Please enjoy this excerpt from my new work of short fiction. You can grab the full story here.

To Whom It May Concern:

If you are reading this document, it means one of two things. It could mean that you want to know how the world as we knew it ended. Or, perhaps it means I'm no longer able to protect these notes, which will find me either dead, at a re-education camp, or soon to be in one of those grim circumstances.

I want to write this down while I still remember it all clearly. Every single day, some event is erased from our collective memory as a society. It disappears from the internet. It gets scrubbed from history, never to be spoken of again. Sometimes, it's hard to recall how things were before this.

Back when I was a child, we didn't have the internet. All of our information came from books. Don't get me wrong. I loved it when the internet became widely used because I had all the knowledge in the world right there on a device the size of my hand. But perhaps getting rid of the hard copies is where we first began to go wrong. We had physical encyclopedias that documented the events and findings of our time. In many ways, this was so much better because words written on paper remain static.