From a small, lower deck port window in a makeshift meat locker, roughly 70 miles above what was once Los Angeles, Armitage looked down upon the Earth from the Mining Frigate Prince Vix III. The desolate charred landscape stretched below him to the coast where it met the curdled brown expanse of the once great pacific ocean. Blotchy patches of green and yellow gave a sense of what had once been, but he knew that those places were even more terrifying that the desolation and destruction. You didn’t want to get caught there at night, or in the day either. Definitely not at dusk, dusk was when the more terrifying things happened.
He sighed, breathing deep, and gagged as he smelled himself. It was not at all pleasant – a heady mix not wholly different to a bus station toilet permanently occupied by a good half dozen rancid tramps. Not that Armitage had ever seen a bus station bathroom. Or a bus for that matter. All that was long gone. Everything that had ever been good or useful in the last 100 years, and plenty of everything else that was not for that matter, was now gone.
Obviously mankind would likely defend itself and say it was not its fault, explaining that it was all a complete misunderstanding, and that in fact they were a good and kind people, hard working and conscientious and kind to their elders. The universe, however, disagreed wholly and completely and when the galactic empire eventually stumbled onto the Earth it took less than three weeks from the initial ask to be taken to their leader and enjoying a quite nice dinner at the United Nations, to declaring mankind non compliant with the Empire’s declared Values and Behaviours, and issuing an asset stripping mining license to the Great Galactic Mining Company and telling them to “have at it and bring us something nice back”.
Two generations later and all thought of toilet bus stations was a thing of the past, as was almost everything of any value or beauty. The lands were stripped, the oceans polluted, the skies dark and deadly.
But all that aside, and back to the matter at hand, so foul was Armitage’s odour that it was probably still an unfair comparison and an unfair sleight on tramps. But then again the tramps had not had been hidden in a transport of rotting whale meat for the last week, and the now non existent bus station toilet probably did once have running water – unlike the carcasses that had been waiting for off world shipment – so perhaps the tramps did indeed deserve everything that was coming to them with their fancy porcelain drinking bowls and abundant supply of hand sanitizer.
Armitage smiled and slumped back against the long curving ribs of what was once an 80 foot blue whale, pink meat and thick translucent fat dripped and pooled around him. He was out, after all these years, he had finally escaped.
He had no idea what to do next, but that was never the point though. It was just about not being there…
Afterwards 