Did I tell Tommy about this? I know it's been a year since the injury, but did he know? I couldn't believe I wasn't closer to him than this. He was my identical twin brother, after all.

Tommy was in some top-secret program for a massive corporation. He was planning to be shot light-years into space. To Pandora. I had heard about it here and there. The news services love to run clips about Pandora. People always took an interest because it was green. Green everywhere. My idea on why people were so interested in Pandora was because it was something they had never seen before. They wanted a way out of this hellhole we were living in now. I never really paid attention to it, but I never could go somewhere without hearing about Pandora. Most discussions were Pandora this and Pandora that. Even so, it was all kind of interesting anyway. Tommy never could tell me what he was up to, just that he was going to Pandora and he would lose all contact with me for the next decade or so. All I knew was that he was training really hard for this mission. He could have been a hell of a Marine, but he chose to earn a Ph.D. in anthropology. At least anthropology was safer than being on the front lines of a war.

The corporation Tommy worked for was called the RDA. Resources Development Administration, I think. Whatever it was, it had a huge monopoly over the entire world. Heck, it even had a monopoly on Pandora. They had helped bring the Earth down to pocket-size with all of the advances in technology. Someone could hop on a bullet train in New York and get to London in just over an hour using a trans-Atlantic tunnel. They were planning on building a trans-Pacific tunnel and balking at the cost and engineering. Well, until they found out what Pandora had to offer. Some rock that could solve all of Earth's problems, as it was advertised. So they funneled all of their money into space travel and things like that. I had pieced together an idea of how we came to know about Pandora through all of the news footage and the media's biased coverage of it all. Even a dummy like me could tell it was biased, so I guessed the RDA had control over the media, too.

Scientists had found out about Pandora about thirty years before I was born. I'm twenty-three right now, so that would make it known to us for just over fifty years. They had sent probes over ten years before that to explore the Alpha Centauri system, because it was our nearest neighboring star. The only reason I knew that fact was because it comes on the news every night. It's been pounded into my head with a broken hammer. The scientists found that Pandora is a lot like Earth, simply because they found vegetation growing. They also found continents, oceans and even more vegetation. Oh, and did I mention mountains? How about floating mountains? The scientists found that Pandora was home to a crazy expensive rock they called a superconductor. This was the rock that was gonna solve Earth's problems. They've been bringing it back for about three years or so, but all I could tell was that it didn't solve any of our problems. But censorship is a wonderful thing if you've got money, so all we hear is that this rock is the best thing ever known to mankind. The scientists of the world call this rock a "room-temperature superconductor," which I think means it has a really low resistance to electricity at room temperature. When they started bringing the superconductor back to Earth, the RDA immediately finalized plans for a trans-Pacific tunnel, like they had wanted. Now, the journey from Los Angeles to Tokyo took a little less than two hours, thanks to the Pandoran rock. So the world was officially pocket-sized, which made everyone believe any problems were in the past.

I wished the RDA or whoever would listen to people like me, because we always saw things in black-and-white. Even though the superconductor was amazing, the pollution on Earth wasn't decreasing. People were still fighting over pointless tracts of land nobody cared about. There were still terrorists bombing and killing everything they could reach because their religion taught them it was good to kill for their god. I figured they'd eventually start bombing the ocean tunnels. Then all hell would definitely break loose. So how was this superconductor supposed to stop the pollution, wars and terrorism? But the scum of the world wasn't important, even if they all had the same voice. Mega-corporations could just ignore them, simply because they had the money. That was the problem with the RDA. Since they never really did anything to help the common person, I grew to hate them. They never improved my world. And yet they called our little planet more livable than ever. I wondered if it was more livable than Pandora.

Eventually, the scientists and RDA decided to send people to Pandora to see what was really going on. And they found animal life. Or whatever you call aliens that move. But wait, it gets better. They found intelligent life. The news services keep showing a picture of a lanky blue-skinned human-looking animal holding a bow and arrow. The animal looked female. I'm pretty sure all the men on Earth wanted to hook up with her. She was beyond drop-dead-gorgeous. They call these "people" the Na'vi. They've got tails, and their faces look a little more like a cat's. The noses are flat, and there's no bridge between the eyes. Their ears are pointed, also like a cat's, but they're about where you would expect them to be if they were human: on the sides of the head. Oh, and their eyes are golden. Their body build is a little different than ours. I'm not sure if they are the same height as we are, but their waists are narrow and their shoulders are very wide, compared to their hips. Even so, the Na'vi look really lanky, but built.

Occasionally, the news services ran specials on the Na'vi language. I never paid attention on what the news services were teaching, but the important thing I learned was that the Na'vi could talk like you and I do, even if it was in a different language.

I thought Tommy had a really cool opportunity. Not only to see these people up close and personal, but at the very least, he'd get away from the problems of Earth for a while. After the news services had brainwashed me about Pandora, I felt kind of jealous that he'd be able to get out of this living hell that we were in on Earth. I figured I'd never get the chance to do anything like this. Ever. I wasn't qualified in any way to even think about going to Pandora, simply because I didn't have a pair of working legs.

But who was I fooling? I learned very quickly that being in a wheelchair shouldn't slow me down. I could pass any test a man could pass. All I needed was an opportunity. I might have been discharged from the military, but the attitude never left me. There was no such thing as an ex-Marine.

I had realized during the year after my discharge that I had gone to Venezuela just to fight. I didn't know what I was fighting for. They kept giving me that argument about how we were "fighting for freedom" and so forth. And they were right. Freedom doesn't come free, ladies and gentlemen. But I went to Venezuela with no clear goal in my mind. I was there just to help keep the drug cartels and the guerilla fighters at bay, trying to help some other country keep itself afloat. Because they told me to. And I had no choice. Over the course of that year, I realized what I was looking for in life: something to fight for. I wanted something worth living for.

While I was searching for that reason, life drudged on. All the days were molding into each other. It was the same routine every day. Wake up, breakfast, try to find work until lunch, lunch, maybe an interview here and there, dinner and unwind for the evening, sleep, blah, blah, blah. Interviews never went well, simply because I was "disabled," as they put it. But I learned very quickly that disabled is someone who quits. I was only "less-abled." I wanted everyone to shut up about what they thought I couldn't do. But you don't have much clout when you're as tall as everyone else's waist.