Going Green

By Christina McMullen

In the ambiguously near future, a snap decision by a government official inadvertently sets in motion the destruction of mankind. Going Green chronicles the brief journey from infection to extinction through a series of short, interconnected stories, peppered with colorful commentary from both the skeptics and those just looking to survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christina McMullen
• Release date: Jul 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781393553137

Christina McMullen

Christina McMullen is a science fiction and fantasy author who dreams of flying cars, electric sheep, and one day having the means to adopt all of the world's rescue dogs. When she isn't writing, Christina enjoys travel, vegan cooking, modern and classical art (she fancies herself to be a somewhat competent artist as well as author), and of course, reading. 

Book preview

Act I

Infection

The Abandoned Frontier

BY THE MIDDLE OF THE twenty first century, outer space simply wasn’t fashionable anymore. The wide-eyed speculation about life beyond the stars, popular in the mid-twentieth century, was long forgotten by everyone except the most hardcore of nostalgic science fiction enthusiasts and the remaining members of the Sagan Society. Led by an aging astrophysicist who once gained a brief celebrity status by making science cool again, the Sagan Society was a fringe activist group who petitioned the world’s governments to once again fund exploratory missions beyond the Earth’s orbit. But after decades of fruitless campaigns and ignored requests for an audience with world leaders, even they began to give up hope. 

Of course, this did not mean that the space race was over, only that the landscape had changed. Instead of world powers vying for their claim on interplanetary real estate, top mega-corporations of the travel industry now fought for the average consumer’s dollar. What had started as a handful of concepts, dreamed up by eccentric billionaires and crowd-funded upstarts, soon became a trillion dollar a year industry. On one end of the spectrum, luxury-class transportation shuttles offered every comfort and amenity imaginable, docking only at four and five star off-world resort stations. On the other end, low cost carriers offered no-frills flights to the average citizen on a budget. Destination resort stations became so plentiful that younger generations only knew stories of a time when stars, not hotels, were visible in the night sky.

With commercial spaceflight rapidly becoming an economically viable household word, it seemed clear that this would be the peak achievement of human space exploration. The moon was deemed an uninteresting rock and not worth the bother. Sure, certain entrepreneurs still saw the barren wasteland as the next Las Vegas. But the major consensus among casual space travelers was that as long as the plain old Nevada desert Vegas existed, there was no need for a new and vastly more expensive Vegas on the moon. Mars became the lament of cranky old timers, and interstellar travel had been unanimously voted 'just not worth it' by the Global Space Commerce Committee.

No longer the powerhouse of scientific innovation, NASA had been systematically defunded until the organization functioned solely as the space faring arm of the Transportation Security Administration. Space tourism had become what the smart phone had been at the beginning of the century: an affordable luxury. Now that everyone with disposable income was leaving the planet whenever they could afford, a laundry list of rules and regulations had to be established. It was now NASA’s job to maintain and enforce the rules for those leaving from American spaceports. Much like the traditional TSA, which still monitored airplane passengers, NASA performed a thankless service that was considered unnecessary and invasive by nearly everyone who had to pass through their scanners and checkpoints. But unlike the traditional TSA, whose seemingly random and arbitrary restrictions were historically based on speculated threats against the US, NASA had a different, more substantial reason for the majority of their numerous restrictions: Humans were careless creatures.

Certainly, not everyone who traveled into near space was completely oblivious to the dangers. Many of the flights that left the spaceports were meant to be educational. Schools frequently booked lower atmosphere flights as field trips and several geological studies still persisted on the moon. But while most people knew better than to light a fire in an oxygenated environment, NASA understood that sometimes, even the most diligent of parents could not keep an eye on their offspring at all times. As such, matches and lighters, along with thousands of other items, were banned from shuttle flights.

But the largest headache for the NASA agents, by far, was the Firsties: people who went into space simply to be the first to do some ordinary, mundane thing in outer space. It began as something of a joke when a couple of college kids decided to be the first to 'spring break' in space. One viral video later, Guinness was assembling a new division to officially acknowledge these firsts. Some were simple things, such as being the first to tell a famous joke, others were more complex, including a full-scale production of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Some, like the consortium of famous internet felines in space, were done as publicity stunts by internet media corporations trying to stay relevant in the space age.

But soon, as many had predicted, there were no longer any firsts to be had and no one was content to be known as the second person to do anything. As such, space tourists had taken to pulling stunts that were meant to shock and disturb. Whether they fell into the category of explicit or extreme, these antics led to many arrests and a slew of new NASA restrictions that had people longing for the good old days of body scanners and shoe removal. Yet despite the restrictions, there were always those who managed to make the news through their zero-g stunts.

The Shock Jockey

TOBY WESTCOTT, BETTER known to his fans as Master Mayhem, was only a teenager when the first commercial shuttle carriers began applying for permits to take civilians into space, but already he was an internet celebrity. As Mayhem, Westcott had amassed a huge following on The Shock Market, an internet collective dedicated to disproving traditional media’s theory that nothing was truly shocking in the connected age. Members of The Shock Market uploaded content that pushed the boundaries of decency: images, videos, or concepts that were disturbing, violent, sexually deviant, and truly bizarre. As various tropes were deemed ‘mainstream,’ site members would up the ante by challenging their fellow members to competitions in an attempt to dig deeper into the cesspools of human imagination and excavate concepts more disgusting and disturbing than the last.

Toby Westcott never backed down from a challenge. As a misanthropic outcast of a child, Toby began taking out his frustrations with the world through The Shock Market, safely hidden behind the screen name Master Mayhem and a veritable fortress of proxy servers. Still, his antics quickly caught the attention of Homeland Security. In short order, Master Mayhem was listed as a terrorist and a threat to national security. Every new watch list he was added to only served to elevate his hero-like status among his fellow shock jockeys.

On his eighteenth birthday, Toby took his persona public and inadvertently started a revolution.

In a video posted on the largest public message board at the time, Toby came clean, literally. In the video, he stands in front of a bathroom sink wearing the full face and body makeup of his Master Mayhem character. As he speaks of his miserable and misunderstood life, he begins to wash the theatrical makeup from his face. When his story ends, he looks up, his face, now free of makeup, is even more