Juxtapose

Humanity can be infectious.

FADE IN:

Shot 1
A thick forest covers a lush landscape. Trees billow in a distant wind. Focus on a small bug, fluttering, fighting to stay aloft. We stay on it until it finally lands on a ragged blade of grass. The small patch of earth we see is barren, sparsely covered with lone blades of grass, each marked with holes, yellow with dehydration, etc. 

A distant roar shakes the ground. The bug begins flittering, trying to lift off from the blade of grass, but it isn’t quick enough. Flames roar over the ground, obscuring everything in orange and white. We pull up to see a rocket ship taking off.

WOMAN (V.O.)
Like a virus, the ion engine allowed us
to escape our petri dish of a dying planet

The rocket ship vanishes into the dark sky overhead, becoming just another twinkling light lost in the abyss. We push into the sky, and before long, it’s all we see. 

Shot 2
The stars shift. Their pattern changes until they form a belt of stars, stretching across the sky in a semi-circle. 
We pull back and see a lone spaceman standing on a slight hill, in the foreground. He peers up at the sky, arms limp at his sides.

WOMAN (V.O.)
Free to explore the galaxy unabated. 

The spaceman’s attention is shifted downwards as the trees along the low ridge begin to move. It’s faint, but people are visible, emerging into the sun, tiny, like a small infestation. 

Shot 3
The image fades into another, into bugs on a white wall. They sit idly in the same places on the screen the emerging spacemen had occupied. Their wings twitch idly, some crawl slowly. They are nervous. 

WOMAN (V.O.)
For me, EV1 held the most potential.

Shot 4
We pull back and see the bugs are crawling along the side of a spherical dwelling. As we continue to pull back, it’s revealed there are hundreds of temporary houses. They occupy a circular field, and around the edges are felled trees, torn up ground, etc. 

Shot 5
As we continue to pull back, the dwellings fade into the iris of a woman’s eye. She stares straight ahead, her emotion is hard to read, but could be interpreted as indifferent, or even disgusted. 

Shot 6
Her eye erupts into light as the scene fades. The headlight of a space truck now occupies the space her eye once did. We pull away slightly, then move up. On the hood of the truck are more bugs, considerably more. After a moment of them crawling around, a hissing can be heard. 

White fog rises from the hood and drifts around the bugs. They twitch, their legs fold in, and they fall, immobile, dead. 

The fog continues to rise, obscuring our vision.

Shot 7
Through the fog drives the truck, bouncing over the landscape. We stay on it as it moves forward, and then it breaks out of the fog to reveal an industrial area. As we pull back, we see the factory is destroying the landscape, farming the trees, digging up the ground for resources. 

Shot 8
We begin moving closer to the area dug into the ground. As we center over the strip mine, it fades into the woman’s eye. Perhaps now her emotion can be read - sadness, anger. 

Her eye closes, and a single teardrop runs down her cheek. As it drips from her chin, the background becomes nothing but a black void. 

Shot 9
The tear abruptly falls to the ground, next to a bug on a dying blade of grass. Startled by the sudden drop of water, it stretches its wings and flies from the grass into the air. 

We follow it for a short distance and then pull back. We’re above the treeline, and no more are the trees thick and lush. Dead trunks with bare, twisted limbs stand above broken, barren ground. Old artillery and war machines lie broken and in pieces. There was a battle here, once. 

WOMAN (V.O.)
And soon, the indigenous life will acquiesce. 

FADE OUT: