Alas, we meet again, my fellow fans/writers.
First and foremost, I hope that everyone has enjoyed my first fanfic, WALLY: The Novelization, Humanized!, intended it to be the first full take on the complete humanization of the film, and as a finished one too. It was an idea that had been nagging in my brain ever since I saw the movie and read almost all fanfics about it. So I hope you enjoyed the most touching space opera of the romance of Wall-E and Eve in human form.
Now…this is my newest installment to the humanization story, my second fanfic as well.
This story is the beginning before the beginning…of the film. A look into the secret message we've all seen in Chapter 25 of the film and the Novelization: General Order A113.
This is a one-shot short story that ties with the humanization, an idea that popped into my head while writting the original fanfic chapter of Auto's attempted mutiny, about the message he showed the Captain, of Shelby Forthright's failure with Operation Cleanup. This idea is about what has happened to Forthright before and after that very last recorded footage of a dead Earth, set seven centuries before Wally ever sets foot aboard the Axiom.
We shall explore in this essay from my head that takes us deeper into the musings of Forthright about his deeds, good or bad, before and after the Trash Crisis. We shall look into the history and details of the rise and downfall of Buy N' Large as a planet-wide government, the source that lead to the contamination and abandonment of mankind's home planet, and the onset of events that lead to the film.
Think of this as a prologue bridge that connects the rest of the story, like how the Animatrix short 'Second Renaissance' provides the prologue for the Matrix trilogy, or how Halo: Contact Harvest connects the rest of the Halo universe and games. In fact, this story was originally supposed to be a one-shot for Halo: Reach after i saw the trailer, but it seemed rather counter-intuitive such content of the story in mind was too in parallel with the Fall of Reach book. So, after writing the last message from BnL in chapter 25 of the novelization, this seemed like a rather better idea.
I'm sure everyone may have expected that i did a one-shot of 'Burn-E', i will eventually, but i can only write one at a time, and whatever first comes to mind.
This short fanfic is the first of many other expansions and AUs i have planned for the humanized Wally universe, i have yet to have them drafted but i will see to it that they are completed.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own Wall-E, Pixar Animation Studios and Andrew Stanton does. Rated T for language, violence, and apocalyptic themes. But hey, we all learn about these things eventually in our lives. And also part of the disclaimer is that everything depicted in this story is entirely fictional, and does not represent the opinon of either myself or anybody else associated with this story. Its entirely fictitious, so just enjoy it:) And so, without anything else to address...
BnL CORPORATE COMMAND AUTHORITY ORDER 09999-1A: GENERAL ORDER A113
-THE LAST TRANSMISSION-
...
Buy N' Large World Headquarters, Washington D.C., Cleanup Sector NA-002, Earth
1624 hours, June 27th, 2110 A.D. (695 years before the film…)
The air was thick with one hundred degree heat, mixed with carbon monoxide, lead aerosol, regolith particles, sulfur, and a century's worth of fossil fuels exhausted into the atmosphere with nowhere else to go, mixed with a planet-wide concoction of impurities. Chemicals, burnt gases, and evaporated remains of compacted and combusted plastic, metal, wood, and organics; and who knew what else could be in the air, as much as anyone could guess what was in the garbage.
No storage to keep the polluted air, no ventilation to rid of it, no endless supply of lithium hydroxide to scrub it, no plants left to photosynthesize it. Just like the garbage, it couldn't be dealt with; so why bother?
The breeze blew to Shelby Forthright's feet and kissed his sweat-drenched face, but moving air that's this dusty and polluted, it felt unbearable and nearly un-breathable to be blasted with such air.
Maybe it was nature's way of saying it rightfully doesn't like me. The disgraced CEO cynically mused, his skin hurting like hell as he stood at the outdoor presidential podium impatiently waiting for a technical crew trying to rig the holo-cameras for a subspace broadcast.
He tried to brush the accumulating dust off of his sweaty and grizzled brow underneath his gas mask, but it felt like abrasive sandpaper rubbed into his already sun-burnt skin, adding further irritation to his already overstressed being, physically and mentally.
"Can you guys hurry the fuck up or what?"
Adding to the stress and heat, Forthright bashed out at the two man tech-crew.
"Almost done sir, please be patient." One technician replied rather sternly, he was thin even in his hazmat suit, and had been working furiously to get the delicate camera to work again after five years of maintenance neglect and hostile environmental conditions.
"Well just in case, do hurry, or else we won't have to worry about patience, wouldn't we?" Forthright retorted.
The tech officer didn't respond, but rather looked at his commander-in-chief warily, fixing subspace communications gear is not as easy as it looked, and Forthright couldn't care less when it came to impatience. He had to get this job done right or else the message could not be sent out, but considering the circumstances, he speeds up his progress just a little.
Accompanying the CEO was a large platoon's worth of heavily armed bodyguards that surrounded a hundred meter perimeter around the capitol building. Each soldier was clad with Nuclear-Biological-Chemical (NBC) suits, and further armored with Kevlar padding, bulletproof vests. The guards surrounding the Capitol were outfitted with riot control gear, transparent-steel shields, tear gas cartridges, sonic stun guns, electroshock batons, and flash bangs. Most soldiers were equipped with nonlethal weapons, while some wielded everything from small arms pistols, to pump-action shotguns and automatic rifles. And a couple were armed with long-range sniper rifles that lined the roof of the Capitol
Standing alongside the small army and the CEO was a couple dozen of board-of-state directors, chief advisers, a handful of senators and bureaucrats that was all that remained of the Buy N' Large corporate government; all were clad in the same survival gear and body armor as their leader, just as impatient as he was to escape.
The prize that was being protected along with the remnants of a world government was an awaiting starliner Return Vehicle that stood ready to launch near the base of the building, assigned to take the remaining heads of state off-planet and rendezvous with its home ship, the BnL.S.S. Enterprise (BnLSS-27000X-SSO), currently in a parking orbit behind the far side of the Moon, undetectable from the ground tracking stations on Earth. It was the CEO's own capitol office in space, the newest and probably final central government location of humanity's fleet of ships that it will join with to forever sail the heavens; it was also known as Starliner One whenever the CEO himself was onboard.
But that was yet to be done until the last order was sent out from the ground.
