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Friday, August 15, 2014

Today's #flashfiction #AStrangeArtifact

“He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.”
General Custer* #quote




Today I went to a card game thing that now takes place on Friday. I may stop going to the one on Sunday as it's farther away and just go to the ones on Friday and Saturday.



A Strange Artifact

         Thousands upon thousands of years after the people of today croak and become corpses they become the subject of archeology. Eventually everything does. Today we have mummies and disco to catalog and study. In the future it will be us.
         “What is this strange artifact?” an archeologist says in a language that will be invented a few thousand years from now. (And has a word for telling someone that you're single but they're not your type, but the word has that sort of tone that will make them think that you're calling them ugly or giving them a lame excuse. It's a great word really. Makes dating less awkward.) He held up the artifact in his plastic gloves carefully and places it in a sterile containment unit.
        The other scientists gather around the artifact. They'd been digging for quite awhile. Something being discovered sent jolts of excitement down all their backs. Archeology is work that involves great reward after great tedium.
           The archeologist looked at it and instantly formed his hypothesis and spout it triumphantly.  “Obviously this artifact was a close-quarters combat weapon. Something this large and heavy must have only that function. The writing on the top of it must be some sort of army markings.”
         The archeologist observed a dictionary. As technology had been instituted for so many thousands of years the concept of a book was foreign to him and he didn't even think of opening it. The future became so far flung even the simplest elements of the past were buried. After thousands upon thousands of years the archeologists now dug through their own archives of the Internet and the very ground just to figure out who invented things as after all that time it became lost and needed to be rediscovered. Maybe this archeologist will deduce what a book is and help them further along the path.

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