The Burning Red Poppy 

Chapter 1 ~The Beginning~

Far in the future and far away from  earth , the settlers of mars had a rude awakening coming for them soon.  The earth was consumed by flames and toxic air. The water is no longer drinkable. Humans and a couple of animals fled to the closest planet that was livable. All this is now far in the past and life is good on Mars. Society has forgotten with the help of these special pills that were made mandatory by the new government. Let’s go back to the beginning to get a better understanding of what happened. 

Back in the end days everything was chaos, there was fire everywhere. People are flooding the streets in protest of the government and their new oil project. The ice was melting and the water was rising. The temperature kept rising and with the pollution the air was no longer breathable. The Ozone layer was so thin, that radiation from the sun was seeping through. People were divided and the people in charge didn’t know what to do. They were stuck and nowhere knew where to turn. So as the government kept getting backed into a corner, they made the bold decision to take most of the people and some of the surviving plants and animals, then packed up everything and moved to the next best thing. Though the world was still in chaos, the people couldn’t believe they were that blind and they destroyed the planet. This made the government start studying the poppy flower. One such scientist found that you can make them into pills to help control the population. The people didn’t know what was happening but they were happy and everything was fine.. Or at least I thought it was. 

“Did you release the new pill?..we’ve been having more reports of people remembering what happened…” said a voice.

 I.. a lower class government official was walking when I heard that. It caught my attention, this made me hide behind a wall and listen into the conversation.. ‘Remember what?..’ I questioned as I listened in. 

There wasn’t much information.. So eventually I let it be and started to head to my own pod. Turning on the news, it was the basic coverage of the climate crisis. This made me start to question everything as I sat there watching the news reporter go on about what was happening in the world. I took the bottle of the unsettling red pills and tossed them. I want to see what I’m supposed to not remember. One night wouldn’t hurt, at least it shouldn’t, right?.. 

I was dead wrong, as I laid in bed only a few hours after not taking the pill. I started running a fever and started to see these red lights and fire everywhere. Panic was setting in as I grabbed my pillow and stuffed my face in it, letting out a pained groan. All I heard was screaming, mixed with the burning feeling all over my body, I felt like I was going crazy at that moment. No matter what, I went to sleep, trying to sleep off the pain of being off the pill. In the sleep state it wasn’t much better, I dreamt of the old world and everything that happened there. That was the night I realized what was happening. 

  Chapter 2 ~Savior~

Every time I would see a poppy or even the symbol of the flower, I would get these absolutely head splitting headaches followed by the rush of information of what happened before humanity moved to mars. This made me start to realize that the population was going down the same path as we did 25 years ago. Using the little power my position had I started to try and convince the people that we were making the same mistakes we made more than two decades ago. I tried to convince myself that people would listen to me but they didn’t. The people above me didn’t listen to me or even cared for that matter. 

“Once it gets too bad, that’s when I will step in but for now do your job..”

Those words cut through me like a hot knife through butter. This didn’t stop me, instead it just made me work harder, I picked up trash whenever I saw it, I would make it a point  to stop overuse of water and electricity. While doing that I went to news articles and channels to get them to do coverage over it. Not like they have but since I was here now maybe the people would listen more. I had no proof of what happened to the old world. There was no way I could prove what was happening was the repeat of something that happened not too long ago. I knew if we didn’t have the pill that more people would listen to me. So that was the next step. 

Over the next week using the power I had, I would sneak into the lab area and make slight changes so that there was less and less of the poppy in the pill. This would have worked like an absolute charm. I kept doing the same thing of going to the news and making it a point to change. Of course there was panic for a while and a lot of people didn’t listen and this made a lot more government officials start to look into what was happening. Now I thought they would look into it and see people were starting to remember and this was a good point to turn the faith of humanity around and change the way we treat the planet. This is not what happened sadly. The government upped the dosage and the people were basically zombies as of now. They didn’t think for themselves. 

This didn’t stop me from trying my hardest to get people to understand, I would keep trying and trying until the government either took action against me or for me. I needed people to understand that if we kept going like this that it wouldn’t matter where we went we would destroy our planet and that we needed to understand our mistakes and understand that we need to make a change but of course this isn’t what happened. 

Chapter 3 ~The Ending~ 

Eventually I started to get serious letters about how I should stop what I was doing. I was causing a lot of panic around what was happening. This didn’t faze me and I kept doing what I was doing. I wanted to make a commotion around the problems in the world and so I kept at it. Though people were not listening to me and the world kept getting worse and worse. As I got older I saw how the world slowly changed from thriving to the same way the old world was. The air was polluted, the water temperature was higher then normal. Even when I pointed these things out and how were were killing the world faster, the people didn’t understand and the world was dying from this.

Not even 60 years from that point did humanity change. The world was once again in panic. The world was polluted and no longer livable. The living situation got worse in a faster amount of time, and it’ll keep going like that if people don’t start caring about the world we live in, we should treat it with respect and take care of it. Now in a rush panic are people starting to understand that pollution is serious and that we need to make it a point to take care of the place that we live. Though at this point it is too late to change what has happened. People were rushing and pushing through to get on the ship, having no faith in humanity. I stayed back and watched the world be consumed by the mass panic. It was long past my time anyways and I tried my hardest to get people to understand the damage it can cause when you don’t take care of the planet you live on. So I’ll sit here and watch with a smile on my face, knowing that eventually this planet will thrive without humans on it.