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
June 27th, 2110 A.D. (695 years before the film…)
The air is thick with the one hundred degrees heat mixed with carbon monoxide, lead aerosol, regolith particles 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 combust plastic, metal, wood, 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. It couldn't be dealt with just like the garbage, so why bother?
The breeze blew to Shelby Forthright's feet, kissing his sweat-drenched face. It felt unbearable and nearly un-breathable to be blasted with such moving air that's this dusty and polluted.
Maybe it is nature's way of saying it rightfully doesn't like me, The disgraced CEO cynically mused, his skin hurting like hell, standing at the outdoor presidential podium waiting impatiently for the two technical crew trying to rig the holographic cameras for a subspace broadcast.
He tried to brush the accumulating dust off his sweaty and grizzled brow, rubbing into his already sun burnt skin, feeling like abrasive sandpaper underneath his gas mask that added further irritation to his already overstressed physical and mental being.
"Can you guys hurry the hell up or what?"
Adding to the stress and heat, Forthright bashes out at the two technicians.
"Almost done sir, please be patient," one technician replied rather sternly. The technician was thin even in his hazmat suit, 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?" retorted Forthright.
The tech officer didn't respond, 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 is a large platoon's worth of heavily armed bodyguards surrounding a hundred meter perimeter around the capitol building. Each soldier clad with Nuclear-Biological-Chemical (NBC) suits further armored with Kevlar padding, bulletproof vests. The guards surrounded 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 guards were armed with long-range sniper rifles lining the roof of the capitol.
Standing alongside the small army and the CEO was a couple dozen of board-of-state directors, chief advisors, a handful of senators and bureaucrats that were all that remained of the Buy N' Large corporate government, clad in the same survival gear and body armor as their leader, just as impatient as he was to escape.
The prize being protected along with the remnants of a world government is an awaiting star liner Return Vehicle stood ready to launch near the base of the building. Assigned to take the remaining heads of state off the planet and rendezvous with its home ship, the Buy N' Large Space Shuttle Enterprise, also known as Star Liner One whenever the CEO himself is onboard. Currently, Enterprise is in a geostationary orbit behind the far side of the moon, undetectable from the ground tracking stations on Earth. It is 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 forever sail the heavens.
That is yet to be done until the last order was sent out from the ground.
Forthright could stand by and let his subordinate do their jobs, impatient as he is now and wishing it could go a tad bid faster, the technician somewhat right. While the CEO didn't know anything about interstellar communications, he at least will let them do their jobs to the fullest of their abilities to get the message across.
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 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. In the back of his mind, he wanted to do this fast. Not because of the approaching wind surges creeping southward over Maryland towards the DC area, bound to stir up a category five sandstorm that could kill them all.
No, he wanted to get this done with and get out of the city and off this planet before the cleanup workers get to him first. 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 terra f 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 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, a whole starship filled with millenniums worth of essentials rations of fresh water and food, what did the cleanup workers have?
They had nothing to filter out the shit in the air they breathed with every breath. On top of breathing basically poisoned air, they also had no way to shield themselves from the raw sunlight bearing down upon them, the protective ozone layer long depleted by the world's century long reign of negligence.
Alternatively, 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 corporative bureaucracy unified all cultures and societies under consumer goods retailing Mega Corporation that had the greatest impacting influence of all time.
Lead by then arrogant young twenty some year old Shelby Forthright himself, Buy N' Large made its mark in history as the global power in the 2050s. When the corporation was large and confidential 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 as well as threatening to go against themselves for oil, the world's most precious natural resource at the time despite the painstaking efforts they made to accomplish ending terrorism and bringing stability to all corners of the globe together.
The crisis for what little petrol was left on the planet had taken extremely deep pitfalls throughout the early twenty first 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 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 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, from animosity into hostility and then, as feared, into violence.
Incidents over desperate control of the lands lead to border clashes. 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 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 meaning 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 funding, made breakthroughs that caught the attention of the warring nations with the inventing and patenting of fully-functional nano-explicative manufacturing and D-T magnetic-inertia confided nuclear fusion in 2051.
With the world's primary problems completely solved overnight with the newfound, infinitely renewable energy and resources, the world suddenly forgot it's differences and rejoiced unlike any other period before, almost unbelieving 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 reestablished 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 United Nations 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, Forthwright 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 became 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 a complete corporate government overhaul. He used the titular positions of the latter corporation into the former United Nations' organizational assembly branches and drafted a constitution based off of that of the old United States and 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 Fredrick Willard Forthright completely brought the entire world together under one banner where people of every race and nationality could henceforth live as a whole rather than divided. He ultimately stopped World War 3 from breaking out, 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 as if 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 western-based constitutions meant a comfortable living was a civil right. 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 newfound reliance on technology. With its role in ending war and uniting the human race that lead to its growth of newer milestones in advancement, becoming a part of everything from nanotech-replication that supplied people with any amount of edibles effectively ended world hunger to regenerative medical miracles leading to averaging life span from one hundred forty to one hundred eighty years. Technology mastered spaceflight with the discovery of the secrets behind what made Alcubierre warp and slipstream based faster-than-light travel possible.
