Flash fiction

My house stands at the edge of the Earth.

It didn’t use to. Earth was a normal planet, a planet-sized planet as it were. Round. Not as big as Jupiter, of course, but not so small as to see its edges. I’ve been to cities that were bigger than what Earth looks like now.

There are only a few thousands of us left. We can’t say we’re alive, really – we’re almost zombies. Everybody that’s still here lost family and friends. We’re in the acceptance stage now… there was fighting, and incredulity, and mass suicides, but everybody seems to be resigned to whatever fate we have. Nobody has a clue what happened. It doesn’t even make any sense – no celestial body this small should have an atmosphere, and yet the air is perfectly breathable. A lot more breathable than it used to be, in fact – there’s no industry left on Earth, nothing to pollute. I think all the animals are gone too, except for a few pets. Oh, and lots of insects. The scientists were right; the cockroaches will inherit the Earth. Whatever will remain of it, if anything.

I don’t know what happened. Nobody does for sure. Maybe God was fed up with the humans again, and thought floods were passé? Maybe some evil wizard played with something that escaped his control? Whatever it was, it destroyed us all. The speed of the shrinkage has slowed down, but even if it were to stop completely there are too few people left now and too little space to live in. Some people have called this the Earth Spaceship; it finally became true.

Why am I even writing this? I have no idea. Maybe I’m an incorrigible optimist, even in the face of certain disaster. Maybe all the pessimists died out and I feel responsible for humanity. Maybe this is all a nightmare. Oh God, how I hope this is a nightmare! Somehow, though, I can’t seem to wake up from it.

At least we avoided global warming.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Posting dynamic Master / Detail forms with Knockout

Image
I have the following dynamic form in my GitHub Inventory project : I created the form with KnockoutJS , using some ideas from this article . The detail view looks like this: <table id="acquisition_items" class="jtable"> <thead> <tr> <th>Product Name</th> <th>Quantity</th> <th>Price</th> <th>Value</th> <th><button data-bind="click: addItem">[+]</button></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody data-bind="foreach: items"> <tr> <td> <input data-bind="value: ProductName" type="text" value="" /> </td> <td> <input data-bind="value: Quantity" type="text" value="" /> </td> <td>
Read more

Comparing Excel files, take two

Image
I already wrote this project once, on GitHub , but I can't say that I like the result. I wrote that code without TDD, mostly to see if I can still work in the "normal" fashion. I can, but I had a bug that took me a while to even discover and then was difficult to write tests for. I also hate the temporal dependency in that design (if you don't call the SortBy method first, the ExcludeRecords method will return incorrect results). Anyway; here's attempt number two, writing that code using TDD. Structure I start by creating my usual structure for projects of this type - a library for the logic, a console application for the main program and a test project for tests. I also use the Enable NuGet Package Restore option (right-click on the solution node) to add the three NuGet files that will allow someone to automatically download all the packages I'm referencing without wasting space in the source code repository. (Right now I've only added the Moq pa
Read more

EF Code First: seeding with foreign keys

This is just a quick tip, more for future reference for myself than anything else. When using Entity Framework Code First, one of the things you might want to do while developing the application is to seed your database with some test data. This can be something as easy as: protected override void Seed(InventoryDB context) { context.Products.AddOrUpdate( p => p.Name, new Product { Name = "Hammer", SalePrice = 11.99m, }, new Product { Name = "Nail Pack x100", SalePrice = 0.05m, }, new Product { Name = "Saw", SalePrice = 19.99m, }, new Product { Name = "Toolkit", SalePrice = 39.99m, } ); //... } (I am using the AddOrUpdate method so the code detects whether those products already exist and doesn't add them again if they do.) The Product class is quite simple and – most importantly – doesn't depend on any other: public class Product { public int Id { g
Read more