Pilot in the stars

   The rumors were true. The whole colony had been dreading it would happen again, some day, and it had finally happened. Scouts and explorers coming in and out of the Field confirmed the destruction of an entire planet. According to them, the explosion was still visible in the nearby sectors and it was impossible to pass through the area. Many freighters had to take longer routes to rich worlds nearby, as the rocks that were floating around were sampling to big for such slow ships to handle.

 For the colony, this was especially difficult news. After all, it had been established many years ago precisely because a mad man had destroyed their former planet and they had to resettle in an asteroid field. Somehow they were the only ones, or at least had that idea in mind, that understood how real war felt like and how scary fanatics could be. That’s why they knew it would happen again and it did.

 Some of the colonists cried when they heard the news of the destruction, even more when they learned it had been a planet with a very large population and that had no why of responding to an attack of that magnitude. They had just died, with no way of even knowing they were going to die. The small room that served as temple to all religions in the colony was filled with flowers, one for each inhabitant. The guy that owned the flower shop was both happy and sad.

 Younger colonists, like Gregor, were not as hurt by the destruction of the planet as their parents. They understood it was something awful but hadn’t been old enough to feel their planet been destroyed in order to have something to compare the feeling to. Besides, Gregor’s parents had been mining in a far away planet when theirs was destroyed. According to them, it was something they felt deep in their hearts and it their minds, but Gregor was too young back then and did not remember feeling anything.

 Young colonists also worked and had responsibilities like helping around in the cargo area or in the commercial zone. The idea of the colony was that everyone could give something of themselves to make it all better for all inhabitants of the colony. It was a nice sentiment but difficult to handle as many passers by came in their lives for a few days and even a few hours. Ships came and went from the colony, used as a stopping point to refuel or have a decent meal before preceding their journey.

 Pilots were normally very talkative people and the colony was rather closed to the outside world so every piece of news came from them. It was often boring to hear them talking about the same old subjects but sometimes they did have very interesting insights about the other inhabited planets in the galaxy and the power players beyond the Field.

 Gregor was always interested in hearing the pilots talk. There was something in the way they told their stories, something so intimate and also universal, that made him want to leave the Field and get to know the world for himself. Once, sitting around fixing a machine in his family’s quarters, he decided to test the waters and get a conversation going with his parents about pilots and what they thought of them.

 His mother was a bit scared of them, not only because some of them were aliens, and she wasn’t still very used to that, but because they took so many risks when going from one place to the other. In her mind, the galaxy was a very dangerous place, filled with villainous creatures. His dad was, on the other hand, very interested in them but knew that their job was very difficult and sometimes even deadly. Pilots took many risks and not everyone was built to be one of them.

 Silence followed the conversation and Gregor broke it, by announcing he would love to be a pilot someday. His parents reacted in horror, dropping what they were doing, and looking at him as if he was sick. It was the first time they told him to go to his room and stay there doing nothing. They always wanted him to be helping, to be doing stuff, but now they just wanted him to be isolated and locked behind a door so he could think about what he had said and they could think how to counter that.

 The thing is, of course, it wasn’t and idea he had elaborated on that day. Gregor had been thinking of becoming a pilot for a long time. He even discussed it with a couple of pilots that told him that new blood was always needed but that it was essential that he had the courage to do what they sometimes didn’t have a choice of doing. Some of them had killed people, defending their cargo, their crew or their passengers. They were skilled not only in flying ships but also in different kinds of combat.

 It was a difficult thing for Gregor as any type of weapon was forbidden in the planet and any fights meant jail. The colony had gone out of its way to ensure that its inhabitants could live a life better than the one in other places. They thought that by banning violence, they would avoid it altogether, forever. But that wasn’t the case. After all it was a spaceport and fights always broke out and authorities couldn’t just arrest pilots transporting important cargo.

 That night he spent in his room; Gregor used it to think about what he was going to do with his life.  He really wanted to go away, to leave the colony and get to know other places and he was sure he could be a great pilot, even if he had never even tried to pilot anything.

 Decided and realizing his parents would never let him to do what he wanted, Gregor decided to just leave one night and try his luck in the outside world. He knew he could die or something worse but he didn’t mind. He was sick of staying behind, of just waiting for things to happen in his life. He wanted to be amazed by the galaxy and to see all that every planet had to offer with his own two eyes.

