With the economy failing, no recovery in sight, the priest showed his solution to a friend.
“Jesus coins?” the friend asked.
“Exchange value guaranteed by our savior himself.”
“How’d you figure?”
“Money’s had a faith component since it stopped being worth its weight in gold.”
“Change you can believe in?”
By 2052, an economic process that had been going on for centuries suddenly reversed.
Before, the middle class had been shrinking, mostly increasing the ranks of the poor. Now, the middle-class is growing. Very few poor or rich are left.
Charity now has a new meaning:
Four give, and four get.
For decades, He built his machine, hand-milling each rod and cog… It would be his crowning achievement. The end was at hand.
Over the years, bats had taken residence inside the deeper parts of the machine.
Finally, he started the machine, which promptly blew up.
It’s raining bats and cogs!
When the zoo was abandoned, many of the animals died, for lack of care.
Not the monkeys! They thrived, using their above-average intelligence (for animals) to mimic the humans who once took care of them.
They multiplied. There was monkey shit everywhere.
A sea of monkeys.
Monkey sea, monkey doo-doo.
“Here’s the door I wanted to show you. Under no circumstances are you to open this door.”
Then he left us to stare at that door, without further explanation.
“I dare you to open it!”
“No.”
“Chicken.”
“You do it.”
“Ok.”
“NO! Don’t.”
“Scaredycat.”
Then the door opened by itself.
They had burned his entire library!
Perpetual optimist, he thought, “I’ll just write some books of my own!”
So he started writing. He found he loved writing so much he couldn’t stop himself to even read what he wrote. He just kept writing.
Too bad everything he wrote was crap.
“Remember when we used to just… talk?”
“Remember when we used to have things to say?”
“Remember when we used to have things to do?”
“Remember when we didn’t have such great memory?”
“Remember when we had more important stuff to remember?”
…and so on.
The 2023 Mnemonic Plague.
Never forget.
The last man on Earth was lonely. So he cloned himself.
But that got boring fast: “I can’t stand talking to myself like that!” he would exclaim himself.
He would sometimes hope some aliens would drop by. Seeing new faces would be nice.
Even if they came to take over.