Dark — Dystopian

A Wishbone Episode for Everything

Fan art

“Wishbone for everything!” — That was the campaign promise after decades of poorly run schools and teacher strikes.

But then they had to deliver.

Soon, there wasn’t enough storage available on the planet for all the Wishbone episodes about mosquito bites, kidney replacements, loud sneezes, and birdsong during an overcast day, to name just a few. And so the episodes started bleeding into each other to save space. Napoleon episodes overtop moon landings with Shakespeare-esque voiceover.

New compression was invented — which would only stall changing that lovable dog as we knew him.

He later became grotesque; a chimera of different dog forms. Nothing a child would wish for. But the producers had no choice.

After cries that a Wishcentipede would be too cursed, they decided on adjusting his molecular composition and pixelation. Each pixel supporting an ‘Original Wishbone’ variant now housed several hundred smaller Wishbones, like a mosaic. Exactly how deep it went — no one knew.

One frame — became the equivalent of one trillion stories. Stories of heartbreak. Stories of nothing-much-happening. Stories of looking up at the night sky and making a promise to one’s self. Stories of ghosts having 100-year-lifespans and making the most of it. All played by the same smiley dog fitted in ridiculous pieces of tailored cloth the size of napkins.

A single frame showed a future asteroid collision. It showed a piece of dark matter the size of a penny ripping through hundreds of star systems. The penny had Wishbone’s face. It showed a genocide between two identical Wishbones fighting. The historians saying one side was righteous, while the other was evil? You already know what they looked like.

The full spectacle showed the key to reversing this uncontrollable show, and which lever to pull, but it flashed so fast. Viewers never saw this special easter egg message again, and they would be constantly told so with lines like:

What’s that, you say? A hidden message? Sounds like a mystery even I can’t sniff out! Or maybe… it’s just another story lost in the endless sea of Wishbone.”

Author’s note:

This near-future speculative dystopia was inspired by the Library of Babel: https://libraryofbabel.info/

Perhaps not surprisingly, there is the above story exactly word-for-word in the Library of Babel…

link to story in the library

People have searched for how they’ve died on here…. It’s a dark thing. Use it cautiously!