Morning all and welcome to Tuesday. The rain has finally stopped but the air is still clear enough that my allergies have not returned. I’m sure that will change soon enough but for now i am enjoying a day without itchy water eyes. It’s rather nice. So lets press on with the morning writing prompt shall we?
This one turned out a bit darker than I imagined it would. Too much news I expect. I also spun my wheels quite a bit getting a grip on it. I think there might be a germ of an idea there but i think it will have to be excavated.
Tuesday, March 30th: The change in technology made the need all the more pressing.
The change in technology made the need all the more pressing. Soon more and more people would be able to push past the currently acceptable boundaries and more and more exposure would occur. While treatment existed, it was an expensive and unwieldy process. It wasn’t a treatment that could be used for the masses.
Still the technology allowing the masses to colonize the far reaches of the planet had been established. Kyle ran a hand through his hair. Any attempts to stall the release and mass production of the expansion technology had failed. Mass production had begun and despite the fact that he and his team worked around the clock, taking shifts so that work could continue without cease, they were still at least six months away from a practical solution when the first of the mass produced kits went to market.
Kyle watched the news releases with ever increasing trepidation. He knew that the expansion kits, when coming into contact with the planet’s surface would produce the toxin causing the damage they were trying to treat. There was no way around it.
‘Well there is,’ Kyle thought as reports of large scale expansion teams were discussed on the local news. ‘But to mitigate the effects would make the expansion kits too expensive.’
Currently the low cost was able to allow family groups to club together, purchase a kit that would enable them to establish themselves on a piece of land large enough to support them all. In times of overcrowding and over stress of the few usable areas of the planet, it was viewed as a necessity, and why any attempts to stop it were unsuccessful.
The news was full of hope and he watched what seemed to be a large scale evacuation took place. The more sober eyed of the news casters debated the ramifications of spreading out the population instead of maintaining the dense clusters in the cities. While a few negative points were raised, most of the reports were positive. The contamination and it’s effects on those brave new settlers was not even a footnote in any of their stories. When the expansion packs were created and set for mass production, Kyle and his team were given leave to study treatment options and were given resources to work towards the goal of making it workable for a larger section of the populous but they were also told not to mention it to anyone. They were forced to work in secrecy. None of them had even left the facility in the past year for fear that word of their project would leak.
‘I suppose it isn’t surprising that it isn’t mentioned on the news either.’ Kyle shrugged. As always he wondered if someone somewhere looked at the current population numbers and determined that it was impossible to continue as they were and was using the expansion packs to reduce the population. He knew from experience that nearly seventy percent of those that shipped out in this new colonization force would come down with symptoms in the first three months. Of those that contracted health issues from the contamination, only ten percent would be able to recover even partially on their own.
Even if his team was successful in getting a treatment option together in their expected timeline of six months, there would be a lot of deaths. For many, the treatment would come too late. As one of the politicians came on screen, Kyle turned off the report. He and Delegate Stevens clashed heads enough in the past few months that voluntarily listening to him was more than he could take.
Ten til Midnight 