Of all the technological wonders of Buy N' Large, nanotech-based replication so widely used it become a free form of manufacturing that produced anything at will, it turned any forms of raw matter into consumables, an essential perpetual energy/resource technology in the world that could serve all purposes of consumption. It produced food, commodities, goods, and so forth. 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 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 twenty-first century had briefly become a paradise on this Earth, a half-century of perpetrates peace and prospers unlike any other in history, a second Renaissance...
It was a brief paradise.
The high-life for every human being came with consequences. Costs nobody could possibly imagine, a world problem that 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 left out of human control from living in blissful ignorance of consumerist-ruled planet, was a portion of governing the planet itself, which included resource and 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, 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. 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 first. Instead of finding a simple way out, they 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 and such. The only way they could at least make a difference in altering the planet's environment would have to require work force. A work force that matched the population of whole countries in the hundreds of millions that would manually haul every piece of garbage into what available compactors, replicators, furnaces, or landfills that could accumulate it all. If overall put into use for cleaning up the planet, it would take at minimum five years, give or take a decade or two more.
The survivability of the humans was the darkest and most sobering factor that hindered that solution. Since the air was so poisonous, it could cause widespread pandemic, from lethal pathogenic plagues and sterility if exposed to misadjusted environment in the required cleanup timeline. Census calculations estimated that if the environmental conditions of the Crisis went on the way it was, birth rate overtaken by 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 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 will undo itself. Everything would come apart as 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 splitting into fragments of people desperate for prolonging survival, much like the fractured world Forthright changed many decades before. 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 bound 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 all right, like he 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 impossible or frustrating tasks anyone could face, he always kept up his spirits by bringing up everyone else's. Arrogant and stubborn he was at times, which was among the reasons he disregarded the issue of pollution in the first place. He always insured everyone was satisfied, that everyone was comfortable, and that life was good, 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.
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—
That thought of running away from it all was what created the Buy N' Large star liners. If they couldn't survive on this planet, they didn't have to. They could survive off this world.
The human race could survive without massive losses of life in space on an armada of state-of-the-art starships originally built by Buy N' Large's Aeronautical and Space Administration program for colony exploration missions to the outer planets of the Solar System and beyond.
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-faring equivalent fleet of Noah's Arks was born.
Though the plan seemed initially sketchy at first, many of Forthright's political and scientific advisers cited most people of Earth might be unwilling to 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. One thousand, two hundred and twenty-five days total time.
The advisers also knew this was the most critical and desperate time in human history, greater than the near petrol feuded nuclear war. This crisis affected every human being on the planet won't 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 Buy N' Large Star Liners 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.
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 Forthright's scientific advisers but lost in favor of Buy N' Large sugar-coating the situation for the public's sake. Instead, each and every citizen was given free sanctuary on a luxury cruise in space on Buy N' Larges' newly completed Star Lines, a fleet of forty- eight thousand luxurious starships, the largest collection of moving objects ever created by human craftsmanship. Interstellar spacecraft ranged from small Genesis-class star cruisers that carried only a hundred thousand to the massive city-sized flagships like the Axiom, Exodus, or Queen Marry IIIthat could carry over a million people each.
These ships were assembled and readied for launch in their designated population centers whom which they would carry. They 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 get away from the unfamiliar and frightening reality of the dying planet.
While required by all citizens to go, a large work force roughly estimated to stay behind. 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 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 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. 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. The provision of generated crops for food, and make plant and animal life flourish once again, transforming the barren continents into fertile landmasses making Earth ready to sustain itself once the star liners 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 since Buy N' Large employed them, they didn't have much of a choice but keep 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.
From 2104 to 2105, the entire world population of twelve billion people boarded the Star Liners, 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 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 Star Liners 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.
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 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, contamination 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 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. Oceans' toxic water 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 never faded over the century. The tainted air became even more deadly with ash and sulfuric ejected from feared and predicted super eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera in 2108. That further hastened the destruction of the Earth's ecological systems with the pyroclastic burial of most North America in ash and sulfur circulating around the globe in the chemically altered air with the introduction of the by-products eruptions into the deathly mix, poisoning the stratosphere.
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 over two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, 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 Earth like modern Pompeii at every settlement near what once were ice mountain terrains, further accelerating 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 little as six to as much as a hundred 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. Land-bridged neighboring landmasses like Britain with France and Siberia with Alaska for the first time since the Ice Age. 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. The drop of the sea level effectively cut off circulating currents by land bridges violently changed the distribution of the climate throughout the world, sending the airborne dust storms in haywire and erratic directions across the planet.
