Third World
02/11/2004 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 

One of our famous one page stories by GF Willmetts.

Oxygen Nitrogens for you uninitiated who think I’m shouting out there reading this. As there ain’t that many people about any more you might well be some methane breather archaeologist on some kinda dig translatin’ this and want to know what happened.

All great at first, too, even if were treated like a third world state. Third world. Hah! But it got better. If anything, a Commonwealth with unlimited resources and doesn’t know what to do with is always generous to its lesser buddies. In this case, that was us. Even their cast-off tech was way advanced of what we got. Seemed the best of deals. All they wanted in return was to exploit our gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn.

Sure, we say. Why not? It would take us years to siphon off even a fraction of the gases it had on offer even with the new tech they supplied us. An unlimited resource that we could willingly share the politicians told us an’ they weren’t gettin’ any backhanders.

That was our big mistake. Each of the individual planets of the sector sent their own teams and crews with many ships to fill. ONs. Methos. They also had tech that could do it faster than we dreamt. By the time we had anything to say about it, Jupiter and Saturn had mostly gone. Who’d‘ve thought how that would muck up the Solar system as all the planets were so far apart. Left us, the third world, still in place but with a lot of worthless second-hand out-of-date gadgets which wouldn’t get us out of this fix.

Oh, we tried to get out of it. We appealed to their equivalent of conservation laws to stop them taking any more of Jupiter or Saturn. It actually worked. Too well!. Too late! As we were now an endangered species, it was decided that we were now covered by a preservation order which also meant no further interference. No more tech. We’d been kippered. Some volunteered to become members of their zoos prior to withdrawal ‘fore the Earth Governments stepped in declaring we need our freedom. So much for the human race then. The Evangelists had a field day, I kin tell you.

Everywhere blame was spread. Governments fail. The replacements couldn’t do any better. We was under quarantine. An over-exploited star system with a third world on a wobbly orbit. Left long enough, we was told, some sort of stability would sort out the order of life and they’d review the situation then with our successors. When’s that we asked? A few centuries by the way we defined time.

Terrific! Our move in orbit an’ planetary angle had shift gradually before sticking. We lost our poles or rather the ice, what was left of it, moved to the Pacific. The ozone layer was already damaged from our own activity but made worse now. The land loss to rising oceans and heat killed off all but the less hardy or better positioned.

Now the missionaries are coming! Are we so savage or did we get the order in which we did this to our own third world countries get muddled along the way?

end

GF Willmetts

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