Forthright could just stand by and let his sub-ordinates do their jobs, impatient as he is now, the technician was somewhat right. While the CEO didn't know anything about interstellar communications, he will at least let them do their jobs to the fullest of their abilities to get the message across. But he wished they could go just a tad bit faster.
He didn't have time to ponder over his inconveniences or how much time they had left; he had a message to send out as soon as his staff could get the damn broadcasting gear running again, and get this emergency general order over with.
It had to be done in a thorough manner, meaning no details could be left out for the ships so they would have all the necessary information to stay away from Earth. But in the back of his mind, he wanted to do this fast. Not because of the approaching wind surges creeping south-ward over Maryland towards the DC area, bound to stir up a category-5 sandstorm that could kill them all.
No, he wanted to get this done with and get out of the city and off of this planet before they get to him first; the cleanup workers. The remains of the two hundred million randomly selected employees of Buy N' Larges' ultra-market janitorial departments that stayed behind with the heads of the company to clean an entire planet in the last five years time. Five years of the general population living in space-fairing paradise spas while the lowest classes of humanity were left to pretty much clean an entire planet to make it habitable, just short of terraforming it all together.
Forthright dared not to remember what the cleanup workers had to live through in those five years, and dared not to think the sad thing about how most likely that the workers will be spending the rest of their lives here in this shithole; living in almost a hundred-fold more amounts of pain and irritation of breathing this air. Unlike him, safe in his airtight NBC suit, with its extremely comfortable environmental filtration system, with his rations of fresh water and food, and a whole starship filled with millenniums worth of essentials, what did the cleanup workers have?
They had nothing to filter out the shit in the air they breathe with every breath. On top of breathing basically poisoned air, they also had no way to shield themselves from the raw sunlight that bore down upon them, the protective ozone layer long depleted by the world's century long reign of negligence.
Or more appropriately, by the company itself, since Buy N' Large was basically the world up until now, once the largest private company that had become the first and only governing body of Earth. A corporatocracy that unified all cultures and societies under a consumer goods retailing mega-corporation that had started out as a family-owned supermarketing buisness that grew far above and astronomically beyond the expectations of it's founding, of destined to having the greatest impacting influence of all time.
Forthright began as an aspiring superintendant and somewhat more of a persistent and picky leader than a manager at the time of it's creation, immediately ascended through it's corporate hierarchy with his well renouned enthusiasm and his vast and brilliant ideas to could not only change the company as it was, but to change the world with it as well; noting the expansive growth BnL was given to it's unmatched performance on the market, Forthright made it his long term goal to change the world with this store.
Slowly the company became a highly profitable orginization with natural disaster relief suppliers as events around the world became more unstable, mainly concerning energy demands and economic struggles throughout the early decades of the new millenium, and incredibly cheap consumables avaliable to almost anyone, including the third world.
From the company's founding in 2015 by Forthright's immensily wealthy family before Shelby was even born, to him becoming CEO in 2045 after inheriting from his family's passing, what started off in one country, then spread to another, then across continents, and across the world in a matter of years, Buy N Large has been involved in so many world events and economics, it was granted the title of mega-corporation. Having a store in almost every country that managed retailing and governemt supply of populations in most undeveloped societies. It even had it's own research and development department to develop its own products, helping deliever things such as liquified food, holographic entertainment, and even working on new means of scientific breakthroughs and how to put them to use, such as electromagnetically leviating hover-chairs, as one BnL inventor thought up of to make easier use of transportation, along with liquid food supplying the human body with all the nutrients it could possibly need, and these inventions had earned BnL quite alot for providing cheap and immediate needs for transportation and food in disaster reconstruction, providing for the unwealthy, and aiding in building in the undeveloped societies with these new technologies that made BnL sor above the highest and most widely known retailers in the western world. But with Forthright now in the place of it's highest power and having enough gross domestic product to form a corporate hierarchy similar to a small governing body and for being involved in enough aids for world disaster relief, Forthright decided it would be the time to rise up the challenge of changing the world when the opportunity arrised.
Given the circumstances of the time, if he hadn't changed things at all, the world still would have changed into something terrible, for history always played itself out, as it did for the degrading world of the mid-21st century.
Lead by then thirty years young and arrogant Shelby Forthright himself, Buy N' Large made its mark in history as the global power in the 2050s when the corporation was large and influential enough to earn a voice within the United Nations, to help create a peace between fragile alliances of the then confederated countries that formed during after the everlasting armistice of the War on Terror. They were the Commonwealth of Eurasia, the African & Australian Protectorates, the People's Republics, and the United States of North & South America; and despite the pain-staking efforts they have made to accomplish ending terrorism and bringing stability to all corners of the globe together, had threatened to go against themselves for the worlds most precious natural resource at the time: oil.
The crisis for what little petrol was left on the planet had taken extremely deep pitfalls throughout the early 21st century; extraction and processing disasters, depleted reserves, and fewer discoveries of newer deposits from accelerated consumption rates had in turn made the price of transportation and electricity almost unaffordable to the even the most affluent citizens. Economic domains were crippled by such inflation that they were deprived of a means to bring food and warmth to their people, and had brought many cooperative societies down to widespread civil unrest in even the most developed of countries.
During the late 2040s, with the last shallow reservoirs lying on shared territories, it became the final straw of global cooperation as heated disputes over jurisdiction of drilling in the lands sparked distrust among the those who drilled the oil, wondering if those who did were willing to share it or just take it for themselves. Slowly but surely, distrust turned into animosity, then from animosity into hostility and then, as feared, into violence.
Incidents over desperate control of the lands had lead to border clashes; and just after one reported death or two, the resulting international outcry had finally resorted to threats of military action if those reservoirs were not surrendered, in return came the promises of retaliation from one another.
What were the former alliances of the western world had fractured into enemies amongst themselves, waiting to blow the crisis wide open into a full-scale world conflict. It seemed like it was going to be an inevitable fight that would mean an uncertain, but a dark and deathly future for the human race.
But that future was avoided when Buy N' Large's scientific department, with the help of Forthright's funding, made breakthroughs that caught the attention of the warring nations with the inventing and pattening of fully-functional nano-replicative manufacturing and D-T magnetic-inerta confined nuclear fusion in 2051.
With the worlds primary problems completely solved overnight with the new-found, infinitely renewable energy and resources, the world suddenly forgot it's differences and rejoiced unlike any other period before, almost unbelieving that what could have been a third world war has been averted by a corporation figurehead that started off as a supermarket tenant.
