BUT EVIL WASN’T done with me.
It wanted me to die regretting every choice I had ever made in my life.
“You were foolish enough to think these humans were worthy of your protection, Alien Hunter? You wasted your life trying to save this planet when those who inhabit it have done everything in their power to destroy it?”
Now my pain-racked mind swirled with images of smokestacks chugging out swollen clouds of black soot. Oil spills suffocating pelicans and fish. Birds circling heaped mountains of rotting garbage. Fluorescent green chemicals oozing out of a drain pipe into a rippling stream. Rivers burning.
There… is… good.… I struggled to complete the thought despite the pain. I… have… seen… the good.
“You saw what you wanted to see, foolish boy. See the truth: humanity reigns as the most colossal mistake in all of creation. It is a race of greedy, avaricious, selfish animals determined to destroy all the lesser creatures doomed to share this puny planet with them.”
I knew it was trying to play mind games with me. It would be delighted to watch me die, totally lamenting my decision to join the Alpar Nokian Protectorship. I had forsaken any chance at a halfway normal teenage life to defend Terra Firma and its human inhabitants from an onslaught of alien outlaws.
What if they hadn’t been worth it?
What if my whole life had been a colossal waste of time?
The only thing worse than dying, I guess, is living a life with absolutely no meaning.
But I refused to wallow in the hideous thing’s dark and gloomy shadows. I clung to the truth as I knew it: There was good in this world. I had seen it. I had tasted it. I had heard it. Despite all their flaws, earthlings (and their planet) were definitely worth saving.
So, with every minuscule ounce of my remaining strength, I fought back. I punched through the pain and countered the evil thing’s thoughts with a few of my own:
If these humans are so evil, why don’t you embrace them instead of sending them off to oblivion in your black hole?
It hesitated.
The irrefutable logic of my argument caused a momentary glitch in its operating system.
Its grip of pain loosened.
Not much.
But enough.
I was out of there in a flash.