Today's #flashfiction #OldEarthAtTheDinnerTable

"What goes up must come down."

Superman* #quote

Today a gigantic Rubik's cube came up and solved me. What an enlightening encounter. Anyway onto the 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 our origins.”

          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.

              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 and strange things like footballs and nets.