“With great
power comes great responsibility.”
Nero, 5th
Emperor of Rome*
Today's I've
been writing, but not working on my book, but rather my entry into
the Writers of the Future contest. http://www.writersofthefuture.com/
It's a short story contest for new writers who don't have
professionally published works(Professionally being paid, you can
enter if you only have one or two short stories professionally
published and I only have one. If you have three or more you cannot
enter. These flash fictions are non-profit so even those I've
published over 160 of these on this blog I can still enter.)
There are
multiple quarters for the contest and its been going on for years so
there's no rush. My entry is I'm redoing one of the flash fictions on
this blog. I took the premise and rewrote it taking a few parts of
the plot. It's like x1000 times better because I rewrote with all the
skill I have now after all the stories I written over my blog and it
was a story I wrote during the first few weeks.
I haven't
edited it completely though but when I do I'll reveal what story I
redid to super quality and repost it with the old one so you can see
how I've improved. I'll actually be posting it after I submit it to the contest because if I win(which eh, not sure if I will) they will be publishing it in their things and publishing it here before then wouldn't be the best thing. But I will post it here eventually.
But for now, today's flash fiction!
But for now, today's flash fiction!
Old Earth At
The Dinner Table
Sarah looked at
her five meal jars. She was only seven so she had the impulse to just
chug the jars down and get back to playing. But she had been raised
proper enough to resist the urge and drink from her meal jars with a
straw just as any proper adult would. To go along with her meal jars
she had some water. Within the meal jars were lamb cells, cow cells,
fish cells some spliced plant cells, and formula. Everything ground
to the finest mush to grow through her straw though she still had to
chew.
All of this was
grown in vats in various food facilities. There were no longer any
living lambs, cows or fish to grow that. The DNA was stored in
computers and the cells artificially produced as big hunks of meat
for the protein. The meat in Sarah's meal jars never came from a
living animal and it never did ever since she was born.
Sarah lived at
what was called the animal purge. But it wasn't caused by nuclear
bombs or pollution or any kind of human hubris. It was one special
virus. A virus that ripped through all complex non-plant life. The
virus even worked its way into the ocean and passed through the air.
Humans managed to save themselves by holing themselves up in special
facilities, but not before losing the majority of the populace. Even
roaches, the animals that could supposedly survive anything died.
Things such as amoebas are unaffected but anything a few steps above
that would perish.
So now humanity
lives in little facilities growing its food in vats, then harvesting
plant life from outside as there is plenty of that because there is
not a single animal competing with them. Though things can become
more difficult because of no worms to move the soil. Generations have
passed so the world has stabilized and they have created their
systems and have grown comfortable with it all. They let the virus
stay dormant outside their sealed domes and carry on with life.
“You know
your food didn't actually look like that before.” Sarah's brother
Jacob said.
Sarah looked at
him puzzled. “What are you talking about?”
“Meat used to
come from animals.” Jacob told her.
Their father
laughed after sucking up some food from a straw. “So practicing
teaching Old Earth history are you? Well you are getting a degree in
teaching it. Good thing, we should know are history.”
Sarah then
asked her brother, “What's animal?”
Her brother
struggled for an explanation for a moment. The only thing with flesh
Sarah would understand was a human being. Because of the virus
nothing else was left but old records of animals that she probably
hadn't seen. “It's a thing that's like a person but different.
There used to be billions of different kinds. Like the “cow” your
eating was something that had four legs, plus hair all over. It
walked on all four of those legs.”
The mental
image Sarah got was nothing like a true cow. She imagined a human
being with legs coming out of its chest. Jacob never said the cow
didn't have arms so the “cow she imagined had arms. And this “cow”
had hair all over its human like body. And since it walked with all
four of its legs it leaned over forward so that the legs protruding
from its chest could touch the ground along with its normal legs.
Sarah gave
Jacob a bizarre look. “What a weird thing. How'd they get the
meat?”
Jacob said
bluntly without thinking much about it since he had been studying so
much to get his degree, “They killed it.”
Sarah gagged
then looked down at her meal jar. “That's where this all used to
come from? That's horrible!”
Their mother
rolled her eyes and their father resisted bursting out laughing, they both knew the difference much more than history having taken their Old Earth history classes in school already.
Jacob then told
her, “Well, that's not how we're doing it now. That and animals are
different from people even in the way they think, the size of the
brains are different. Some had things called wings that allowed them
to fly. Yes, fly like we do between domes sometimes. Old Earth was a
very different place Sarah, though I guess this isn't the thing I
should be telling you about at dinner.”
Sarah then
said, “Yeah, tell me something else, these animals just sound
weirder and how could thinking and brains be different?” When her
brother talked about wings the “cow” in her head suddenly had the
wings of an airplane as Sarah had never seen a feather before either.
Jacob then
said, “Alright, well because the domes are so tiny we get our
exercise by using treadmills or walking but when they had all the
land outside they had enough room to make fields for something called
sports. Sports were fun games where teams of people would play
together like in a video game but in real life.”
“Wow.” said
Sarah. She was much more interested in this than those gross sounding
animals. She pushed the previous talk about animals out of her mind
and continued eating out of her meal jars as he listened to her
brother explain sports.
This work is
copyright Langdon Kennedy you may share this(email it, print it, post
it on your own website, broadcast it etc.) work unaltered as long as
you credit me as the author and share a link to this blog with it and
it is not for profit. If you have any questions and/or are unclear of
these conditions email me at llkenne1@asu.edu
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