Echoes of tomorrow (a flash fiction)
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## Echoes of tomorrow
a flash fiction
By Willow
June 9, 2024
## The year 1997 C.E.
"Welcome to our new paperless office," announced general manager
Heather Eng on the first day at Advantex Corporation's new,
state-of-the-art office. "Today marks a new milestone in Advantex's
30-year history. We go paperless as we ride the wave of the
Information Superhighway, and as we do so, we save countless
trees!"
Gone were the old fax machines and dot-matrix printers. Now it's
floppy disks, Zip Drives, and email. Over the coming months, old
paper-based records will be scanned and digitized thanks to the OCR
technology.
Office worker Melissa Stone finds her new cubicle, complete with a
PC. She logs into the company network. Everything is online: office
memos, purchase orders, policy manuals, forms, and more.
"The 21st century is here!" Melissa exclaims.
## The year 2007 C.E.
Melissa is now 39 years old, and her 40th birthday is approaching.
Her friends are organizing a big birthday party via email
exchanges, and they sent out invitations on MySpace. So much of
Melissa's life has gone digital. When was the last time she even
wrote a paper check? A paper letter or greeting card? Maybe she
won't even receive a real birthday card in the mail anymore.
Melissa goes to OfficeMax to buy a few flash drives. One
512-megabyte flash drive can store so much. There are also those
new CD-RWs that can store more data, but she does not own a CD
burner. She remembers the old days when she had a big stack of
floppy disks.
"Digitization" is the trend now. Museums, libraries, and archives
are making their collections into PDF and MP3 files so that they
can be more accessible for researchers and perhaps better preserve
the history for posterity. It fascinates Melissa that the entire
library can fit into a box of hard drives.
## The year 2017 C.E.
The American economy is booming again. Melissa is one of few among
her circle of friends who survived the Great Recession unscathed.
At age 50, she is now the Chief Operating Officer of Advantex
Corporation. Her company has come a long way, too, now focusing on
cloud computing and cybersecurity. She has become an evangelist for
cloud computing.
"Back up, back up, back up," Melissa says as if it's a mantra.
Advantex's cloud platforms are secured by redundant backups at
multiple data centers. Yesterday, Russian hackers wiped out one of
their major clients' data; fortunately, Advantex automatically
backed up their data five hours before the incident and copied it
to air-gapped storage. The damage is minimal.
In her free time, Melissa volunteers for local historical archives
to help digitize the artifacts and documents. She imagines how the
future world looks back at her generation, her parents, and her
grandparents. She picks up a dust-covered box of old maps from the
1920s, carefully lays them out on a table, and scans them with a
specially designed high-resolution digital camera.
Anything could happen, Melissa thinks to herself. Climate change,
earthquakes, and wildfires could wipe out these precious artifacts
of history, and then the history might be forgotten. Fortunately,
the wonders of modern technology allow these irreplaceable records
to be backed up not only on local hard drives but also at data
centers in different parts of the world. If one goes down, there
will still be others -- just as how the Internet was originally
invented to protect the U.S. communication system from a Soviet
nuclear attack.
----
## The Year 472 of the Era of the Din Tats Dynasty
Queen Prastal's reign has seen an expansion of technology and
commerce. Not long ago, people rode their dragon aurochs to the
market town for a day. Dragon aurochs are tough and fast; they can
carry a lot of things and can travel quite a long distance. It is
said that God gave our ancestors dragon aurochs.
The new craze in town is the carriage. It is a box with round
spinning things underneath, and it propels itself with burning
stones and water. A carriage can run ten times as fast as a dragon
auroch, and there's no need to feed that beast anymore. The rich
lords in town ride the carriages nowadays, and children watch with
amazement. The lords love to show off their carriages!
Mistress Miralena is one of those rich lords' daughters. She is
about to traverse the land to study in the esteemed House of
Learning in the City of Ins Segue. Her father, Lord Evet of Adurn,
is a forward-thinking man and did not hesitate to send his maiden
daughter to the House of Learning, even though many think it is a
waste to send a maid to study anything. Some, even the commoners,
mock Lord Evet's decision. He shrugged off the criticism and gifted
Miralena a new carriage so she may travel to the Ins Segue in style
and comfort.
## The year 490 of the Era of the Din Tats Dynasty
Mistress Miralena, one of the few females to complete a decade-long
study at the House of Learning, is now an acclaimed historian. She
is particularly interested in old artifacts she finds in caves.
With the principal holy day of Dwavlan approaching, Miralena makes
a long journey back to her hometown. A journey of two weeks on the
back of a dragon auroch, her carriage can take her there in under
two days.
Halfway through her journey home, Miralena stops by a lake shore to
take a break and enjoy the sight. As she stoops down by the water,
she notices something that appears to be an iron box submerged in
water and partially encased in mud. Curious, she pulls the box out
of the lake.
