Five Billion Credit Man



You don’t walk around with a five billion credit reward on your head like I have and not worry that someone might try and turn you in.
Although the reward the corporation offered slips out of my mind for a moment when I walk along the shore.
The blue water of the lagoon is anybody’s idea of paradise.
By daylight, I can almost believe I am living a normal life on earth, strolling along any of that world’s wonderful beaches with no care in the universe.
The reality hits me at sundown when we have to hear for the bunkers to keep from being crushed in this planet’s monstrous storms.
For me each cycle is creation and doom, the world rising out of chaos at dawn and sinking back to it by dusk.
Who in the universe would think to look for me here on a world so ravaged as to make civilization impossible?
No one understands how I might choose my own prison over the titanium jail the corporation has built for me.
Better paradise half the day than that kind of hell for all of it.
Yes, I am lonely, and I miss the ordinary day to day things I remember from my time on earth.
I winder the beach letting foam and sand ooze through my toes with each step, waiting for a time when I might find a way to go back.
Perhaps the rebels can over throw the corporation, recasting my role from terrorist to hero?
But the corporation seems so powerful, so all knowing. I feel luck to even have this tiny grain of sand to exist upon.
Then, Ellen calls me from the direction of the bunker, waving her hands above her head with such urgency I finally stop.
Something has happened.
I wait for her.
I do not rush towards her.
I never rush to gather bad news.
I don’t usually run from it either.
I simply wait for it to arrive.
Her tanned face grows clearer as she nears and her expression shows incredible concern. When she gets close enough, she snouts out in breathless sobs that I have received a message and the party on the other end of the transmission will not talk with anyone but me.
Shit!
Panic explodes in me as I envision corporate ships circling the planet.
I start towards the bunker and the anger where we keep a small space ship.
I think we need to escape quick before the trap is set.
Then I stop half way there and realize that must be part of the plan, to wait for a single craft to rise up out of the atmosphere.
I am safe here – one more life form roaming this planets variegated surface.
Let them come and get me, I think.
Yet even as I make my way into the bunker to hear the message for myself, I know someone has betrayed me – maybe it is even Ellen – looking to turn me in for the five billion credits.
I might have to kill her.
I might have to kill everybody here.
Then I know I’ll be truly alone, a live, but not living in paradise, not even by day, but trapped in a personal hell of loneliness, night and day.
And I wonder if living like that in any prison is worth it.
 
 
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