 One night, he went out of his room and left home with only a small bag with clothes and other essentials. His parents had not talked to him after their failed conversation and he was still hurt by it so he didn’t left them any kind of letter telling them what he was about to do. He just left and ran through corridor and hangars in order to get to the cargo area, were ships were refueled and taken care of.

 Gregor hid behind some crates containing food and waited until the workers left. It was well known that no ships could leave for some hours in the night, so he just waited there for all the workers to leave. The flight prohibition was only good for a couple of hours but it was more than enough for him to sneak into one of the ships and hide inside it. Once they realized he was there, it would be too late and no pilot would go back just for a kid escaping his parents.

 He entered the nearest ship, a typical cargo freighter, and hid between the tanks it was transporting. As he was not very tall and skinny, he could easily hide sitting down among all those tanks. After some minutes, he realized those were fuel tanks and decided it was maybe not a very good idea to travel near any of that. After all, it could blow it in any given second and his journey would be over.

 The ship next to that one was transporting cages and something made an awful noise inside of them. The third and last ship carried the typical crates and he went for it but wanted to go back as soon as he felt the awful smell in his nostrils. It was really awful, probably some kind of food considered a delicacy in another world but certainly not in the Field. He was about to leave when the ship closed its back door and he was trapped.

 He hadn’t realized the prohibition was over and all three ships departed at the same time. He had to hide there, among the stench, and try not to be detected. But after a while he just couldn’t hold it and started coughing like a lunatic. It was too loud for the pilot to ignore it. The door to the cockpit opened and Gregor was surprised to see a very tall women look at him and say: “You’re gonna die if you stay here. Come”. And he did and that’s how his big adventure started.

Queen of tragedy

   The devastation brought by the wave could be seen easily from the castle, which had been built in a peninsula that shoot straight into the ocean with a very high elevation. The waves that attacked the city did not really affect the castle or the people inside it, although they did feel the arrive of the killing water and saw how it engulfed the whole fishing town that was located very close to the castle. Every little boat and those small and weak houses were rapidly destroyed by the wave. The people didn’t even have time to pray or to scream. The wave was just too fast and too destructive, it didn’t leave a thing standing. The people in the castle, including Princes Ariana, were all horrified. She sent some soldiers after it happened but, as they were about to go out, another wave, even taller than the last one, hit the beach.

 No one could have survived that. And the thing now was that, because of the second wave, the access to the castle had been flooded. Until the waters receded, they were all trapped there, without any communication with the rest of the world. Ariana’s father, the King, had left the day before to attend a very traditional ceremony in an inland town and her mother the Queen had also left to visit her brother who was a duke in some region south of the castle. Ariana was alone and needed desperately to talk to someone, as she was very perturbed by the images of water hitting the fishing town with such vile and strength. She remained in the chapel for a whole day, praying and asking God for the souls that had been lost. She asked “why”.

 But, of course, she never got an answer. After that time, the princess tried to help the people that were inside the castle and organize everything for every single person to have a ration of food. She had no idea how much time that could last but she would at least try to help them as only she could do it. At the end of the day, the castle was hers, her domain, and everyone inside it had to hear her until the King or the Queen came back. The day after the waves hot the coast, the castle started to receive various letters sent by aerial means (pigeons, mostly). Many were soldiers informing of the situation on their towns and others were people, asking for help as the situation was very dire. It was a surprise to see letters from far inland and the Ariana’s heart stopped for a moment.

 She asked her helpers to look for letter from a specific location. There was only one letter and it was from a farmer. He said the wave had flooded his field and now his crops had been destroyed, so he had no means to sustain his family or to trade with others. He also mentioned, although briefly, that the nearby town had been flooded too and festivities had been cancelled. Ariana breathed out. Her father was probably okay but she needed to be sure. She asked her servants to answer the letter she had just read and do what they could to locate his father and help that poor man with his crops. She owed him, or at least she felt so.

 Ariana did the same thing to know if her mother was okay but there were no letters from that region in the big pile that had arrived during the day. More pigeons entered the castle during the day, but almost all came from very nearby, were apparently the stench of death was already hard to ignore. People said that there were no victims, as the people who sent the pigeons were merchants that traveled from town to town and saw what happened all around them. Apparently the fishing town couldn’t be saved and the most awful part of it all was that everyone could easily see the ruins of the town from the castle. It was so close but at the same time it had such a different faith than the people hidden in the castle.

