Butterflies

Everything changed the moment he flipped the stark resistant toggle switch. The sound made him flinch. It was like a breaking bone. Subsequently klaxons blared somewhere down below. He'd never understood their design, the cacophony was meaningless. Better, he thought, would be a symphony. Something uplifting as they plummeted to certain doom. The surface of the planet, from here, looked like a dried kitchen sponge. There were slight variations in color but the pattern was regular and unremarkable. In his last moments he predictably wondered why he'd joined the service. To crash onto a stunning alien world while listening to Beethoven, that would be something. Once he'd considered becoming an entomologist, to be concerned with the very small instead of the very great. If he hadn't succumbed to ego he might be in a field catching butterflies right now, maybe a little bored, but alive and happy.