Today's #flashfiction #TheRecycledApocalypse

 “I want to be an astronaut when I grow up.”

Tom Hanks* #quote

Today I watched some videos on artificial intelligence. I wonder if we combine it with artifical selection can we breed some really neat robot dogs? Anyway onto the flash fiction!

The Recycled Apocalypse

          We build everything out of the Byproduct. It's all around us. It's shiny and gray. We can change how solid it is by stirring it. We can preserve food with it. It protects us from heat and cold if we cover our skin with it. If we eat it it can not only fill our belly but cure diseases. There are so many uses for it I could hardly count them all. It's a vital resource of society, almost as vital as water. At least it is now in this year of 4024. Well, that's what the year is supposed to be. With most old records destroyed, scholars debate.

        Among the legends the tales go like this. Our ancestors built and built the most elaborate society with technological wonders beyond our comprehension. But these technologies came with garbage and waste and over the centuries it became too much for them. So they created something to consume it all. A “bacteria”. And when it consumed the waste it left behind the Byproduct. I don't know exactly what a bacteria is but apparently it can be many things, not only this great consumer.

       But the consumer didn't just consume the garbage, it consumed every city and all the technologies, just leaving behind the Byproduct. This was because all those cities were made of the same materials the garbage was. Our ancestors thought they could control the bacteria, but it escaped, despite their effort.

      So now we have our world. A world of the Byproduct and nature alongside it. We even write with it. The most we use of the only way is paper and we write on it by smearing the Byproduct. I wonder how much our ancestors built over the centuries to make so much Byproduct to last so many generations. We use some of the old knowledge and make wooden things and stone. But many metals are gone and the scholars claim that bacteria is still making Byproduct in the Earth, slowly eating the metals that are made that could have been used for their technologies.

     I want to live in that old world. No matter how great our Byproduct is...if it is merely something that came from the garbage of the technology...what I have missed? I've heard of the ability to fly, things you can ride to hundreds of miles an hours, the power to talk to people across oceans, the ability to control things in worlds that don't exist. So many things in the legends. I wonder about that world. It's such fantasy. I kept calling our history legends because I don't think that it's the history the scholars talk about exist. I think the Byproduct is just the same thing as dirt and such a technologies couldn't exist. But if they did I really wish I could leave the Byproduct behind and go to the world of the ancestors.