 They received a letter from the King the day after that. He informed the people that he had been injured by the flooding, that had taking everyone by surprise. He was in bed with a very swollen ankle, product of a fall as he escaped the water towards higher ground. The doctor said that it was easy to cure but that he had to stay there for some day, at least a week, to make his leg better. Ariana read the letter in front of everyone and even shared with the people the nice adjectives he had for her. He said that the castle was in hands of the princess and that everyone had to respond to her orders and listen to her lead, as she was the only person with authority to be there with them.

 These words from her father made Ariana feel very happy and also very important. She had never done much in the castle or even in her life, only being a nice girl that sits correctly whenever an important visitor comes and that leaves for her room to do nothing at all there, except if you consider combing your hair or looking at your dresses some sort of job. The truth was that Ariana was thrilled to finally have some responsibility and taste, however short it may last, the sweetness and pleasure to share her kindness with her people and with everyone that wrote the letters that kept coming into the castle. On the fifth day, the waters finally receded and soldiers were sent to every single nearby that to assess the situation.

 The small fishing port had not been the only one to be destroyed completely. A very large portion of the coast had been devastated by that same wave, ten meter tall or more, so many towns had suffered the same faith. Even some soldiers that decided to check on the state of the castle came with urgency to see the princess and asked her to put some men to work. Apparently, the bases of the castle had been shaken very seriously and repairs had to be made in order for it not to fall into the ocean. A small army of men was hired to do those works and the proper army was tasked with burning every corpse they saw and help survivors, if any. There were not to many.

 The first week was difficult for Ariana, specially when a merchant that sold fur came into town and old everyone how the wave had destroyed the region south of the castle. He swore the smell was too overwhelming and bodies piled up on both sides of the roads. Ariana felt awful and sent some soldiers right then but it was useless. The man was right; there was nothing but destruction, especially because in the south there were no hills or mountain. It was a big plain and now it was something like a swamp, with flies flying all over it and over the bodies of hundred of people. One of those was the Queen, who had died with her brother as they were outside the duke’s house when tragedy came. Being inside, wouldn’t have changed a thing, though.

 The princess tried not to cry when she received a pigeon telling her of her mother’s death. She only asked for the soldiers to bring her body and that of the duke, if they found him. Some days later the dead body of the Queen arrived into town and a rapidly organized funeral was arranged. Ariana would have loved to have her father there to comfort her but was now having a very dangerous fever and his doctor recommended for him to stay were he was, as any trip might be too dangerous for him. So she had to bury her mother alone, in the family mausoleum. Many people attended the funeral and she wasn’t surprised, as her mother had always being loved by her people.

 Ariana, in the inside, was devastated. Now she didn’t want any responsibility or to grow up, she didn’t want to be the woman who ruled over the kingdom. And even if she was the last royal, she would have to marry to be able to exercise her role as Queen. It hurt her to be thinking of such things, as if her father was dead too but he wasn’t, he was just injured and she wanted to be with him but then no one would stay behind to help the people that needed the family. Some of her father’s helpers wanted her to leave to have a free reign over everything but she refused to go and even jailed some of those who pretended for her to leave the city and stay away from the corruption.

 Only two weeks after the waves hit the coast, the King came back to town. But Ariana suffered once more because he wasn’t doing as well as the doctor had said. Unsurprisingly, the doctor had left the party that accompanied her father. She ordered soldiers to execute him if they ever saw him. But the most important thing for her was to see her father, which whom she talked privately and summoned a religious authority and a lawmaker. After some days, the King was too weak to keep talking and he eventually died from his wounds and mistreatment. His funeral was attended by all and he was buried in the crypt next to his wife.

 Everyone was more surprised, however, with the fact that a new law had been enacted the day before the king’s death. It liberated his daughter of marriage and gave her the power to rule the kingdom as Queen. People didn’t know whether to celebrate or not. But eventually, they would know the answer to that question.

