Passed Time
CURSED TOMB UNVEILED BY EARTHQUAKE!
GHOST EMPEROR SEIZES POWER!
SPECTRAL MENACE UNSTOPPABLE, SCIENTISTS SAY!
There was little immediate reward to date-posting headlines like these into the archives with script-tags that would cause them to slowly pop up and implant themselves two hundred years from now. Denny wasn’t concerned about the immediate reward, he was used to the long-con, and liked the idea of messing with the future. They probably had done something to deserve it.
Would do.
Will do.
He wasn’t quite sure, tense-wise.
He had snuck in hundreds of similar articles, compiled by a program he had written that mined a 20 page document he painstakingly crafted detailing the history of the Sino-Ghost War, and the resultant worldwide panic that followed. He even had detailed reports, from several different reputable news agencies, of flash-skirmishes in other regions, as their magical past came back to haunt them in a dual-sense. It was a grand prank, and if it all went off correctly, nobody would ever know it was all his baby. History books would be rewritten slowly as people cross-linked all the articles. The pseudo-scientific theories he had concocted, including Erickson’s Three Laws of Phantasmagoria, would be reputed, if not as fact, at least as the efforts of an earlier age to explain a terrifying new encounter that never happened.
He would have to take a break after this one, make some new friends, maybe go out and meet a girl. He had started to dream about the false history he had created, and was fairly certain he was seeing references to it in other things, things he had nothing to do with, but when he would check again, they’d be gone. That’s why he post-dated it, he couldn’t go through that again, unsure of whether or not something had existed before him, or if he was just really convincing. He would take a break after this one. For sure.
Just like he had with global warming.
This is a repost of a piece that was originally posted back in January 2009. You can find it originally presented here, and you can see other writing from the same week here. We’ll be sharing Elephant Memories with you for the next few weeks, while we break for Christmas.
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