Fiction Redesigned needs your help. Starting and growing a community isn’t easy, so please, consider sharing this publication with someone you know. It only takes a few minutes, but it makes an impact. Thank you.
Before the short story, I just want to wish everyone a Happy Holidays! 🎉
Short Story: I was writing down random symbols on a piece of crumpled paper. It was 2:00pm, and I was bored out of my mind. I was having lunch in my office and was making an alphabet for a fictional language. I was just goofing around, of course, but if I had known what impact that small crumpled up paper would have on the rest of society, I would have been more careful. Finishing on the last letter, I crumpled the paper up again and threw it in the trash.
A few days later…
A worker was sifting through piles of trash. This was his job, of course. He spent many hours, day after day, sifting through piles of garbage that had been discarded by other people. He was focused but bored. As he looked through the rubbish, he found a hand-written note. Because of the fact that he was bored, he took the paper, folded up into a paper plane, and threw it out the window. Little did he know that it would end up in a child’s hands.
The paper airplane glided out the window, smoothly being guided by the zephyr that filled the warm summer air. It flew for a few minutes, then began to descend. It glided through an open window and into a child’s bedroom. The child, sitting down on the floor, picked up the paper airplane and opened it up.
This was very exciting for the child. They had discovered something new! They took the paper and put it on a desk, and began writing with the alphabet that was scribbled down. The next day, when the child went to school, they shared it with some of their friends.
The alphabet spread.
Soon, people at the school began to write notes using this alphabet so that their teachers wouldn’t know what they where saying. In very little time, the whole student population was fluent in this alphabet.
One of the children at this school was very present online. They copied down the alphabet and posted it on the internet. It wasn’t very popular at first - after all, it was just a random piece of paper with scribbles on it, but it had a deeper meaning - a cultural meaning for the population of people that understood the possibilities of that piece of paper.
The child that posted the alphabet online was already popular on the internet, so after a while, it began to become popular. Soon, the people who understood the made up alphabet began to exchange with each other speaking only in the language on that piece of paper.
After a few years, the population of people that spoke it increased very much. People were talking, and soon the community became toxic. People harassed each other in the language, and it became associated with a criminal organization. All because of a bored person scribbling on a piece of paper.