The death of the world

   My breathing was really heavy and I almost couldn’t move after pulling myself out of that lake full of tar or petroleum. I had no idea what it was and I wasn’t going to find out by staying there. The people that had dropped me there to kill me had already gone and the night was very dark in this part of the world. I wasn’t in the city anymore, I was somewhere where water was very highly contaminated and the birds didn’t even sing. As I cleaned myself with my hand and some big leaves of a tree, I realized the substance was very oily so it had to be petroleum.  Walking was the worst as I couldn’t move properly but I made the effort any way because I didn’t want to stay there through the night. I walked for an hour until I saw some lights and ran towards them.

 The lights became brighter and there were so many I couldn’t even count them all. They lit a huge factory with chimneys on top and suddenly I realized that place was the source of all the pollution. That was the place I had tried to shut down but many people were not at all interested in that. Money flowed from that factory and all because of the oil the tankers brought from the sea. I had been there and I had seen the platforms, horrible places were people that had nothing to lose decided to win their living. Those were not factories but prisons filled with heavy warmth and an awful smell. Needless to say, you couldn’t see a bird or any other animal near those places. Even they knew those places meant death.

 Instead of asking for help in the factory, I went the other way, following the road the trucks used to gain access to it. In no time, I was in the main road and a nice old lady picked me up. But there was more to her than what met the eye. I hadn’t called her and I would never use auto-stop, as the country was too dangerous for that sort of thing. I hopped into the backseat and we didn’t say a word until she left me in front of my home, an hour later. I just said “Thank you” and she just nodded. She was called Delilah and had been my friend for a long while but we never really spoke about our lives or anything like that. She had saved my life once and that was enough for us to become friends.

 Delilah had been married and had too sons and a daughter but they lived far away and she didn’t really care about them coming into her life again. She had raised them well, done her job and that’s all she was interested in. When I went up to my apartment, I wasn’t very shocked to see that every single object in my home was on the floor. Broken, torn apart or just laying there, all my life was on the floor. They had come here, maybe as they drugged me and dumped me in that thick lake, and destroyed everything. My backup files, all stores in hard drives, had been stolen and my computer was just a bunch of metal on my desk. But I had more backups so I didn’t really care about the state of things.

 I went through my ripped clothes and destroyed drawers. I grabbed some things that no one would care to take away like my mother’s wedding ring or my parent’s picture I kept in a book. They were my link to them because I wasn’t the type of person that was into graveyards or however you want to call them. I just liked to talk to their picture and tell them what I was up to then. I had always been the rebellious kind of kid and I knew they would be so worried about me. My mother would asked me if I had a way to clean myself and brush my teeth and my dad would remind me to check my body for bruises in the shower. Somehow, he said, the body bumps into things and you never realize it until it’s too late.

 They were the only two people in the world I cared about. They had died years before and now I was all alone, fighting against something that was bigger than me and that any other human being. I was trying to bring a corporation down and, although I had some friends like Delilah, none would be so much into this cause as I was. I had invested my life in investigating; taking advantage of my position in society to bring everyone involved in this down and now my life had an expiration date. What I couldn’t understand was why they had dropped me in that pond and not shot me or something. Were they cowards or was that their style? I don’t know and, honestly, I have no idea if I want to know.

 Proof. That’s what, supposedly, justice wants from me in order to apprehend the people that have cause so much misery and despair around the world. Because this city is just a piece of the whole puzzle. I have traveled the world and seen children drown in similar ponds to the one they wanted to use to kill me. Huge factories built just next to all the little and rattled houses that people have built with their effort and suffering. There’s nothing quite like misery because it’s brutal and forces you into the real world. It makes you see how more than half of the world lives their lives and that has the capacity to shock anyone that has feelings or even just a pair of good old eyes.

 I was the kind of person you would find in high society events, whether they happened in a club or in a yacht, in the Riviera or a penthouse in Paris. I was always there and I had been educated to know what to do, how to talk and who to be “friends” with. Because even then, I was friends with no one. My family knew that I hated all of it but that I did it for them because they were all too important in society. Every man and woman wanted to have my attention because they knew who I was. But they weren’t interested in knowing anything more than the amount of money I could give them or what I could show off to them. It was very pathetic.

