I'm a murderer. Just not yet, I guess.
I like to know I can look at myself in the mirror and flaunt what I look like without a care. I do that at least once every day. I can't get enough of how I look.
I'll admit that I'm vain. I'm proud of how good I look for my age. Look, I'm a woman. I admit it, I love pretty things and I have the money to buy them, but there are a lot of women out there that are just as vain as me. I've even let a few of them stay with me.
I can't say that I've slept with very many women. I've been with my husband for a very long time and I have no desire to let him go to the grave without me. He's a good man, who's always been there for me. And to be honest, he's so handsome that he doesn't leave me all that much room for desire.
I like my husband and I do love him, but who am I to tell you about love? I'm not about to preach about it.
I'm just a sinner who loves to look at herself. I've been that way since I was a small girl. Why can't I just admit that I'm a vain, good-for-nothing sinner? I don't have to apologize for that.
My name is Aida. I'm a government employee who smiles for the cameras. For show, I live in a middle class colonial neighbourhood. You know the kind, the kind we build for the outside world. It's not where I live. I live in a mountain area. It's quiet, far away from the colony's city centres, where most everybody else lives.
I've lived here for as long as I've lived. It's quiet because there aren't a lot of people living here. Numbers keep growing and my neighbourhood is at the end of its expansion phase.
I live in the colony of Scorpius. We're about sixty light years away from Earth with a population of just under twenty thousand. Of course, that's not counting Elysium. When you include the number of people who live at Elysium... Elysium is a small island that's home to quite a few well-to-do individuals.
And by well-to-do I mean people who work at Elysium but are shipped here everyday by shuttle. They are people who live out here, but maintain a home on Earth. Most of them have either been born Earthside or continue to spend a lot of time on Earth. They aren't even colonists. I guess they're the equivalent of the rich people who live on Earth our colony was founded by people like that.
Thankfully, until now, the rich people living at Elysium haven't interfered with the colonists much. The colonial government doesn't even go that far to bother with the people who live on Elysium. There is no government on Elysium. The only laws there are the laws that people choose to live by. I guess it's the equivalent of Earthside's country clubs or whatever you might call them.
A lot of the colonists think Elysium is a tourist attraction. Even though it might be just that, the Elysian lifestyles are just a touch more extravagant than the lives of the average colonists. Come to think of it, Aida lives like that too. She lives in a small mountain village, a five minute drive from the main city where most of the colony's people live.
Aida and her husband have lived here for a very long time. He's gone to Elysium for work and he's been there for a long time. She's been here for a very, very long time. She has the sort of looks that can make the rest of us look bad. She has a round face and a slightly pudgy figure. To be honest, most people think she's needed some shape-up. She doesn't care.
I was the same kind of woman when I was young. But I've been lucky. The man I married was the best looking man I've ever seen. I like to say he was the catch of the century. I never quite understood why he chose me. He said he'd been sent to deliver me. I'd been sent by my parents.
When we first met, it was just love at first sight. He was just nineteen. He was a stellar solider. He had tattoo's on his arms. I didn't want to ask him what they were... I still don't know.
"Hello, beautiful." He said to me when I first saw him. It was just after the first tremors of the war's beginning. We were in a crowded room. I looked at him and just responded immediately. It was like he knew exactly what to say to me. It's hard to explain.
And that was it. We started dating and got married a few years later. It sounds so simple. It was no different from what you hear all the time from young people. Although, we were both very young. I'd been nineteen and he was the same age. Ours was the most beautiful love story that never happened.
Not all love stories are written just by saying that you love somebody and you don't need to marry them to prove it. Maybe some of you younger people will understand what I'm talking about... Maybe you won't. He fell in love with me the same day he met me. He married me because he knew that I was all that was good.
I've been alive, I don't know for how long for sure. I remember a time before the war. Before we lost the war against Earth that is.
My husband was my advisor and tactician in the military. I was just a naive young woman from a well-to-do family on Earth. I was somebody with enough intelligence to become a commander. I was somebody with the courage to face my husband in the battlefield. I was someone who was his equal.
I'm somebody who just didn't want to see my world lose the war. I was somebody who wanted to preserve our beautiful world of peace so that I could live in it until the end of time and beyond.
But that's not how it ended.
You know the war as the tragedy of the 24th century. I know it as the tragedy of the 21st century.
It all started off just like us losing in the very early stages of the war. Our colony was a particularly strong place to resist the Earth military's attacks. They couldn't quite reach us. But they damn well tried. We'd lost contact with Earth. They were going to destroy every colony that opposed them. They had the full backing of the United Nations. The United Nations didn't actually go to war because they didn't have the power to do so.
We did. We had nearly twenty thousand colonists to defend our colony. The United Nations didn't have the same numbers or people in the same areas. Now we see them as people, but back then those Earth people were just the enemy. Earth didn't have the same thing going for them like we did. All the colonies did.
Every planet who had a colony on their back didn't have the military weight to resist Earth.
