Thursday, March 24, 2016

Read at Your Own Risk



A Fiction Story

Once upon a time, there was a civilization where one person could talk to another on the other side of the globe.

This civilization invented the wheel, a way for man to fly, they sent a man to the moon and brought him back safely.

They found a way to interpret ancient cultures and marveled over the remnants of these cultures. The found messages from their forefathers written into stone. The ancients knew true North, the circumference of the earth, and that elusive Pi.

This great civilization, eager to learn, and constantly investigating, found scrolls buried in the earth and they found a way to interpret them. Their forefathers gave them a nudge with a rock called the Rosetta stone that served as a translator from hieroglyphs carved into rocks to the written word.

Stones, rocks, buried scrolls, paintings with codes encrypted, that was how important it was to the forefathers to preserve knowledge for future generations.

The great civilization that can send words around the globe invented the steam engine, rocket fuel, solar energy, the printing press and books made accessible to everyone, not just the learned scholars.

They began to write their stories, as the ancients had done. They wrote down the scientific facts they had found, the diseases they had healed, their formulas, and construction plans.

They built libraries so they could share the knowledge. People read the books for education, fun, and entertainment. Schools taught from them, scholars studied them.

One day this civilization build the computer, and they so loved the computer they began to pour their knowledge into it. Soon, they found it was much simpler and much more accessible to use the computer as a storage tank.

Bookstores closed because people weren’t buying books anymore. Libraries weren’t heralded as the hallmark of study. Because books were cluttering their houses, people began giving them away, clearing them out, for now, they had the computer, and it only took up a couple feet of space.

And then one day a great surge of electricity fried the lines to all the computers…

And because people revered one book, it had been in homes for generations, and for a time the only one read, it was, again, the only one read…

But wait, the rocks are still there.