The Broken Man

Once, Earth had consisted entirely of seas and land. There had been water and there had been rock. And then there had been people, and people had decided that they could do better than water and rock. They decided to fix the problem, and in so doing, they invented plastic. It was a miracle substance. It came in every colour and every shape, and it lasted forever.

The problem was that people didn't want things that lasted forever. Sometimes, they barely wanted them to last for the scant few seconds it took to pull a chocolate bar from a wrapper, or the few minutes that it took to carry their new dress from the shop to the car. And when the time was up, they threw the plastic things away, because out of sight was out of mind after all. But all that plastic had to go somewhere. Out of mind did not mean that it had gone, the exact opposite in fact. It existed in places that people did not go.

And it changed the lives of the creatures that did.

There hadn't always been an island, but Kiko had always lived on it. Nothing was ever really new, not down here. Only the people in the cloud city ever got to experience what newness was really like.

This morning was no different. Kiko swung her legs over the edge of the bunk and lowered herself to the floor. She pulled on thick socks and her boiler suit, which she'd found over in section four underneath a cracked toilet bowl and a bundle of random wires. Everyone down here dressed in discarded things, putting together outfits from whatever they could find. The boiler suit was an unfortunate shade of yellow but it covered her arms and legs and kept off the sun and that was more important.

She rubbed her sandpapery skin with the clean corner of an otherwise dirty cloth and ate a banana from her fruit basket. It was overripe and smelly, but it was a banana, and she came by them too infrequently to think of it as anything other than a marvel. The sweetness went up her nose. She quite enjoyed it.

Then she opened the door of her workshop and stepped out into the stink. The rubbish that had rained down overnight had cluttered her path so she was forced to kick her way through. Fortunatley her boots were solid enough to let nothing in, so she kicked with enthusiasm. This was her favourite time. You never knew what might have fallen quite literally into your path over night. Usually it was nothing but junk, but sometimes, just sometimes, there might be something more.

Something glinted up ahead, and she pounced on it, dropping into a crouch and sweeping aside scattered pieces of snapped crockery and broken glass and rusted metal.

It was something most unexpected.

'Oh,' she said. 'Would you look at that.'

It was a beautiful velvet glove. The fingers were long and elegant, the cuff exquisitely embroidered with green leaves and orange flowers. Quickly, she glanced around, then grabbed at it. It slid free with no effort at all, and revealed something that set Kiko's heart truly to racing.

She heaved aside a large panel with a crack like a bolt of lightning in the centre. There, underneath it, was a man. Kiko looked him over once, then again, just to make sure that she had the details of him. She looked around. And then, finally, she looked up.

He could not have come from anywhere else. He most certainly had not come from here. His skin was too soft, there were no gill slits on his neck. His hair wasn't slimy and there were no whiskers trailing from his cheeks, or shells anywhere.

There were stripes down the sides of his midnight blue trousers and his boots were shiny and at his side was a sword, and she wondered at the games that were played in the cities in the sky that would require a man to be dressed in such a fashion.