A Short Story

/* This is a story I partly remember for a dutch class about 5 years ago It may sound familiar with you. I adapted it a bit with some scene elements */

2215. The earth is covered with a 10 Km concrete layer after the nuclear war between Jeskola!Productions and Complex. (You know with all this dope and semtex they were quite dangerous for the rest of the world... ) People live on artificially made pieces of land on planets 252 and 253 our solar system. Books do no longer exist, except 5 of them. The were all destroyed during the nuclear war. The five books that still exist are : 'Programmers Guide to EGA, VGA and Super VGA Cards by Ferraro, Third Edition', 'How Microsoft went Broke, by Linus Torvalds', 'Physics for Scientist and Engeneers by Serway' , 'The Lords and the New Creatures by James Douglas Morrison' and from that same author 'An American Poet'. One of the other historical things that was saved from this great disaster was a machine. After closer examination it was decided this should have been one of the Intelbased machines called a 486DX50VLB with 8Mb of RAM Chips a Tseng Labs ET4000W32P graphics card and a Advanced Gravis Ultrasound. Better known as one of the first television sets in the world. On this machine there were lot's of programs that didn't do anything but show something on the screen. People believe it was the kind of 'Television' as they have now but you had to give a command to start the program. Some of these programs had a storyline in it others didn't. So it was conluded that humans just before the big war spent their time watching this programs when they were tired. These five books and the computer were saved by one of the survivors of the war whose name is till today not found. The only thing people do know about him is that he came from a part of the world that was called Europe.

Historians all over the universe want to find out who this person was so they decided to go back to the earth and have a look at what happened. So the first historici landed on the earth and started digging through the concrete layer. They cleaned up an are of approximately 20 by 25 meters. Down there they found something they would describe as a complete city. But it was so small... the books they had found were as big as one complete house in this city. At least they were sure of one thing... there was a sign found that stated 'Europe' ... there was something before it but the other half of the sign was missing. Also some human bodies were found in exactly the same situation as they died. And they were also much smaller. As a matter of fact they would have to crawl on the keyboard of that television set that was saved in order to make it work. So the tv-set couldn't be a tv-set after al ... it was more like a huge cinemascreen. Then what about the books ?? Letters in it were as big as the average human being that was found. Could this be true. What happened during these 215 years ?? Did the concrete made everything smaller than it originally was or did everything outside the concrete grow ?

Then suddenly one of the scientist who was also on the mission found another sign wich stated 'Mini', it was the missing part of the broken sign.

Further investigations showed....

June 1993, Sleeping Dog/The Natives