A/N: Hello my pretties. This story has been brewing in my mind for a long while, and I've finally decided to put it down on paper...er, computer? Anyway, this started off as a short (really short) Biology assignment, and I liked the idea so I took it and blew it all to pieces.
Also, this is short, but that's because it is the Prologue. Future chapters will definitely be longer.
Feel free to read and review (please?)
Prologue
The signs had always been there; the dangers always present. But danger is always present, and threats don't necessarily mean action. So those in power ignored the inevitable, ignored the idea of an unlivable Earth. They sat in their posh homes and offices, chugging gallon after gallon of water, not even once wondering where the hell it would all end up. Where we would all end up. Because it didn't matter to them. After all, the Earth is mostly water, they reasoned. There would always be water.
How wrong they were.
It started slowly. Gradual changes in the environment made previously dry lands inhospitable. But no one lived on those lands, so they reasoned that it did not matter. The poles began to melt. Again, they reasoned, there was more water for all. Everything flooded, and still, no one desired a change.
The temperature continued to increase. The slushy marshlands of the previous century slowly turned into the deserts of the next century. Wind—hot, dry, unbearable wind—shook dust storms that ravaged whole countries. Entire animal and plant species became extinct at a rate previously unheard of.
And humans—well, they began dying by the millions. As water became a commodity, the population became its smallest in millennia. Now people wanted change. But it was too late; there was no turning back. So humans, like the rational, sentient beings they were, went on a killing spree. Decimated entire fucking civilizations, entire cultures, to sustain their needs. To feed themselves and satiate their burning lust. Because it was lust—lust for the lifestyle that no longer was. The human race was reduced to a handful of small tribes and groups of wandering nomads. The Earth had been thrown into a seemingly endless cycle of heat and of death.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh. There was a period of invention, slightly before the mass murders—a period of creativity and resourcefulness—that saved the human races sorry asses. And after all, I am a human. Who am I to judge? I've lied and threatened and stolen and… killed. Oh, yes, I have killed—I've damned so many people to save my own skin that I've lost track. All in the name of the Source…But good things still happened: babies were born, music still shared, and love… people still fell in love. Like me, I fell in love once. Do you know what's incredible? She loved me back.
Me, Edward Cullen.
Anyway, some odd years after the first forecasts of Global Warming, I like to imagine that the Earth finally begins to stabilize. That there will be changes, as slow to come as they had been in the beginning of it all, and rain will fall more than once a year, and crops will begin growing in places where they just couldn't grow—can't grow—right now.
But this isn't a story about the Earth, and I will not bore you with the details. I wasted too much damned time fretting about them in the past, and I do not have much time left. I am an old, dry, withered man, just waiting for the day when my liquid life will go to serving the community. And the story must be told-to anyone, anyone, so that they may remember. Because this, this is the tale of Man—men, like you and I, because anyone who clinged to this pathetic excuse for a fucking life was a certified man—and the struggle to survive. This is a tale of Man and his dealings with the most important, and most often disregarded resource on this planet.
Water.