Johnny (Part One)

Johnny Cramblit had always wanted to be a cop. He believed in law and order, and he believed in the ideals of the Enlightened Society, and ever since he was a young boy he had planned to devote his life to the enforcement of the principles that he believed had saved planet Earth from a terrible fate. So, the day after his eighteenth birthday, he went down to the recruitment office and signed up for the police academy. After six months of intensive training and a year or two of on the job training working at a prison, or as he hoped, a prison transport ship, he would take his place as a proud officer of the United Earth Police Force.
In the year 2150, after years of war, disease, poverty, and division among mankind, a new order brought peace to the embattled planet that most historians believed was about to be destroyed by the human creatures who had recently come along after millions of years of evolutionary progress and decided they had the right to treat the world like they owned it. A great man arose after the last war. There were three wars before it that were each called a war that would end all wars, but what became known as World War IV actually accomplished this. Sort of. Peace was called when the New United Nations Secretary General Joshua Lewis made an emergency pronouncement to the world saying that if an immediate cease fire wasn't called, the entire planet would be destroyed.
Over two and a half billion people, nearly a third of the population, had already been killed and the twenty eight planets that had nuclear capabilities were all threatening to be the first to launch their missiles. The last war had ended when the missiles were launched, a two year winter that killed billions followed, and the peace that came afterward was just long enough for nations to build themselves up again, develop more weapons, and pick up where they left off. Nobody wanted to go through the nuclear winters, radiation sickness, and the years of recovery that would follow a second holocaust, if anybody even survived it, so the war raged on for nearly a decade with only one nuclear blast on a lunar colony which nobody claimed and to which nobody retaliated. But the war was getting more brutal and another mass launch of missiles seemed imminent.
That was when Joshua Lewis came on the scene. He had been elected Secretary General when the previous one had been assassinated by a Christian Fundamentalist Terrorist. The New United Nations, reformed after World War III, was little more than a loose organization of countries and large city states that was lucky if even a third of the members sent delegates to any function and was more likely to erupt into a multinational riot than accomplish anything towards its official goal of world peace and unity. But Joshua Lewis stood up his first day on the job and delivered a short, but profound message to any human being in the solar system who would hear him.
"My fellow human beings," he began, his face and voice being broadcasted to the entire planet, the three remaining lunar colonies, the colony on Mars (which had remained neutral since the beginning of WW III) and the two dozen space stations in the solar system, "we are in a very dangerous place here on Earth. Humanity is once again approaching annihilation and if we do not do something immediately, this war will destroy every human on the planet, and eventually kill every living thing in the known galaxy! Peace is not only desired, it is essential to our survival as a species! Even now, twenty-eight nations on Earth are threatening to launch nuclear weapons, and other WMD's have already been used to catastrophic results, killing billions! We must put aside our differences, whether they are cultural, racial, or spiritual, and finally come together in unity or else our entire existence will come to an end in a fiery ball of radioactive futility! Whatever you may have against your fellow human being, is it worth the irradiation of every life on Earth to prove your point? So, I am pleading with the leaders of the countries of Earth and the armies now raging against each other, cease the warfare and let us come together to seek peace! The floor of the N.U.N. is open and I will not leave this building until every nation is at peace! Please! For the sake of humanity!"
The same plea had been made countless times by nearly every other Secretary General and millions of peace activists, but there was something different about the man delivering this speech. No one could quite put their finger on it, but for some reason Joshua Lewis seemed to connect with every race, every culture, and every religion. The fighting stopped that very hour and a day later, thousands of the world's political and religious leaders were gathered and finally discussing peace. With Lewis's leadership and radical new philosophy, it was achieved.
The N.U.N. worked for nearly a year, during which there were few instances of organized, government-condoned violence, and came to a consensus on everything from a global economy to a religion that would take the best parts of every faith and create a new one that would satisfy the majority of humanity. That last point was the most important to Joshua Lewis. He believed that World War Three and the follow-up World War Four were begun by religious differences and fanatical fundamentalists who had taken over the major faiths. America's War on Terror, which raged for decades under different presidents and different names, was perceived by many as a war on Islam. With Christian's killing Muslims, Muslims killing Christians, everybody else starting to kill Jews, and even the peace loving Buddhists and Hindus getting involved, Lewis believed that organized religion in nearly every form was dangerous and corrupt. If mankind could only come together and agree on spirituality, then ninety percent of wars would cease. Of course he also came up with solutions to the economic and energy problems, but his biggest accomplishment was the unification of all faiths into what he called The Church.
When The Church was endorsed by most religious leaders, including the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Mormon leadership, to name a few, all other faiths were declared outdated and dangerous. The Church leaders proclaimed to their respective followers that the old ways were dying out and the new order was the true path. They anathemized anyone who held to the old ways. While most of the so-called new agers and many of the Eastern religions joined in whole heartedly, there were hardliners from the monotheistic faiths. Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike all declared that their God said that He was the only God and that lumping Yahweh and Allah in with Buddha and Brahma would be blasphemous.
These hardliners were excommunicated and discouraged, but tolerated for the first few years. Lewis explained that it would take a while for the new religion to win everybody over. But when Muslim, Christian, and Jewish terrorists began to attack any organization that endorsed The Church, one Christian even making an attempt on Lewis's life, any faith not adhering to The Church was outlawed. A citizen didn't have to become a member of The Church, but they couldn't follow any other religion either. Leaders of the three main monotheistic religions denounced both the terrorists and The Church, but most believed that they were only attacking the terrorists for political reasons and secretly endorsed them. Soon, prisons were filled with Christians, Muslims, and Jews who had refused to join Lewis's Church.
In the same year that the term Enlightened Society began to gain popularity, a space exploration mission discovered a stable wormhole a few hundred thousand kilometers past Pluto. It was large enough for ships to travel through and it opened up about three days journey from an inhabited planet that was nicknamed Planet X. The name stuck, especially when it was discovered that the environment was quite harsh and barely livable. Nobody wanted to settle there. There were plants and many animals, but the planet was basically three continents of desert. Lewis had a brilliant idea that both dealt with the ever growing prison population and the seemingly useless planet. Criminals deemed too deviant or dangerous to return to human society would be sent there and left to their own devices. X became a giant penal colony, and a large portion of its population were religious offenders.
Johnny Cramblit knew this history. Forty years after the end of the war that truly ended all wars the Enlightened Society that Earth had become was a thriving global community that was unified, peaceful, and happy. He wanted to help keep it that way. He joined the police academy and spent six months training at the Martian colony, and returned home to his family proudly wearing the black and green uniform of United Earth Police Force. He had impressed his superiors and had been granted the assignment he desired for his on the job training. He would be a guard on a prison transport ship taking prisoners to Planet X. He would serve there for a year and then be assigned a more permanent post.
But he would first spend two weeks at home with his family. The leave was granted to all those who would be sent off planet for their first assignment, and he was looking forward to spending time with his family, especially his older brother Joshua, named after Joshua Lewis. He had always looked up to his brother and had wanted to be just like him when he became a man. Joshua had decided to become a doctor and had left for school when Johnny was ten years old. He had come home rarely, but had just moved back to Capitol City (formerly New York City) a month before eighteen year old Johnny had left for the academy. He had barely gotten to catch up with him and was planning on spending most of his leave doing just that.
Little did Johnny know when he walked through the door to be greeted by his older brother that the man he was embracing would be the first man he would arrest.
TO BE CONTINUED...