 It was the day my parents died when I knew how vicious that society I had been feeding could be. The day of their burial, no one was there but me and a couple of people that were too afraid the ghosts of my parents would pull their legs as they slept. Cowards. They never moved a finger when I was being dragged through the mud, laughed at for everything I did to help people that had no way of helping themselves. None of those high and mighty people had any heart or soul. They only cared about profit and making their wallets and bank account even more filled with money. They cut every single link to my parents company and I had to save what I could before they tore it apart completely. My parents weren’t being stupid: they had left me enough for me to keep on living in peace for many years.

 I moved fro my former neighborhood, which helped me exterminate many bad feelings I had for all those people. I didn’t want to hate them so I just disappeared from their lives and asked them to disappear from mine. They heard me, at least that time, and I have to say I lived a very good year after that. I was teaching and I was helping the people I had met so many years before. But nothing can be as perfect forever. Life has a way to even out and that’s exactly what happened. I discovered the contamination of several national parks both in the sea and the land as well as contracts between oil companies and banks in order to make the economic system fall to their feet. That wasn’t a difficult thing to do.

 This world, after all, is not built on solid ground. Our society was built by greedy men that only thought of their profit in that moment of time but had no interest, or very little, in the future. People were not aware of how easy it was to influence the stock market in order to benefit a certain country or a certain type of company. I have to confess that when I discovered it all, I felt sick to my stomach and I felt guilty because I was part of the problem. I was the kind of person that complains but never does anything. I was the kind of person that things their ideas should be implemented and then I would go and have cocktails with my friends.

 I’m not saying people shouldn’t have fun. I only think we should all be more aware of what happens around us. How people in power use us to get there and never recall what the promises that were made were all about. Politicians are rotten because the whole system is in decay. I thought this to my students: the economic and political system of our western society cannot last for a thousand years. In one moment, everything will stumble because that’s what nature does. It has to keep changing in order to stay alive and nowadays, nature is slowly dying and we cannot do anything anymore. It’s too late for the world and now we have to pay the consequences of our ignorance.

 I help because I need to. Because I still feel guilty. Because I don’t have anything else to do. When I went back home, I put everything that hadn’t been torned apart into a suitcase. I grabbed it all and left for the place where I hid part of my archives. Those were not all but I didn’t need them all, not all the copies. I needed even more copies until the world decided to wake up and listen to what the planet had to say. After I picked up the information, Delilah came for me and took me to a city four hours away. It was the first time we actually chatted. And it felt good.

On the rubble

   At first, the sounds were like thunder. Once and again they repeated themselves, a little bit louder each minute that passed. People were hiding in their basements or in any other structures below ground but were still very close to the bombs. They normally fell for hours, at least two, and then they would stop for another two hours until they came back. It was particularly awful at night, because people had no electricity and they feared something worse could happen in the dark, even worse that a foreign force dropping bombs on their heads. They just stayed there and prayed, if they believed in something. If they didn’t, it was a lot harder to imagine a way to go back outside alive.

 Every single person, even children, now knew that the world had been crumbling down for at least fifty years but no one had really noticed. That was until, all of a sudden, the most powerful country in the powerful got very extremist and started killing their own. People around the world saw it happening and they couldn’t believe their eyes. But as many times before, they did nothing, as they were scared they would get a blockade or some sort of attack just because they wanted to defend the lives of so many that had been massacred. And what the TV showed was only the tip of a very bloody iceberg. If people had known, they wouldn’t have feared, they would have done something. But that didn’t happen and it was only two years after that that the war starter. Ironically, it had nothing to do with mass murders but with a fishing boat.

 Since that happened, the world had seen five awful years of fire, misery and death. People talked about safe havens around the world but they all sounded so perfect, so ideal, that the general population thought they were only a fantasy created by those who didn’t want to realize what their reality was. They were prisoners in their own country, having to eat whatever they could find and surviving as animals, as rats. Some escaped to the countryside but things were supposed to be worst there because of the open spaces and the use of more horrible weapons that one could ever imagine.  The country was dead.

 Besides, they had been cut off from the rest of the world, so heading to the borders was useless as they were all under surveillance. And the truth was that even beyond those fences, life was exactly the same. So why bother in running, escaping and hurting the shitty body one had only to be in a place where things were exactly the same or maybe worst? People survived and they openly welcomed death, but on their terms. No one died of old age anymore but it was the objective of many to die that way. Most people died in the streets, with a shot to the head and probably not even fired by enemies but by other hungry people.

