He looked down as the last armies met in the ashen rubble of an old city, its skyscrapers of bursted windows and the stained steel armory that couldn’t last long enough for a real empire. He cackled maniacally, still wearing his aviators, his bald head slippery with a thin coat of Vaseline. The ship lifted out of the thick mass of smog like a shimmering erection slowing rising out of a witch’s stew. When Jeff Bezos looked out from his portal window, he had no intention of coming back. The sprawling orgiastic terrariums of moss and lichens and mushrooms that grew amongst the old growth forests all helped fill this terraqueous orb, and somehow levitated in empty space, spinning around in the benevolent circumstellar habitable zone, known as the Goldilocks zone. It had swirling turquoise oceans filled with the bioluminescent octopus and sea turtles, the Glaucus Atlanticus blue sea slug, the narwhal, the ribbon eel, the frilled shark and goblin shark, and predatory whales as old as the dinosaurs. Earth used to actually be a nice place in the universe. He made us buy the virtual assistant AI with the sexually enticing name of libidinal paralysis, Alexa. He made us buy those hipster-chic security cameras. He made us buy a Dyson ball vacuum and then a miniature-sized fake one for our kids. He made us buy those 4-in-1 inflatable pool floats that are shaped like a crocodile. He made us buy towering monuments of plastic toys, all shipped and suffocated in that trademark rectangular bubble wrap. This is already not a habitable enough rock to come back to we ruined it, turned it into one of the other planets with opaque clouds of sulphuric acid. When he and his younger brother boarded the New Shepard-the rocket ship made by Bezos’s space company Blue Horizon-he had no intention of coming back. He can still be seen up there, if you look closely on a night with no moon-the Amazon logo like the fading stain left behind a shooting star.