The new technology was shared across the world and in return, the age of dependency on fossil fuels ultimately ended. Countries were freed from the burden of bickering for oil, and from spending their dwindling financial systems on distribution of energy and food for their people. Buy N' Larges' stock and investments exploded as the world's economies blossomed, old factional hatreds faded, and international commerce was re-established with every government on Earth. Forthright, his scientists and the company itself won the Nobel Peace Prize; and Forthright won the position of Secretariat of the UN Security Council, and title of Man-Of-The-Century by the world media.
Using his virtually unlimited wealth, fame, and his position of peacekeeping powers, Forthright permanently ensured world unification when he officially ratified the cease-fire between the superpowers which included their transfer of sovereignty to the United Nations itself after he 'purchased' the world power's consent with trillion dollar price tags. As Security-General during the integration of the world governments and their territories on all seven continents as a single state, Forthright had become de facto leader/owner of the world.
With his company and the newly-created planetary government under his sole possession, Forthright decided to combine the two, seeing it as a complete corporate government overhaul. He used the titular positions of the corporate latter into the former UN's organizational assembly branches, drafted a constitution based off of that of the old United States even using the same capitol city of Washington DC as the global headquarters, and the European Union's legislative council. He decided to keep his title as Corporate Executive Official and made the name 'Buy N' Large' the title of the world governing body.
By 2053, Shelby Freddrick-Willard Forthright had completely brought the entire world together under one banner, that the world could henceforth live as a whole rather than divided. He ultimately stopped World War Three from breaking out and united all of the human nations as one; and had become the most widely praised and looked upon human on Earth. He had done it, just like always wanted to change the world for the better like he wanted so many years before.
His idea of an entire planet under the control of a consumerist-capitalist retailer seemed like a somewhat good cause for a world government.
It predominantly meant global peace, that there would be no full-scale conflicts between bickering nations over resources that lay inconveniently beyond their borders and the necessity called for bloodshed, while Buy N' Large's world governing meant it was for everyone, where all land, water, and air was shared under one controlling body. It also meant equality, one government, one set of rules, and rules based off of western-based constitutions meant a comfortable living was a civil right; and at average it was an exclusive way of life for the majority of the world population, meaning almost everyone was living like a millionaire.
The biggest change in the function of the world was its new-found reliance on technology; with it's role in ending war and uniting the human race, lead to its growth of newer milestones in advancement. It was part of everything from nanotech-replication that supplied people with any amount of edibles that effectively ended world hunger, regenerative medical miracles that lead to averaging life-spans into the 140-180 year range, and to the mastery of spaceflight with the discovery of the secrets behind what made alcubierre warp and slipstream based faster-than-light travel possible.
But of all the technological wonders of Buy N' Large, nanotech-based replication was so widely used it become a free form of manufacturing that produced anything at will, it turned any forms of raw matter into consumables. It was essentially a perpetual energy/resource technology in the world that could serve all purposes of consumption. It produced food, commodities, goods, etc. With these technologies, it put all forms of production, harvesting, and even economics out of business.
With the need for acquisition of money absent, now that practically everything made had become quite literally 'free', it meant there was no further need for people to give their lives for feeding their families, no need for people to stress their minds or bodies over manual labor. It meant all human requirement for the common goal of a functioning civilization was ceased, no need for workers, no need for control nor peacekeeping, no need of managing, no need of anything. It seemed like they had everything humanity could ever want.
Life of the late 21st century had briefly become a paradise on this Earth, a half-century of unperpetrated peace and prosper unlike any other in history. A second Renaissance...
A paradise, but a brief one.
For the high-life for every human being came with consequences; costs that nobody could possibly imagine, a world problem that had long been neglected for so long it didn't seem possible to coupe or adapt. The beautiful future of the paradise shattered into ugliness and uncertainty by the Trash Crisis.
When from the 2080s until the 2100s, everyone slowly but surely noticed where everything they consumed or used was piling up all around them. If there was another thing that was left out of human control from living in blissful ignorance of an consumerist-ruled planet, was a portion of governing the planet itself, which included resource & waste management as the by-products of perpetual replication (thanks again to Forthright's disregard to those issues at the time).
As birth and consumption rates skyrocketed, unattended landfills exponentially overflowed, and spread into cities and across entire landmasses and into the oceans as well. No one bothered with what was first an inconvenience then until it became life threatening, medically by just taking one gulp of the poisoned air was enough to cause respiratory problems, and as a safety hazard being buried by it all. Even as isolated incidents and reports of people dying from the problem increased, no one spoke up about it or did anything until it was too late when the trash piles and tainted air was all around Forthright in the Capitol, and the image of the green land on Earth no longer recognizable from space as it looked phlegm brown and yellow; it was something he never expected to see, and never expected to see any hope in what he saw.
By 2099, what was supposed to mark the end of the first century of a unified human civilization, was instead left tainted by their decimated and ruined planet.
Forthright and the staggering Board-of-State directors thought of a solution, never deviating from corporate policy that coexisted with governing priorities: customers (people) first. But instead of finding a simple way out, they were instead faced with a grim reality.
They didn't nearly have enough replicator tech to break down the molecular structures of every single piece of garbage on the Earth at the rate it grew. They couldn't dump everything into the oceans nor lift it onto rockets and send them flying into the sun to burn up. There was simply no way to clean up a whole planet worth of trash that covered all thirty percent of the planet's surface in at least one meter of discarded plastic, aluminum, paper, scrap, raw human sewage, destroyed ruins, etc. But the only way they could at least make a difference in altering the planet's environment would have to require was with man power, a work force that matched the population of whole countries (in the hundreds of millions), that would have to manually haul every piece of garbage into what available compactors, replicators, furnaces, or landfills that could accumulate it all. If all things were considered to be put into use for cleaning up the planet, it would take at minimum five years, give or take a decade or two more.
But the survivability of the humans was the darkest and most sobering factor that hindered that solution. Since the air was so poisonous that it could cause wide-spread pandemic, from lethal pathogenic plagues and sterility if exposed to an unadaptive environment in the required cleanup timeline. Census calculations estimated that if the environmental conditions of the Crisis went on the way it was, the birth rate could be over taken by the death rate, and populations will be dying off by the tens of millions over the next century. By then, Earth will be virtually uninhabitable and the human population will plunge from twelve billion down to a few scattered million by 2200, and the rest was left unsaid to slow but inevitable decline into extinction.
