Lost Worlds (my sci-fi short collection)

Green Revolution

SFSD 6.0 Round 2 - Dystopian Quotes!  Greenpunk

Challenge - to write a dystopian sci-fi story and incorporate five quotes from a given selection, these appear in bold.

#1 - 2 Every man has to decide for themselves which side they are on.

#2 - 6 Anyone that wants to challenge that will have to deal with me.

#3 - 1 This is a witch-hunt. I will not have it aboard my ship.

#4 - 6 For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.

#5 - 1 He needed to sleep but more importantly than that he needed to rub one out, which he did, twice.

GREEN REVOLUTION

Eco-Enforcer Tom Forest stared at the sawn off stump in disbelief. Only a day ago, possibly two, there had been a living tree there, providing shade and more importantly, cleaning the air and storing carbon. He transferred his gaze to the perpetrator, a short stocky man in dusty workman's clothes, standing opposite, looking back, guiltily defiant. 

"It had to go!" he insisted. "It was dropping branches on the house, leaves in the gutters. Made a mess all over the paving." 

Forest shook his head, "You should have put in a request to council. Cutting down a tree? That's a third degree felony." 

"But I did! I made three requests. They did nothing!" the man protested indignantly, starting to feel a little uneasy. 'Third degree felony' didn't sound good. 

Forest examined the stump more closely. "Eucalyptus leucoxylon, sub species megalocarpa, a red flowering gum," he pronounced with absolute certainty. "Only twelve years old," he added sadly.  

"That'll be at least a year in the tree nurseries for you, after you finish your rehabilitation of course." 

"A year? I can't spend a year stuffing around with plants! I have a job, a family to support." 

"You should have thought of that before you cut the tree down," Forest reproved, unsympathetically. "Perhaps the judge will let you do your service on weekends, although of course that will stretch out the sentence." 

He entered the details into his palmtop, taking a couple of pictures of the stump as supporting evidence. "Where's your blackboard?" he demanded impatiently.  

Reluctantly the other man handed it over and Forest wrote down a date and time in red chalk. "That's your court hearing, Woodville council chambers, Wednesday the fifteenth, 14:00 hours. Don't be late." 

He left the man clutching his blackboard, the defiance now replaced with fear.  

Forest had no sympathy for him, some people just didn't deserve to live in a house with a real garden. If he had to sell it now and move into a zero-energy apartment while he worked off his debt to society, that was his problem.  

He looked down at his palmtop for details of his next assignment. Since the Green Revolution, fifty years ago, electronic devices were severely limited. Personal devices were issued only to individuals occupying various carefully monitored positions, Eco-Enforcers being one of them. People who had been brought up in the rampant technological age before the Revolution would have been amazed at how little technology modern people needed. Blackboards for instance, blackboards were ideal for recording messages and information. They could be used multiple times and once produced, required absolutely no energy to keep operating.