Wednesday, October 21, 2009

In the year 12525 (A rough draft of some fiction)

A historian in 12525 puzzled over over what few remnants of relics from the year 2009 he could find:

"He tweeted this response..."
The historian read that and scratched his head. He had seen several references to this type of speech or writing in this stack of ancient scribbles. Tweeted?

He wondered if it was possible if humans 10,000 years ago were kin to birds and thus talked in some kind of bird language. Based on the number of tweets referenced, he thought this highly likely.

"His classmates left messages for him on his FB page."

He'd seen the FB initialization several times before. More head scratching. He believed this to be a reference to something he'd seen called a "Facebook." This, he thought, must be some kind of scrap book or photo album. It might even reference the little boxes.

Those little boxes puzzled him, and turned to a set of photos. Picture after picture showed a single skeleton sitting before a flat boxes. The photos were taken at a recently uncovered archaeological site. The dig had produced a large structure that had been buried for centuries in rubble. It had yielded dozens of rooms with the same scenario: people sitting before movable little boxes. Other had small little boxes in their hands. Some folks lay on bed-like structures in front of still another kind of box.

It had to be some kind of worship ceremony, he decided. This box must be an altar. He made copious notes in preparation for a paper on religion in the year 2000.

This was part of his paper:

"Early mankind worshipped constantly at the base of some kind of box, which was named for the deity being worshipped. Humans in 2000 worshipped an entire pantheon of deities who went by the names of Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, e-Machine, and Apple. Handheld worship boxes carried names such as Blackberry, Razar, iPhone, Sprint and Nokia. A third type of box, similar to the first, carried the names of RCA, Zenith, Samsung, Sony, Sharp and Mitsubishi."

After looking at the way the skeletons were poised and cuddling various boxes, he wrote this:

"Apple and Blackberry appear to be very highly regarded gods; since these are named after foods this makes sense. Sustenance based worship is of course representative of survival and it is only natural that these gods would be considered foremost in the pantheon."

Since so many of the folks were in the large building, he determined that everyone must have been inside worshipping at a given hour. The structure could have been some sort of church, he surmised, and the folks laying down and looking at boxes were invalids receiving healing. He bent over his paper and surmised that RCA, Zenith, etc. were the healing gods of the year 2000.

The disaster that buried the building must have taken everyone at once and given no warning, for few people had risen from their worship to leave, he thought. That lent itself to a very sophisticated weaponry, the kind outlawed in the Human Rights Code of 10528.

He went back to his paper.

"Lack of communication, because humans used sounds akin to bird language (calling it "tweets" in written language) along with an intense focus on worship of great number of gods who were symbolized by boxes, obviously led to this civilization's demise."

4 comments:

  1. Hee hee heeeee..... LOL You are very clever my dear and I am totally laughing at this post in a good way.

    DI

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  2. I agree with Di, Anita---very clever indeed. Humorous, yet somehow sobering at the same time. Fiction with a lot of truth in it. I'm glad you're making progress on writing fiction--yay!

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  3. Very entertaining and an original idea. I would love to read an expanded short story or even a novel using this concept.

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  4. That was wonderful satire, Anita! "This box must be an altar." Indeed. An altar that no one should be in front of. A false idol.

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