Facing the possible collapse of civilization on an already dying planet, if the world knew that the human species was doomed in the next century, everything would be undone by itself. Everything would come apart like he couldn't imagine.
The collapse of order, shattering of commerce and the peace; an entire planet would plunge itself into anarchy. Shattering the blissful paradise, the world spiltting into fragments of people desperate for prolonging survival, much like the fractured world Forthright changed many decades before. But it was all about to come down and go back to the way it was, a dark future, but unlike the past of being uncertain, they knew what was bond to be: The end of the world. And it would all be his entire fault.
Forthright refused to let that revelation break the spirits of his world citizens, the world doesn't need to know if something could be done about it, and he'll put his best face forward to keep things peaceful. It was part of his nature to find a way to cheer people up; telling them everything was going to be alright, like he had always done.
He was known as the endlessly optimistic leader that outshined any world leader throughout history, who always had a smile on his face, even facing the most impossible or frustrating tasks anyone could face, he always kept up his spirits by bringing up everyone else's. Arrogant and stubborn he was sometimes (which was among the reasons he disregarded the issue of pollution in the first place), he always insured that everyone was satisfied, that everyone was comfortable, and that life was good. He was viewed as the world leader that could never let anything bad happen to anyone. That was the prime source of his widely cherished leadership that lasted through the latter half of the century; the good old days.
But now, faced with the not-so-distant possibility of the extinction of humanity, Forthright had to find a way to not only ensure its survival along with the planet itself no matter the cost, but he also wanted to make sure the cost didn't include his pride, his position, or possibly, his own life.
This was a terrifying thing for him; Forthright never backed down from taking on a company problem or multiples at once, but with the unparalleled burden of saving the human race which always entirely looked up to him as an all-mighty entity, it was enough to make him just run away from it all. To leave it all like his ancestral farmers did, migration. Whenever problems plagued their crops, they fled to another fertile land to start over—
And that thought of running away from it all was what created the BnL Starliners. If they couldn't survive on this planet, they didn't have to. They could survive off of this world.
The human race could survive without massive losses of life, in space on an armada of state-of-the-art starships that were originally built by BnL's Aeronautical and Space Administration program for colony exploration missions to the outer planets of the Solar System and beyond.
And thanks to the fact that these ships were already built in large numbers with the appropriate means of long-term survival in zero gravity, cosmic dangers of radiation and micrometeorites, and were all equipped with replication technology that offered its passengers anything and everything they could ever want, and the designs were modified to carry hundreds of thousands of people each; the luxury space-fairing equivalent fleet of Noah's Arks was born.
Though the plan seemed initially sketchy at first, many of Forthwright's political and scientific advisers cited that most people of Earth might be unwilling to just abandon everything they knew, to go fly off into deep space, on starships that were never properly tested, and have the entire world cleaned up somehow in five years. 1,825 days total time.
But the advisers also knew that this was the most critical and desperate time in human history, greater than the near petrol feuded nuclear war; and this crisis that affected every human being on the planet won't just end with the collapse of one country or another, but the fate of a species was at stake. So this time called for extreme measures if need be, regardless if the population would like it or not. And in that thought, the designers of the BnL Starliners made sure of another thing: to make their passengers content with leaving, to make their temporary lives aboard these ships as comfortable and distracting as possible to ensure populace stability.
Thus after a couple years of brainstorming, with the problem of saving the majority of the population solved and the means to carry out the clean up drafted, the solution was decided right then, and christened as one massive planet-wide effort: Operation Cleanup.
So in 2102, Forthright addressed the world of the 'problem' but assured them like any other global emergency; it would be taken care of in a professional and efficient manner, and would not put the people under any expense of it. The population would not have to live on the planet to suffer the effects (which were heavily censored, against the wishes of Forthwright's scientific advisers but lost in favor of BnL sugar-coating the situation for the public's sake), and instead, each and every citizen was given free sanctuary on a luxury cruise in space on Buy N' Larges' newly completed Starlines, a fleet of 48,000 luxurious starships, the largest collection of moving objects ever created by human craftsmanship. Interstellar spacecraft that ranged from small Genesis-class starcruisers that carried only a hundred thousand, to the massive city-sized flagships like the Axiom, Exodus, or Queen Marry III that could carry over a million people each.
These ships, which were assembled and readied for launch in their designated population centers whom which they would carry, were loaded with everything they would need to last five years or more, from spa treatments, exclusive suites, dazzling entertainment, wide enough space to move around, grow, even to raise families, and build lives for themselves…until it was time to return.
Amazingly, everyone agreed to go, to just get away from the unfamiliar and frightening reality of the planet dying.
While required by all citizens to go, it was roughly estimated that a large work force had to stay behind. So with a large number drawn up by Forthright's reluctant advisers, two hundred million of the best and most physically fit manual laborers within Buy N' Larges' janitorial departments, male and female, were genetically selected by the government's central profiling database, and were ordered to stay behind to carry out the operation. All would be split up across the world in sectors assigned to each continent and based off of the most heavily polluted areas in need of clean up.
Along with a manual laboring work force to clean up the mess was a collective of people who were to make the planet biologically habitable again. For thousands of ecological specialists, mostly mass-quantities of top-class university graduates, doctors, scientists, farmers, and environmentalists (that ironically were called upon their need despite being ignored by Buy N' Large's reign) were selected for the research and re-engineering of Earth's destroyed biosphere. For once sectors were cleaned up, they would reseed them with biotechnologically-engineered seeds and seedlings that could survive the harsh conditions of drought, malnourished soil, and carbon dioxide-ridden air to replenish Earth's diminished breathable atmosphere, provide gen-enged crops for food, and make plant and animal life florish once again; transforming the barren continents into fertile landmasses, making the Earth ready to sustain itself once the starliners have returned.
It all seemed impossible from the start, nobody or nothing could fix the mess this massive with what little resources Forthright thought could be used, to show that this Crisis could be solved as if it were an afterthought. Most workers were reluctant to stay behind and clean up an entire planet's mess their own government created while everyone else goes on an extended pleasure cruise.
In reassurance, Forthright himself promised to compensate them with lifetime rewards for all of their selfless efforts before and supposedly after the Crisis were to end, and extended the rewards for their families that would last for generations; on top of being declared heroes of humanity.