Inside the box, which appears to be of an extremely ancient origin,
Miralena finds an assortment of curious objects tied together with
numerous strings. There are several green plates with intricate
copper patterns and many otherworldly black and rectangular jewels.
The mysterious patterns inscribed on these plates appear to be some
labyrinths, perhaps full of religious symbols, Miralena muses. Next
to those plates, she finds a smaller box with a round, metallic
disk. She is fascinated by these archaeological finds that possibly
date back to the era of primitive savages tens of thousands of
years ago. She is unsure of their meanings or utilities.
Miralena decides to find an inn in a nearby town and return to the
site of her discovery the next morning to explore more.
The morning came, and Miralena, accompanied by several townsfolks
returned to the lake shore to dig up more. They find more objects:
several tablets with a hard, translucent side, some of which are
small and about the side of her hand; and a box filled with hard
rectangular objects the size of her finger. She breaks open some of
them, and she also finds the mysterious green plates with intricate
copper inscriptions albeit in smaller sizes.
Miralena collects the mysterious plates and places them in a
basket, hoping that she will be able to study their significance
once she returns to Ins Segue after the holy days.
## The Year 493 of the Era of the Din Tats Dynasty
Lady Miralena was puzzled by the intricacies of the mysterious
green plates she unearthed a few years ago on her way home. These
ancient tribes had no known written language, as they never left
any records. Historians concluded that these people, who lived tens
of thousands of years ago before the invention of writing,
committed their memories orally and perhaps by using chants or
songs. In recent years, archaeologists discovered ruins of
magnificent edifices that might have reached the heavens, as well
as fragments of long bridges made of a strong metal unknown to them
-- bridges so grandiose that they must have spanned over an ocean.
How could a primitive ancient tribe without a sophisticated written
language build such things?
----
## August 20, 2135 C.E.
The human technologies have advanced by leaps and bounds since the
last two centuries. Thanks to endless innovations, humankind has
overcome a variety of challenges, such as the perilous climate
change of the 21st century. Thanks to the 150 years of development
in information technology, the entire knowledge of homo sapiens
from the stone age to modern times has been successfully digitized,
easily and freely accessible to all, anytime, anywhere. What once
took a team of researchers years to dig through and analyze, now
takes a mere two seconds thanks to the invention of generative
artificial intelligence just over a century ago.
Today, everything depends on artificial intelligence.
Manufacturing, transportation, government, education, healthcare,
entertainment, and even religion have been automated thanks to AI.
Humans now live like medieval kings and queens, no longer having to
work to make a living. In fact, a couple of decades ago, we finally
decided that we'd even automate politics! There are no more
elections, no corruption, and no self-serving politicians; we have
an AI-powered parliament, AI-president, and AI courts. We've
achieved a paradise in our lifetime!
## August 21, 2135 C.E.
Hannah wakes up around 8 a.m. and looks outside her window. It's
another beautiful summer day and she is excited because she gets to
go to the beach with her friend Rebecca. There has been a trend of
nostalgia for the last two decades, and Hannah and Rebecca grew up
spending some time in nature with the encouragement of their
parents. Their parents gave them old-fashioned names, apparently
from very ancient writings created long before they were digitized.
In contrast, Hannah's mothers are named QxaF821MMjU and
P8bnb7ksUYmsU - her grandparents thought those were "secure" names.
The Sun shines in the sky brightly, and ominously. It has been
"acting up" a little during the past week. Its colors and
brightness are odd.
Hannah and Rebecca are 25 years old, but they have only gone to
school for five weeks like most kids their age would. Their
grandparents used to say in the olden days, they'd spent 12 to 20
years in school to memorize a lot of things -- something they no
longer have to because the AI client device implanted behind their
ears does better jobs than the people their grandparents referred
to as "PHD."
Hannah visualizes Rebecca's face, trying to contact her. The AI
client device fails to connect to Rebecca. Panicked, Hannah once
again visualizes Rebecca's face. It does not work.
Hannah grabs her tablet and taps it three times on the screen. It
turns on but there's only a blank screen staring back at her.
Suddenly, the lights go out. As she looks outside, she sees all the
vehicles abruptly stop and get stuck on the road. Then she sees an
airplane falling from the sky, loudly crashing into a housing
complex.
A massive solar flare disabled the entire computer system of the
planet Earth in a blink of an eye.
All the digitized data that held the stories of humankind together,
was wiped out in a second.
Wholly dependent on AI and supercomputers for generations, unable
to even imagine a life without them, the civilization collapses in
an instant and the inhabitants of the planet perish from starvation
and thirst.
With climate control satellites no longer functioning, the sea
level immediately rises by 50 feet, washing away all the hubris of
homo sapiens, a species that almost became like gods, along with
their artifacts and other animal and plant species.
Now the earth was formless and empty again. Darkness was on the
surface of the deep and God's Spirit was hovering over the surface
of the waters.
