Let me introduce myself. I am an uncomplicated man, one who enjoys uncomplicated things. I get up in the morning and go to work, same as anyone else. It’s just that the nature of my work can sometimes be, well complicated. I’m a fugitive recovery agent, a “bounty hunter” if you will. Pretty often criminals fail to meet their bail, and think they can escape off-planet and start over. The police just aint have the manpower or the ships to track down all these gate-jumpers, which’s why the Guild was started to track them down instead. It’s my job to inject, extract, and deliver these fugitives to the police. I work; I get paid. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

I eat a steady diet of protein bars, boiled ramen, and black coffee, can’t afford much else. I’m trying to save up some money to replace some of the parts in the engines, make the ship run smoother. She’s a good ship, used to do debris-retrieval around Earth orbit back in the day, nothing but debris nowadays. She changed hands a few times, and was refitted for interstellar flight, before I bought her from a man claiming to only sell brand new ships. She’s not pretty, and certainly not fast, and are a little cramped for my tastes, buts its all I’ve got. Just me, a few tons of steel and porcelain, and the black, perfect for the quiet uncomplicated life like I like.

It is only when the pressing demands of my day job get in the way that I make my way planet-side to rejoin the human race. In this case I was headed for the biggest center of human existence left, Goldilocks planet. In the early days of colonization, people were hard-pressed to find suitable planets for living. This planet was too small, this planet was too cold, Goldilocks planet was just right. Goldilocks planet was like Earth-Part-Two, with yellow sun, single moon, approx. one Earth gees, and 70 percent ocean surface. Now, with Earth the first gone, Goldilocks planet is the default leader of the Federation planets, and boasts the biggest population, though a huge percentage of that are the terran refugees, who mostly live in shanty towns in the bottom layers of the major cities. Populated areas like my destination, the no-longer-accurately named “Colony Town”, are like cities built on top of cities. Only the wealthy can afford to live in the upper layers, while the nameless masses live in squalid conditions in the under-city.

I was doing a job for Ravine’s police, hunting down a fugitive considered dangerous for his involvement in subversive anti-government activities on Ravine. The man created propaganda for one of the largest terrorist groups in the Federation, and was arrested in a big police shootout that took out most of his group. He escaped prison a few months back, part of a riot-turned-break orchestrated by the Black Hole Syndicate, and somehow managed to get off planet before the cops got him.

He fled to Goldilocks, which most fugitives do, probably hoping to make a new start where no one could remember his face. Seems someone did recognize his though, and I got a tip that he made frequent visits to a small shop in the under-city, a place that sold antiques scavenged from what’s left of Earth.

I spent days sitting on the roof of the building across the street, waiting for the guy to make an appearance. Hours wasted staring at a neon sign, and the few hundreds of nameless pedestrians who walked past its sick glow. I’d almost given up, thinking I’d been handed a bad tip, when I finally saw a guy who registered as a match for my target. He went in the store, and I was waiting when he came out with a brown paper bag in hand.

I followed him through crowded streets, pushing my way through hordes of people desperately trying to survive in a world that doesn’t make sense. People who live down here are barely human anymore, they scavenge for food and fight for their lives, because they have nowhere to go home to. People don’t really live here, in the dark underbelly of an unstoppable machine; even the planet itself is somehow wrong for humanity, something about the air or the smell.

My target was living in a condemned building full of squatters, enough that no one noticed that I didn’t belong. I followed him up a dark emergency staircase, and kept my distance as he entered a room at the end of a long hall.

Bounty hunters aren’t allowed to carry firearms, its what separates us from the criminals we catch many would say. I don’t buy in to such talk myself, as most of my targets get death at the government’s hands anyway. Instead I was armed with enough tranquilizers to put a man to sleep for well more than the time it’ll take to haul him to my ship.

I bust down the door, full ready for a fight, but I was sorely mistaken. Its worth noting that this was the first chance I got to get a clean look at my target, and you can be sure that he was no intimidating sight to behold. The many was short, scrawny even, and looked more like a starved rat than a dangerous terrorist. He put up little resistance as I threw a few quick jabs to his head, knocked him on his back, and injected the tranq into his arm.

It wasn’t the man the man himself that surprised me. No, it was his room. The floor could only have been 8 foot square, but every inch of the walls was covered in paint. This man, an escaped criminal, accused of the worst sort of thought-crimes, living in a box, had painted landscapes about as real as the real thing. Hills, fields forests, the man had run out of wall and begun new paintings over his own work. Somehow this man had managed to escape everything, and he still desperately clung to a vision of a planet long dead. This guy was living in a box, yet had still managed to hold on to his home.

I fixated on one spot on the wall, a small picture of a green forest. It looked just like the forests where I grew up. Redwoods. Strong trees. I spent countless hours running through those woods, playing cowboys and Indians. I fought a war in forests like that, not much left of them afterwards. Something about that forest haunts me, the life I saw destroyed before my eyes. It was like the man had seen into my past and pulled out what I had tried to forget. I thought I could never go back to those woods, but there I was.

I stuffed the man in a body bag, and hoisted him over my shoulders to carry him back to my ship. He didn’t weigh much, but it was a long walk. I stopped for a minute and sat on a bench with the bag next to me. No one noticed. It was dark when I reached my ship, dark and tired. My ship’s hold swallowed us up like a warm cave, and I handcuffed the man to a pipe where he couldn’t mess with anything. Soon, I returned triumphant to the blackness of space.

I was well paid on Ravine for the man, who I suspect didn’t last many days. It was an easy job, no complications. I return to my life of solitude, alone with myself and my ship and my dreams of Redwoods. I am still alone in space, but at least its quiet.