They agreed, mostly under the fact that since they were employed by Buy N' Large, they didn't have much of a choice; but kept Forthright to his word after the CEO himself agreed to stay behind with them along with some of his senior staff to participate in conducting the operation and reconstruction.
And so, from 2104 to 2105, the entire world population of twelve billion people boarded the starliners, launched into space and left Earth orbit into a cruise throughout the Solar System as the cleanup commenced as planned.
Aboard the luxury spacecraft, the people of Earth had found that paradise they thought they lost to the Trash Crisis, so much of the treasured automation of commodities and entertainment seemed even better than life on Earth before the Crisis. With every form of consumable entertainment and pleasures aboard the starliners in infinite quantities, they all soon forgot all about the crisis back down on Earth. They were too busy being lazy and dazzled by the endless horde of entertainment, they didn't even bother to check with the time of the cruise and the progress going down on the planet they left in the charge of Buy N' Large. They didn't care about when they had to leave the safety of the care-free executive cruise and go back to Earth.
But, the cruise journeys of humanity's ships shall continue on without them ever knowing if the pleasantries that were loaded on those ships were that good to ignore. The journey through the infinite of space possibly would never end not only because of it though.
The work was carried out in the five years Forthright had promised, but, slowly but surely Forthright gravely realized his underestimation of the serious Crisis, and how much his over-optimism cost humanity its home planet.
Five years, two hundred million workers, and miscalculated requirements would not heal the Earth.
It was already dead, and everything on it was dying from it as well. The rising temperatures and rapidly shifting climate zones had spread the chemically diluted air of the littered continents all over the planet. The decomposing trash sank into the soil; the contamination had severed all plant life of healthy nutrition to carry out photosynthesis, dying off and has left the animal kingdoms devoid of a food supply. In turn, the disappearance of plants killed off all animal life in the process; and all trashed or un-trashed lush green, animal inhabited lands that were left turned into rotting, dried up, deathly wastelands. In the aftermath of such desertification, the leftover loose earth and decomposed greenery became uplifted by violent winds, turning into hurricane force dust storm systems that inundated entire cities with clouds of rock and dead soil spanning hundreds of miles, burying them and transforming the artificial environments of sprawling megacities and their surrounding natural landscapes into Sahara-like dunes.
Oceanic currents carried the garbage's raw noxious chemicals throughout the northern and southern hemispheres; coral reefs and seabed life were unable to absorb so much lethal amounts of pollution and sewage, turning the seas into concoctions of poison and dead rotting sea-creatures. The toxic water of the oceans at the warm equator evaporated, and the deadly chemicals mixed with stratospheric convection streams already plagued with carbon monoxide from fossil fuels that were exhausted and had never faded over the century; the tainted air became even more deadly with ash and sulfuric ejecti from the feared and predicted super eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera in 2108, further hastening the destruction of the Earth's ecological systems with the pyroclastic burial of most of North America in ash and the sulfur circulating around the globe in the chemically altered air, with the introduction of the eruptions by-products into the deathly mix finally turning the stratosphere acidic.
The resulting atmospheric composition effectively ate away what little ozone was left; ultraviolet radiation from pure solar light literally baked the planet's surface that sometimes turned deep deserts, high mountains, and mid-oceanic locations into plus 200 F degree natural furnaces; almost hot enough to evaporate salt water, making the already lifeless forests of still-standing dead trees combust and burn all that was left, sending smoke and charred remains into the volatile global winds. The intense heat had made also caused tundra and ice sheets to melt everywhere, creating flash floods that solidified the sand dunes that buried the cities. The doomed population centers of a scattered civilization became forever lost to the Earth like modern Pompeiis at every human settlement near once icy-mountain terrains, and further accelerated the circulating pollution from ocean water evaporating into the atmosphere, then condensate as acid rain onto land, to the oceans and back into the atmosphere again. The perpetual hot also made fresh water rivers, lakes, and in-land seas boiled away into dried up nothingness, even the average ocean levels dropped as much as several tens of feet, exposing continental shelf sea-bed as new land that drastically altered the face of the planet beyond recognition, and beyond already lost hope of reversing.
Even a drop as little as six to as much as a hundred and fifty feet of the sea level extended the shorelines of Australia several hundred miles to assimilate the island of New Guinea or the Mediterranean shrinking to connect almost all of Europe's southern peninsulas and panhandles with North Africa, and land-bridged neighboring landmasses like Britain with France and Siberia with Alaska for the first time since the Ice Age. But these new land areas were unexplored, featureless like moonscapes and ultimately lifeless places just as scorched as the trash littered lands that still poured into the receded oceans; and the drop of the sea level effectively cut off circulating currents by the land bridges, this violently changed the distribution of the climate throughout the world, sending the airborne dust storms in haywire and erratic directions across the planet.
But the changes caused by the damage didn't stop there. The Earth itself reacted violently through numerous earthquakes, tsunamis, and more volcanic eruptions all over littered landmasses created by isostatic pressures, by the exponential weight of the garbage covering the surface of the Earth's crust, stressing the tectonic plates to be compressed and fractured; the planet itself was breaking apart beneath their feet.
With all this going on, the millions of workers and the planetary environmental specialist couldn't keep up with the rapid and deadly changes of the planet; the work force population slowly became decimated by natural disasters which no one had adequate anticipation or preparation for.
The desertification mixed with pollution lead to many deaths involving suffocation from severely carbon-choked or heat-scorched air to dying from falls or landslides from high winds of the continent-traversing sandstorms. Sandstorms and flash floods washed away many thousands of workers and destroyed many cleaned up areas where ever they struck, further stretching the strained need of manpower to complete the task of worldwide cleanup. Earthquakes lead to the destruction of more trash towers that were meant to be cut down and reprocessed for raw materials with what little replication technology was available, out of the rest used for the starliners. Each tower took so many workers' time, effort, and lives to make and lots of them were laid to waste; along with planted transgenic crops that were lost under the piles of collapsed garbage.
With every disaster that struck, lives and resources were lost that could not be replaced. With two hundred million workers that stayed to clean up, there was only enough provisions kept for the fives years it was supposed to take. But like the workers washed away by one disaster or another, food and clean water to keep the workers feed had become lost as well, making starvation commonplace; and even more common was fighting, the work force turning against each other, sparking famine wars for whatever they could get to survive.
