Doomed Planet- Day 0ne- Prologue

Prologue: Wherein the history of everything is revealed

There are few events in the life of a human being that can truly be seen as defining moments. Most Homo sapiens stumble along blindly until they run face first into adversity, and even then most will not open their eyes to see what is causing them pain. They pray to their various gods, or blame them, or curse fate, and then run into the wall again. There is a reason sane creatures of the universe avoid earth like the plague: The only “intelligent” species to inhabit land is collectively mad.

It was to no surprise, then, that earth was chosen as a “portal planet”, a gateway to the strange worlds and universes that existed beyond the physical boundaries of space and time. Not only would they be protected from the curiosity of the greater races (for who in their right mind would want to visit earth?) but if, by some strange coincidence, they were discovered by the bi-pedal half-ape that controlled the planet, nothing would happen. Humans were notorious for locking up or even killing those who knew truths beyond the common understanding.

Not that any of this mattered to Charlie Smith, a man who thought doughnuts were a food group and Tim Horton was a god. His primary goal for the moment was drinking his double-double without getting in an accident. And this was no easy task, especially for a man whose stomach rested on the steering wheel at red lights and whose head often blinded other drivers as it sparkled in the intense august sun. He looked like he felt: old, fat, and balding, though how anyone could feel bald was still a mystery to him. He pondered that thought while waiting in traffic, the noxious fumes of Toronto rising around him like a noxious blanket of cancerous gasses.

The city, like most urban centres, was not a horrible place to live as long as you were rich or artistic. For a middle class corporate drone like Charlie, however, who possessed neither money nor creativity, the city was simply a place to park his derriere until the weekend, when he could leave and go to his quaint little cottage on the lake to kill things with pointy sticks or projectile weapons. He was one of the lucky few who could escape; his roommate, Jo, ran a summer program for mentally unstable youth at the Y and didn’t get any vacation time until September. She had tried to rope him into helping out, but her constant insistence that stab wounds really didn’t hurt that much did nothing to convince him. There was very little that could keep Charlie Smith in the city between 5:00 pm on Friday and 2:00 pm on Sunday. It was his only chance to pretend that he had made something of himself, to lie to the universe (and his neighbours) about his status in life.

“Shit!” he swore suddenly as the car in front of him came to a sudden stop. He pressed hard on the brakes, and the sudden change of velocity sent sugar-and-cream-laced coffee spilling down the front of his off white shirt and onto his forest-green khakis. He grabbed a napkin and tried, in vain, to remove the caffeinated brew from his personage. Charlie succeeded only in grinding thousands of tiny chocolate doughnut crumbs into his outfit, and for a moment he wondered if it would be any more embarrassing to show up to work naked. He quickly dismissed the idea as mundanely ridiculous. Everyone at work had already seen him in the nude and he was pretty sure that none of them had the desire to do it again. At least that was the impression he had received by their gagging and fainting. He was surprised that they hadn’t fired him after that little “incident”, but corporate drones were a dying breed, the younger generation opting instead to work for themselves (not surprising, considering the diet of individualism they’d been media fed their whole lives). Besides, a lot of things had happened that evening, and Charlie was pretty sure his full Monty escapade had been tame compared to the actions of some of his coworkers.

He sighed internally as the office where he worked rose out of the horizon like a Godzilla of steel and concrete. He hated the ugliness that came with the shear size of the place; he was pretty sure that the thing could have been shaped like a hot female celebrity and still been ugly. “Morning Paul,” he called in greeting to the old Pakistani parking attendant while handing him the keys to his Hyundai Accent. The old man said nothing, only glancing at Charlie long enough to find the keys. A stranger would have found the behaviour rude, but to Charlie it was simply ritual. Indeed, if the old man had said something, Charlie would have probably gone into shock.
Dragging his feet along the cement floor, Charlie slowly headed for the elevator, his waistline jiggling like possessed Jell-O. He paused briefly as he passed the stairs, his inner dialogue caught in a timeless battle between duty and sloth. Sloth won, like always, but Charlie swore that he had walked by even slower than usual; somehow proving that duty would win out one day.