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Summery:  The thoughts of Dylan on Earth

A/N:  I fixed it up a bit.  Technically I've only seen 4 episodes (and 2 were about Tyr) so any more problems with my facts can be blamed on this.  The title comes from how long it took me to read this.

Dylan Hunt was sitting in his darkened room, alone with his thoughts.  His thoughts weren't especially happy though.  He was thinking about Earth.  Like everything else he had ever known the Earth he knew was gone.  Gone and replaced with the living hell of Harper's Earth. It was just unbelievable that Earth could have fallen so far so fast.  That one moment people were living their lives as a part of the greatest society ever known and the next they were lucky to be alive. 

In his time Earth was the representative of the Commonwealth, a shining example of peace and justice.  The people were safe, no one went hungry and there was harmony. Life was good for the people. Everyone had jobs; education and health care were free and available to all people. That was the Earth he had known all his life. It was a paradise. 

 He had grown up far from Earth on Tarn Vedra.  But, he had visited there once with his parents when he was a kid.  He remembered the big, modern cities and their buildings that seemed to touch the sky.  They were gone now.

Today's Earth was a nightmare.  The people were habitually terrorized by the Nietzchiens and the Magog. Death was a normal part of the day and the sounds of sobbing or screaming cut through the air on a regular basis. Kids like Harper went hungry everyday there.  He grew up in a refugee camp for Christ's sake.  Refugee camps, on Earth! They faced hardships like plagues, slavery, and burring their children all the time.

 He remembered that first day he had met Harper and the Maru crew.  Harper had had a potentially fatal case of measles and he hadn't even known.  It was a disease long eradicated in his time, but it could have killed the engineer.  Life on Earth had ravaged his, and no doubt the other people on Earth's immune system.  Medical care was limited and hard to come by. He had been born more than 335 years ago, but he was healthier than a kid in his early 20s.  Medicine on Earth hadn't just stopped finding new cures; it was losing the ones it already had.   It was hard to imagine one day the Commonwealth fell, the Magog descended on the planet, and now the people couldn't even fathom the way he had known Earth.  Their lives changed almost as much as his had when he was pulled from the black hole.

He understood things were different now.  The Commonwealth was dead and he was doing all he could to revive it.  But, whenever he heard something about Earth, especially when Harper let something slip about his childhood, it really hit home that it was a different time.  People, no matter what planet in the Commonwealth they lived on, hadn't lived that way.  His society was dead.  But, these thoughts just strengthened his resolve to restore the Commonwealth.  No one should grow up that way. They didn't have to in the past and they shouldn't have to now.  Society had taken huge steps backwards and Dylan Hunt was going to get it moving back in the right direction.