Disease didn't help any, for the spread of deadly pathogens and viruses in the air leading to the spread of bubonic infestations, influenza, malaria, ebola, small pox, and further more diseases that had long since disappeared, and had arisen again when there was hardly any medicine left to combat them.
And the worst effect of the pandemics had all but destroyed the bioengineered plants that were painfully developed to give life to the planet, the largest technological accomplishment in the history of biology, only to be eaten and dissolved by the smallest organisms within the realm of that science.
So with all of that work gone, there was no hope of making the destroyed lands lively green again.
When 2110 rolled around, six months before the deadline when the starliners were supposed to return, there was hardly any work done that survived the natural disasters that proved to be cleaned up land. Not even half of the work force survived the harsh conditions and endless labor. And conditions became worse than ever before.
Within the twenty five years since the 2080s, after the Crisis had evolved into a cataclysm that had taken hold of the world biosphere, and turned mankind's very own homeworld into a hostile, deserted, poisoned, and carbon-excessive ecosystem akin to the unforgivingly lifeless environments of Venus, Mars, or Titan. In other words, it had become what everyone had feared: uninhabitable.
It was permenant now, the damage of such scale could not be undone.
Operation Cleanup had failed. Shelby Forthright had failed.
There was nothing more he could do, except leave the planet. Leave like everyone else had, and spend the rest of his life onboard a pleasure cruise with what was left of a world government, and his guilt for what he had done, and what he failed to do; or better yet, could have prevented from the beginning, if only. Not even acknowledging that he at least tried to fix all this brought any comfort, for this was all irreversable from the beginning, by his neglegence for thinking ahead.
But if anything more could be done in such hopelessness present Forthright was in, he had to let the other ships' crews know that they cannot return. Earth was no longer a habitable world and the rest of humanity will be forced to live in space for what could be for an eternity.
At least until a new homeworld could be found, while he only acted like he believed in the program that involved searching for photosynthetic life on exoplanets, he did harbor some amount of hope for the Extraterrestrial Vegetation Reconnaissance program that it would one day bring humanity back down to a solid surfaced world to start human life all over again; learning from his mistakes made on a long forgotten Earth and corporation to live freely again.
It seemed possible that if the people were content enough of leaving the excessiveness of their sloth lives, maybe they could start life anew on colonies by the starliners themselves. The ships were not only carnival cruise liners, but also overdesigned interstellar generation ships. Built to be more than capable of keeping secular passengers alive in the enclosed, self-sustaining, and sterile environment carrying populations worth of families and their descendants on a journey to reach other star systems, to seed life on new distant worlds. If they could do that with the amount of the starliners already leaving Sol, they could spread human civilization across the Orion arm, and maybe even across the Milky Way. There must be billions upon billions of stars and planets within the galaxy; how in favor are the odds of finding at least one world that's fit for supporting complex life?
It seemed like a promising future in the long run. IF the people were content to evolve from leaving the comfort of their ships, and even if there could be habitable planets to inhabit. Despite how far space exploration has come since Sputnik in 1957 A.D., despite after one hundred and fifty-three years of searching the stars with technological eyes that could see into the darkest places of the known universe, scanning exosystems up to one thousand light-years from Sol, not a single Earth-like world has been found. Not yet at least; but still, if humanity is going to set sail for a new homeworld, its going to be a very long, long, long odyssey to make to find something out there...But unlike Forthright, they will never give up.
And if that's all that's left he could do to save face and the continuity of mankind, might as well. He only wished he could do the same for the cleanup workers. Already a hundred million of them dead and the rest of them dying or succumbing to horrible injuries or illnesses.
There was only one starship left, and it was for the CEO and what is left of Buy N' Large; that's it. He will be forced to leave those unfortunate hundred million souls behind, unable to save them from a dead world. But as far as he was concerned, they were all dead since the day they were forced to see their families set sail for the sky, and will not be brought up in a ship that couldn't be spared, let alone allowed to spread the diseases amongst humanity surviving in space.
A hundred million workers already dead because of his ignorance, and a hundred million more about to die from disease, desperation, and the elements, all caused by his failure and his abandonment. All of them have worked and died in vain.
But for the good of the species and for himself, Forthright had to leave the Earth, and all those who worked behind.
And he must make sure that no one should ever return…
...
"Sir!…" The technician's voice shouted suddenly, breaking Forthwright's train of thought.
The tech stepped away from the holo-camera which now gleamed to life as a digitized teleprompter and recording lights came on.
"…the broadcasting equipment is fixed and ready to commence the order."
Forthright stood their dumbstruck for a moment, still recounting his thoughts; could be an effect of pushing ninety years old and still acting as an elected official for so long, remembering so much in times like these.
"Great, finally we might just make it out of here!" He exclaimed, he lost the track of time but knew that there wasn't much to begin with, now that he and the remaining of the Buy N' Large government was now fleeing this planet from the furious cleanup workers with a small window of opportunity now.
Who, at this point, may have realized that their leader was about to ditch them and leave them here to die.
The technical crew began typing commands frantically into the broadcasting control panels, information scrolling by incoherently as it processed how to send out the message.
"BnL FLEETCOM AUTHORITY ORDER priority settings put into place for immediate reception of the signal is set, sir." The tech replied.
"Have the signal directed for the Lunar Radioscopic Array and channeled for the most confidential starliner frequencies. Priority code: Black, First Officer eyes only."
"Yes sir."
A few seconds go by as they type as fast as they could into the computers, and, "Done sir, ready to broadcast at your command."
"Right then, lets get this done with." Forthright straightened his suit and wiped away all the sweat, dirt, and grime off his face, to look his best. Even though the message he had to get across wouldn't call for it. But now he could finally focus on what had to be done, his patience and what time they all had left was running out.
The other officials standing-by keep shooting glances between their CEO, the awaiting ship, and the ruined city in the distance, watching the horizon for any approaching storms of sand or angry mobs of workers threatening to attack them.
As the countdown timer for the broadcast began, Forthright contemplated briefly for everything he was going to say.
He was to send out an emergency corporate command authority directive codenamed: A113, to all ships that should supersede recolonization protocols and never return to Earth. He had to tell the high crews why and to be sure that their passengers nor any other non-essential crew should not be informed of the situation to suppress the risk of rebellion, to keep them preoccupied with their onboard paradises. Better for them to live and die in blissful ignorance than come to Earth to die slowly and painfully.
