Lost Transmissions: Splastic

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Lost Transmissions

Entry: Splastic.

Splastic

Plastic, as we all know, is a marvellous thing, preventing right-thinking people from getting their drinks all over their shoes. It has been used for millennia to create sturdy, purposeful objects, such as coat hangers, washing up bowls and Sirius Cybernetics Robots, but its primary use has been in thoroughly, completely and utterly destroying ecosystems.

Many a civilisation has owed its hasty discovery of space travel to the fact that their planet is up to its knees in the wreckage of civilisation, usually manifesting itself as bin liners full of crisp packets, and consequently intergalactic commerce and goodwill flourished.

Ecologists, at least the ones who haven't been shot by the banks that represent the Galacti-merchants, say that plastic is still a bad thing. And so, in a fit of technological pique, splatstic was invented to shut the ecologists up once and for all.

Splastic, as all bad ideas are, was very simple. If items need to be biodegradable in order to avoid the "crisp death" of an ecology, then an item that is spontaneously biodegradable should, theoretically, please everybody.

Splastic was designed to simply revert back to its component molecules every time that it was subjected to a sharp knock, the individual molecules unwinding to become the atoms that they were built from, thus covering right-thinking people's shoes in Ginantonix and anything else they happened to be carrying.

The ecologists were ecstatic, but the people who'd bought shrink wrapped dingo's kidneys were not, especially when they had tucked their purchase underneath their arms to wave frantically for a taxi.

After the gunfire had died away the ecologists found that they were becoming an increasingly endangered profession, but thanks to the philanthropy of some suddenly wealthy dry-cleaning firms who specialised in removing kidney stains from hypersuede, they were given a fast ship, shovels and a mission to cure "crisp death" by any means necessary.

Unfortunately the engines of their starship ignited the mountains of litter that covered the first planet they went to rescue, destroying it utterly. Those same ecologists are still out there, somewhere, running for their lives.

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