At the end of last year, Storm Gerrit brought down our internet / telephone cable. When we texted our service provider, we expected we’d have to wait for a repair. Ours wouldn’t be the only household that had lost that vital connection. Not hearing back from the engineers and, with a bank holiday looming, Mr A managed a temporary repair. |
I’m sure you’ll have your own sorry tales of robotic helplines, so I won’t bore you with further details of mine. Suffice to say that, two weeks after we reported the problem, someone sensible arrived to fix it, but it really shouldn’t have been that hard.
The prompt for this week’s flash fiction challenge is wrecking weather, but I thought I could write a more interesting story on the subject than this all-too-familiar tale of contemporary consumer helplessness. Although I’ve gone for the fantastical, you might detect the influence of this recent slice of life.
He had to intervene before they overpowered their creator. But he was loath to admit he’d got it wrong. He thought that, in giving them intelligence, the ability to learn from experience, they’d build a better version of themselves.
In the past, floods, fire and famine had brought them to their senses. Now they recorded rising temperatures and continued as before. He hated seeing them squander the gifts he’d bestowed on them. He hated the thought of the suffering to come.
But God would do it. He’d send the storms, the wrecking weather that would destroy the human race.