So this was to be treated as a top secret transmission, the last orders he is to give as CEO before he and his surviving officials join the rest of humanity in the infinite journey.
The technician gave the CEO all five fingers up, indicating the message will be commenced.
In…4…3…2…
- COMMENCING TRANSMISSION – 2110:06:27:16:26:17-
The Buy N' Large logo and jingle played over the broadcasting panel.
BUY N' LARGE!…IS YOUR SUPER STORE!…
…WE'VE GOT ALL YOU NEED!…
…AND SO MUCH MORE!...
That jingle, Forthright didn't like it too much when he was in office before the Crisis, before all this shit happened. But now, with so little time to get this done, his patience has reached its end with this annoying song.
"Just Cut It Off, Will Ya?" He shouted to the tech crew, startling them.
The background music stopped abruptly and Forthright looked into the camera, his image played back to him on the holo-screen. He noticed his lack of sleep and overstressing from the looks of his dark circled eyes and graying hair in his image. The weight of the situation bore down on his body, making him looking like he aged another fifty years.
Shelby Forthright, looking worse for wear but having a priority to handle, spoke into the microphone with a forced smile on his face.
"Uhh, hey there, first officers. Got some bad news…" Forthright paused to choose his words, it was unbearable for him to admit failure, but it had to be done.
"...Operation Cleanup has…well, uh...failed."
No matter how hard Forthright tried to keep a smile, he knew it was futile for the information he had to give.
"W-Wouldn't you know, two hundred million workers AND five years weren't able to reverse the rising toxicity levels, not even close...T-There's simply too much trash to possibly remove, and thus the work depleted our operation reserves to survive and carry out the task. But it seems there's nothing left we can do. The toxicity levels have rendered the entire planet unable to sustain human life."
He switched to positive wording, hoping to bring back a drop of his already drained optimism. "…Oh, darn it all we're going to have to…cancel Operation: Recolonize. So, uh…"
But he couldn't suppress the shame, humiliation, and remorse from the words he spoke, reminding him of how much of a failure this large meant for a species. Though he could only do as much as what could be done. He tried to voice it through hesitated sentences, his thoughts riddled with his emotions.
"…So uh…I herby order all vessels to just stay your present course, ummm…rather than try and fix this problem, it'll just be easier for everyone to remain in space. It's our only safe solution until we can find a new home world, if any."
Out of sight, some of the guards silently became further offended upon hearing the words of their CEO, seeing him dump his responsibilities as the source of the problem.
The winds began to pick up, the wind-driven storm system was approaching fast and ready to kick up dirt to the ship. The prediction was confirmed when the guards sighted the columns of dust and rubble along the northeastern horizon, about fifteen kilometers out, stretching high into the sky and rushing towards them like the hounds of Hell.
Judging from its distance and references of how fast it was moving along the horizon, they had about seven minutes to finish the broadcast and escape the fate of being buried among with the last intact city on Earth, the last trace of human civilization and its fruitless efforts to correct the dying Earth about to be swept away.
Just when the guards thought they should get everybody to hurry things up, something got the eye of one guard watching the approaching storm. As he focused his sights down from the horizon between skyscrapers and smaller buildings, down to the boulevards of the 'Global Mall' straight down to the Capitol, something else was moving towards them. It seemed like a mass of the whole street was moving. But it didn't seem right, somehow it looked more yellow and was riddled with strange moving dots.
A faint rumble was heard, rubble composed of shaking asphalt, the distant storm, and…footsteps; fast, determined, and furious footsteps. Like a stampede fleeing the stor—
The guard, adrenaline rushing through his veins, yells out. "Mr. President!"
His alarmed voice drew Forthright's attention from the broadcast to the surrounding area of the guarded capital, to the direction the guard was looking. And soon they were all gripped in fear.
The soft rubble built into a thunderous tremble, and turned into a mix of voices; angry, threatening voices that grew louder and louder. Then they realized what it was; thousands and thousands of savage, starving cleanup workers that all wore the exact same yellow coveralls as each other. They were desperately fleeing the approaching sandstorm in the distance, and coming after their cowering leader.
The workers spot the CEO from the distance, and even from afar, Forthright felt like they were going to burn holes in him where he stood.
The small force of armed guards with riot control gear rushed to stop them, guns at the ready; the government officials prepared to run for the ship. The majority of the tech-staff stayed with the equipment gear, to finish what the CEO started.
"Sir! We need to go, Now!" One of the advisers shouted.
Forthright turned briefly, hesitated and looked back into the camera frightened.
"N..not-not yet. We have to do this!"
In the background, the workers and the guard force clashed; all of them screaming they wanted the CEO himself, they wanted him dead.
Forthright gets back to finishing the message, half-panicking.
"Um, uh… o-Ok, I am herby issuing General Order Alpha One, One, Three. Ordering all second-in-command officers and their successors of every Buy N' Large starship must secretly alter all Earth-return protocols, purge any and all information of this operation's failure by any means necessary to safeguard the civil status quo aboard every starliner."
A guard gave way to the workers under failing strength to hold them off. He was run over to death as hundreds of fighting workers stormed the capitol stairway; the guards' line had broken.
Then, the sounds of automatic and semi-automatic weapons resound throughout the land.
The guards turned to lethal force and opened up on the workers; many of them dropped dead from the machine gun fire. Most of them were well built men and some women, most of them were faces Forthwright knew personally; and he can only watch as they got cut down by the auto-fire, and press on mindlessly after him.
As much as an upper hand the guards had, they had to reload. Seeing the opportunity to get past one while the rest fired, the murderous survival instincts in the numerically superior workers tackled the vulnerable guards with shovels; pick axes, or battering rams.
One by one as the guards gave inch after inch to the advancing workers, running low on ammo; they were soon pummeled into bloody pulps, despite even their most pleading of surrenders. The workers were killing everyone in their path, taking the murdered guards' weapons, and scrambled towards the Presidential Podium.
"Sir, Let's Get Outta Here! NOW!"
With the angry mob charging at the level below them up the Capitol's central stairway, the last of the broadcasting technical staff and Forthwright's personal guards retreated to the ship as fast as they could.
Forthright prepared to run; the workers were after him and are getting closer.