Changes caused by the damage didn't stop there. The Earth itself reacted violently through numerous earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions all over littered landmasses created by isocratic 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. Population of the work force 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 meant to be cut down and reprocessed for raw materials with what little replication technology was available, out of the rest used for the star liners. Each tower took so many workers' time, effort, and lives to make and lots of them laid to waste along with planted transgenic crops 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 five 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. 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 more diseases that had long since disappeared had arisen again when there was hardly any medicine left to combat them.
The worst effect of the pandemics had all but destroyed the bioengineered plants 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 science.
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 Star Liners were supposed to return, there was hardly any work done that survived the natural disasters that proved to be clear land. Not even half of the work force survived the harsh conditions and endless labor. 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 home world into a hostile, deserted, poisoned and carbon-excessive ecosystem akin to the unforgiving lifeless environments of Venus, Mars, or Titan. In other words, it had become what everyone had feared: uninhabitable.
It was permanent now. The damage of such scale cannot be reversed.
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 prevent it from the beginning, if only. Not even acknowledging that he at least tried to fix all this brought any comfort, for this was all irreversible from the beginning, by his negligence for thinking ahead.
If anything more can 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 forced to live in space for what could be for an eternity.
At least until a new home world could be found, while he only acted like he believed in the program involved searching for photosynthetic life on other planets. 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 Star Liners 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 a population with 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 Star Liners 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 end. 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 Sputnikin 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 ecosystems up to one thousand light-years from Sol, not a single Earth-like world discovered. Not yet, at least but still, if humanity is going to set sail for a new home world, it's going to be a very long, long, long odyssey to make to find something out there... Unlike Forthright, they will never give up.
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. 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. They 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.
For the good of the species and for himself, Forthright had to leave the Earth and all those workers behind.
He must make sure no one should ever return…
"Sir . . ." the technician's voice shouted suddenly, breaking Forthright's train of thought.
The tech stepped away from the holographic camera that 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 there dumbstruck for a moment, still recounting his thoughts, 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 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 may have realized their leader was about to ditch them and leave them here to die at this point.
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.
"BUY N'LARGE 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 Star Liner 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.
"Done sir, ready to broadcast at your command."
"Right then, let's 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. 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 neither their passengers nor any other non-essential crew 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.
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 four… three… two…
- 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!...
Forthright never liked that jingle too much when he was in office before the Crisis, before all this shit happened. 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 holographic 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. 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…"
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 was 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 approached fast and ready to kick up dirt to the ship. The prediction was confirmed when 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 moved. 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 fast, determined, and furious footsteps. Like a stampede fleeing the stor—
Adrenaline rushing through his veins, the guard 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. Soon they were all gripped in fear.
The soft rubble built into a thunderous tremble, and turned into a mix of angry, threatening voices that grew louder and louder. Then they realized what it was. Thousands and thousands of savage, starving cleanup workers in jean overalls desperately flee 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 ready. The government officials prepared to run for the ship. Majority of the technician 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, workers and the guard force clashed. All of the workers screaming they wanted the CEO himself 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 Star Liner."
A guard gave way to the workers under failing strength to hold them off, stomped to death as hundreds of fighting workers stormed the capitol stairway. The guards' line had broken.
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 Forthright 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 and 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 Forthright's personal guards retreated to the ship as fast as they could.
Forthright prepared to run, the workers getting closer and are after him.
"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 stairway. Familiar faces now after to murder him.
The camera tech removed the camera from its 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 ran 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 motor 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, 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 Forthright ever saw amongst the crowd of faces he knew was the face of one of his cleanup chiefs, Wilkinson E. Burtt. Clumsy as he was, but 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 Fortwright'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 like flying walls of concrete hitting them. 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. 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, an anthropomorphic chipmunk named Rostom Dickram 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 also he was left here to die to begin within this shithole. His one and only appraised leader and friend abandoning him along with 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.
His wife, Janice will be forced to raise him or her alone, to roam an apocalyptic, trash-ridden, deserted planet. No hope for a future, not for him, his child, his grandchildren, his great-grandchildren, or any other descendants the Dickram name will have or of anyone, depending on how slow the human work force present on Earth will inevitably die out.
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, natural disasters, 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. With a hundred million people left on this Earth, it will take time, precaution breeding, and extreme measures to ensure food and water. 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 holographic camera perhaps, flies at him at two hundred kilometers per hour. He doesn't feel 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 its leader and ultimately the global corporation itself, was no more. Buried in dirt like the remnants of the wasted cities and the garbage, marking mankind's legacy on this dead planet.
From the ruins all over the Earth remain the cleanup workers of former Buy N' Large corporations. Their futures are deathly and dark, untrusting and violent of one another as humanity has always been but most of them have the common determination to survive as humanity always had as well.
They will continue to survive for years, decades, centuries, and so on, even as the broadcasted secret order transmits its way out to the scattered ships across the vast of space, ordering 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 than a dim memory until something or someone could change all that.
Life on Earth will continue to survive.