Collection 5: "Earth (A Gift Shop)" by Charles Yu

Then, after a while, humans, having semi-successfully established colonies on other planets, started to come back to Earth on vacation.

So, being an enterprising species and all, some of us got together and reinvented ourselves as Earth: The Museum, which we thought was a great idea.

One of us had a recording of Maria Callas singing the Violetta aria in La Traviata.

That hurt to hear, but more than that what was hurtful was that no one was coming to Earth anymore, now that it was a small and somewhat eclectic museum.

After the collapse of civilization, school just has never been the same.

By the time kids are done with their five years of mandatory schooling, they are eight or even nine years old and more than ready to join the leisure force as full-time professional consumers.

Eventually one of us realized that the most popular part of the museum was the escalator ride. Although you would think interstellar travel would have sort of raised the bar on what was needed to impress people, there was just something about moving diagonally that seemed to amuse the tourists, both kids and adults, and then one of us finally woke up and said, well, why not give them what they want?

So we did some research, in the few books we had left, and on the computer, and the research confirmed our hypothesis: Humans love rides.

...we finally were able to reopen as Earth: The Theme Park and Gift Shop, which did okay but it was not too long before we realized the theme park part of it was expensive to operate and kind of a hassle, really, as our engineering was not so good and we kept making people sick or, in a few cases, really misjudging g-forces...

...we finally were able to reopen as Earth: The Theme Park and Gift Shop, which did okay but it was not too long before we realized the theme park part of it was expensive to operate and kind of a hassle, really, as our engineering was not so good and we kept making people sick or, in a few cases, really misjudging g-forces...

And coming for the holidays, get ready for the latest installment of Earth’s greatest artistic work of the last century: Hero Story: A Hero’s Redemption (and Sweet Revenge), a computer-generated script based on all the key points of the archetypal story arc that we humans are.

And coming for the holidays, get ready for the latest installment of Earth’s greatest artistic work of the last century: Hero Story: A Hero’s Redemption (and Sweet Revenge), a computer-generated script based on all the key points of the archetypal story arc that we humans are.