 Rumors were always heard. People had begun a rumor, maybe based on the truth, that a group of rebels had been working before the invasion had happened. You see, before the country was attacked daily, there used to be what people call a “puppet government”. A crazy military man, as they all are, had formed an alliance with the extremist nation that attacked them. He sold the country to them in exchange of letting him live and rule. And they did let him do that but only for some years until he was killed and the occupation really began. It was during that time that several “terrorist” attacks took place. It was them, the rebels.

 But now, it seems, the rebels didn’t existed anymore. Apparently, the government killed them all and then the government itself was killed so nothing remained from the past. News came every so often, from people that had managed to salvage radios or television sets. They said they had heard other countries been taken or an uprising somewhere very far. But even if all those things were true, people knew that they weren’t enough. Those things were happening so far away that they would never get any help. They just knew how their lives would end and they didn’t want to do anything about it. Why change what is inevitable? They just waited for the end and that was it. No more believing in miracles, or in any fantasy about rebels and war on the other side of the world. They were dead and that was the only truth.

 People survived eating small rodents that they found among the rubble after the airplanes had stopped bombing. There was no building standing and it made no sense for them to keep bombing them but they did it anyway. Some people believed that they didn’t want to use real soldiers in order to keep in line people that were already scared and enslaved, in a way. Another rumor was that soon they would come and build factories and that all those people in the basements would be made to work there, making uniforms, guns, helmets and so on. It was the normal thing to do by any foreign oppressive power, or so said the elderly. But no one knew and no one cared enough to think about it.

 A person’s day consisted of hearing the bombing all day, trying to sleep at least two hours and then go out of the hiding place in order to find food. That was it. There was no entertainment or time to be happy or joyful. Those things had died with the war. Any kid who laughed was severely spanked by their mother and learned, the hard way, that there was nothing to be happy about in this world. Some people moved around the city, trying to get more food and it sometimes worked. Some of the ponds and lakes still held water and some fish so it was only a question of how to get them. That would have been a nice way to spend an evening but these people saw it as a way to survive so there was nothing nice or good about it. It was just something they had to do.

 Suddenly, one day the bombing stopped altogether. It was not that they had decided to do less bombings; it was that they just stopped. People were scared then, more than ever. The invasion, the full scale one that they had feared for so long, was finally at their doorstep. Mothers decided to teach their children how to be obedient and how to lower their head before the foreigners. They wanted them to live, even if they had to be submissive and enslaved. Nothing could be worse than been a human rodent. They waited, and waited, and waited, but the invasion never came. They never saw a single soldier come their way but that didn’t make them calm down. Maybe they had decided to test a new weapon on them… Maybe they were going to be destroyed for good.

 But that never happened. A year after the bombings stopped, when the grass started to grow again, as the trees and crops, a battalion arrived to the ruined capital city. People were scared and ran away but they soon noticed those soldiers weren’t wearing the flag used by the extremists. They were wearing a white patch only which many remembered as a sign of peace. That week, five battalions arrived to help the people and teach them how to rebuild and feed themselves. The community was alive again and people, for the first time in many years, felt good about smiling and dreaming. The children were especially happy and their parents could finally have a calm heart.

 Many bodies were buried in huge mass graves. And it was then that they realized that their liberators were locals. Not all of them but many and they told them their story. Apparently, they were the ones called rebels back in the day and they had to flee the country before it went to shit. They said that many stayed behind but were killed. Those who remained hid in boats or planes bound for other parts of the world. Their stories were then so different and fantastic but they untied again at what they called the Big Battle. It had happened about a year ago and it had been the turning point for the war. The extremists were cut off of their resources and then their capital was taken. Their leader was hanged.

 That’s why the bombings had stopped. For all effects and purposes, the war was over. The rebels talked about the sacrifice that many had done in order to get their freedom back and that’s why now they wanted every country to stand up again and become a better version of themselves, to become something that people could look up to in the future. War had to be a thing of the past, something only mad men would think about and those mad men had to be put away, their freedom taken before they could take anyone else’s.

 The world had died but then, it’s heart started beating again. Will there be another chance? Will we survive again to our own demons and stupidity? Let’s hope this time it sticks.