"Go to full automation and stasis of operating; keep all personnel and population in control and comfort, I don't care as long as it ensures the continuation of the human race, and do not under ANY circumstances—"
"THERE HE IS! KILL HIM!"
The bloodthirsty cries of over a thousand workers came after Forthright at the base of the podium's stair way, familiar faces once friends now after to murder him.
The camera tech removed the camera from it's stand and ran with it as Forthright too ran for his life to the ship, as fast as he could.
"SIR!" The tech held up the camera as they ran, his images jumping all over the place from running with workers just yards behind them, trying to kill them.
Forthright was running to escape certain death, but still had to finish the message. He manages to keep the camera trained on him as they sprinted in total fear.
"Go To Full Automation, Take Control Of Everything, And Do Not Return To Earth! REPEAT! DO NOT RETURN TO EARTH!-"
The workers suddenly grab him just when he was within reach of the Enterprise Return Vehicle. Having reached the ship, the workers cramped themselves inside; the sheer weight of so many people on the lifting structure disabled the rocket motors, sparks flew everywhere as the launching mechanisms shorted out. Guns opened fire inside the ship and silenced again, screams can from the inside of the vessel as the workers began their slaughter of the surviving governing personnel onboard. Some of the workers even started killing each other for inadvertently and irreparably disabling the ship, their only desperate means of escaping gone.
The camera falls to ground when the technician struggles, his screams of horror and cries for help go silent as the workers bash blow after blow to the back of the man's skull with a shovel, concaving his brain and killing him.
With the last of the guards, crew, and officials, brutally beaten to death, and the rest of the Buy N' Large central government killed, the human tidal wave swarmed Forthright, grabbed him everywhere and pulled.
"AAAAAAHHH!..."
His dying screams fade in the gurgling sounds of the mob tearing his body to bloody pieces, his limbs being ripped off as everyone tries to cause him as much pain as humanly possible. The last thing Forthwright ever sees amongst the crowd of faces he knew that were killing him was the face of one of his cleanup chiefs, Wilkinson E. Burtt, clumsy as he was, but was the most humble and faithful man to work at his side, looked on in feral anger and a glint of sadness as he pries the last of Forthwright's dismembered innards, then Forthright fades into death's sweet release.
The sandstorm, all but forgotten by the blind rage of the workers, had already reached the city and buildings already began collapsing to the ungodly onslaught of the blasting storm, the force of the impacting dust and rocks on the city structures was like being hit by flying walls of concrete. The thunderous crashing sounds of towers toppling is deafened by the roar of the angry storm engulfing the city center, the capitol disintegrating by the wall of dust blasting at two hundred kilometers per hour.
The workers scramble, taking what bits and pieces of the CEO's dismembered flesh with them for their desperate stores for cannibalism with them. But the storm is too fast and too powerful to run or hide from. The deadly clouds of earth engulf the mass of workers fleeing for their lives, but only to be killed either blown away or buried alive.
Somewhere among the blasts of wind and dust, Wilkonson Burtt realizes how hopeless he is now, noting how far into open terrain he had lost himself in.
Resigning to his fate, he cries out incoherently in despair, not only of he was going to die out here, but that he was left here to die to begin with in this shithole. His one and only appraised leader and friend abandoning him, his band-of-brothers-and-sisters work force, and most of all, his family.
For among the female workers was his lover, carrying his unborn child. They are currently safe in the northern sectors away from the storm, but their lives will not be what was supposed to be, especially for his baby who was conceived in hope for the world they hoped and worked so hard to rebuild. But will now be born into a world of hopelessness, of darkness, suffering, and death.
And his lover will be forced to raise him or her alone, to roam an apocalyptic, trash-ridden, desert planet; no hope for a future. Not for him, his child, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren, or any other descendants the Burtt name will have. Or of anyone, depending on how slow the human work force present on Earth will inevitably die out.
But then again, the human race has always adapted to whatever the Earth threw at them, as much as any species of life that ever existed on this planet. The evolutionary wonder of how the human race came to be. Humanity survived two hundred thousand years, through ice ages, super-eruptions, migrations, and even itself from its oldest practice known as war.
With all of the twelve billion humans in space, the continuity of humanity is ensured in the vastness of the cosmos. But with a hundred million people left on this Earth, it will take time, precautioned breeding, and extreme measures to ensure to not starve. But it may be possible to live on, a possibility Forthright never considered.
His child and future generations' lives will be dark and dreadful, but they will survive. They must. For him and for humanity...
The faint hope of his child's survival is Wilkonson's last thought before some hard piece of debris picked up by the wind, a holo-camera perhaps, flies at him at two hundred kilometers per hour. He doesn't fell a thing as the camera smashes through his face, killing him instantly.
His limp body and the destroyed camera were uplifted into the wind; landing and being buried somewhere else, never to be seen again.
The sandstorm continued until nothing stood standing, the last untouched human city and capitol of Buy N' Large, along with it's leader and ultimately the global corporation itself, was no more. Buried in dirt like the remnants of the wasted cities and the garbage, mankind's legacy on this dead planet.
But from the ruins all over the Earth, still remains the former Buy N' Large corporations' cleanup workers. Their futures are deathly and dark, untrusting and violent of one another like humanity has always been; but most of them have the common determination to survive as humanity always had as well.
And will continue to survive for years, decades, centuries, and so on. Even as the broadcasted secret order transmits it's way out to the scattered ships across the vastness of space, telling them to stay away; the very last human voice to ever be heard from the once and only world capable of life before it fades into nothing more of a dim memory until something, or someone, who could change all that.
Life on Earth will continue to survive.
...
- TRANSMISSION TERMINATED - 2110:06:27:16:31:46 –
A/N: So what do you think? Good, realistic, intense, and believable start of an apocolyptic world for Wally, eh? I hope the rating i chose for the language was appropriate enough. The film has been so good it deserves to be made into something bigger and dramatic throughout fanfiction. And i hope that this adds more edge and to the space opera it is.
To Blank Existence, thank you times ten to the twenty-third, thats how much i thank you for your kindness, your reviewing of my story beforehand, and for sharing your mind. I must say it is always a pleasure to commune with an intelligent being such as yourself to help each other unleash our minds upon the world thru the Net.
A testimony to humanity's brightest you are!
So read and review like old times:) See you all sooner than later!
Whodarep08