My clients live in two sorts of places: those where it seems it's raining all the time and those dry as bones and hungry for them. Sometimes they are forced to move from one kind to the other. Sometimes they are forced to stay and it's the place that changes.
A lot of my clients die. Every year the size of my clientele grows. If they paid me I would be as rich as the people I beg for money. Of course if they could pay me I wouldn't have to.
It wasn't the sort of job I had expected to do growing up. I had fallen in love with the planet, romantic idiot that I was, and I dreamed of defending her. Then I learned enough to realize Earth was already dead - the green-eyed blue planet I had pledged myself to was a thing of small private parks and expensive life support. I was bodyguard to a corpse.
Figuring that out did not take the romantic idiot out of me. I set up to solve the case and seek justice.
Two problems with that. One, the case was too obvious to be solved. Everybody knew what that would mean so nobody wanted to. Two, even if justice could be found, and that would take a certain amount of guillotine, the people and systems you'd have to make pay were the same ones that had the resources to help some of their victims. You could try to punish the carbon barons and their accomplices or you could beg them for money to save as many people as you could.
The first time I worked a tent megacity I decided I would beg. Felt like selling my soul, but what the hell is a soul worth compared to kids' lives? Ever since then I swallow my anger and suck up. Saves lives. It's a good bargain.
Besides, I no longer think there was a murder. Yes, a lot of people die in ways even an amateur forensic statistician with dyscalculia and no database access can trace back to some of the people whose parties I go to, but - killing Earth? We loved her when she was pleasing and pliant to our needs. It's easy to think that this dustbowl-eyed place of storms and heatwaves isn't Earth but a vengeful haunted house. But that's on us. It's still herself, with a climate and a biosphere, just not ones we find easy to live and prosper in.
Earth doesn't even bother to sneer at us.
Fair enough. I don't love her and I don't work for her either. Not anymore. But there are nights when I can't pretend to believe the lie of maybe one day. When I can tell I'm running out of bits of myself to sell. Those nights I open a window and accept her embrace even in places where this risks death by heat, smoke, or worse. I know neither one of us cares. That might be the last honest thing in my world.