Unfortunately, even with the best scientists working on the project, no habitable worlds were found by the many "Rover" satelites that were sent out to search the galaxy. While the Rovers were searching for a new home, the governments of the world began building huge orbital stations to house those working towards the salvation of their people. America, Europa, Pacifica were the first to get their stations operational. Thousands of people were brought up from a dying earth to live in the relative comfort of the floating cities.
Ships were created capable of traveling to their new home but word never came from the Rover satelites. The ships eventually became living quarters as well as more and more people bought their way out of the industrial filth of the planet below.
In time, generations were born on the floating cities and the earth was forgotten; left behind like a guilty scar. Three generations had been born and died in the creation of the stations and their ships. No more did shuttles arrive from earth with newly "rescued" families from earth. Nothing new came from the burnt planet.
Materials were recycled almost indefinately to maintain the new human population. Domes of plants, imported from protected gardens, once grown to clean the air and provide a memorial to the fallen world, now became an environment only enjoyed by the extremly wealthy. Real wealth was displayed in the organic. Small planters of real grass could be valued as a whole year's salary. Flowers are now frozen within a protected plastic coating to preserve them for generations and soil is as valued as gold.
As with most things, those who control the wealth are in the minority but control the majority. And, as with most things, wealth can be stolen. Food is no longer fresh vegetables and beef but a poly-protein slurry that is compressed into bars and disks. For those who can afford it, their food has been fashioned to appear very much like it once was. Dye and flavoring additives help people believe that they are eating real apples and real carrots but, in truth, they eat little more than processed soy beans.
Huge domes filled with the only remaining plants adorn the top of the floating cities. Those with wealth are closest to it and one's import is measured by which station level you live upon. Any level lower than thirty is considered dangerous and unpatrolled by on-station security. Those who dwell within those levels are left to their own means for survival - breeding unmonitored and unchecked. Having no wealth to access the food vendors, they steal what they can and hack into water pipes to live. They crawled throughout the station's pipes like rats and so they were named by the wealthy.
Rats skulk in corners and hijack food shipments. They disrupt the natural order of things and prevent the space colony from moving forward to "Launch Day". Set backs and problems a plenty have been attributed to the Rats and they are often rounded up in bunches and summarily disposed of with the public's blessing.
But the Rats have a secret.
Some of the Rats, one in twenty, do not steal food and water, they steal earth and seed. Only the bravest of their tunnel-runners venture so high as to steal an acorn or a handful of rich, black soil. The precious prize may change hands a dozen times to send it deep into the lowest of levels where hyjacked sunlight is piped through fiber-optic cables to grow their Green World.
The Green World is a hollowed cavity within the bowels of the floating city. With torch and flesh, the floors and walls were ripped open to form an 'egg' of salvation. Vines, plants and algae clean the air where most think it unfit for breathing. Water runs not in pipes but in small streams to nourish their new world under an artificial sun.
Thus bore the great conflict upon the stars: The Green versus the Greed.
Security teams, attempting to quell the rash of thefts from the gardens and green houses of the wealthy, delve deep itno the heart of the station to destroy the Rats. This time, above others, the Rats would not be rounded up and destroyed so easily. The Rats, who previously had been picked off one by one, had grown into a community - surrounding the Green World and willing to lay down their lives to protect its secret. The rats worked together to alert each other and although they had no great weapons to fight their hunters, but what they did have was cunning, stealth and above all - faith.
Armed only with a dagger carved from the gigantic thorns grown within their green sanctuary, they plotted ambushes and raids. The sharp point of their thorn-daggers plunging deep within the authority of the station. Where one would fall, they would take five and sometimes six guards with them, the only hint of their identity being a small egg-shaped, green pendant found about their neck.
The struggle between the low and the high continued for near three decades until the station's secret was discovered. The Rover project, to find them a new home, had returned information and the location of at least three planets almost fifty years prior. To leave the station and find a world rich with land, plant and soil would rob the powerful of their wealth.
Best to hold a population in poverty than promote them all from purgatory.
NOTES:
- The earth-that-was has been beyond their observation for more than one-hundred years.
- Even if the colony ships wanted to, could they actually launch the ships to the new world?
- Could the Green World on the station be a bit more technologically savvy - enough to perhaps create a "cure" for the polution problem on the Earth? (Some kind of algae that would eat away at the water and soil polution?)
- Could the Green World's goal be to return to the Earth
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