Civilization Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
It began as a game and ended up an internet sensation and
somewhere in the middle it spent time as a prank, a hoax and several lawsuits.
Alex was a prop mason and avid model maker. Hatcher was a history
buff and an artist and pottery maker. Bradley was a structural engineer who
loved games and pranks. They were all mischief makers and conspiracy
enthusiasts. Late one night during a state of inebriation someone had the
brilliant idea. They couldn’t remember who, but they all remembered liking it a
whole lot.
Weeks later they threw an ‘Indiana Jones’ themed party and asked
everyone to come dressed as their favorite archeologist, real or imagined, and
to be prepared to dig. It was a strange invitation. It was a strange party. But
people came prepared. There was a giant treasure hunt. Alex’s back yard had
been transformed into a dig site. There were tools and stations and hints for
when people got tired of digging. Once the first artifact was found no one
needed any extra motivation or hints. The challenge was on. There was a
competition to be won.
Alex, Hatcher and Bradley had created a lost civilization to be
discovered. There were artifacts buried across the yard and surrounding
neighborhood, and a first place price to the team that found and identified the
most. The party was a big big success.
Their friends enjoyed the party so much they made a habit of
creating more fake artifacts and hiding them around town, as if it had been the
ancient home to a lost culture. It was a game. A scavenger hunt. That was all.
But the three were mischief makers, so naturally things were bound to escalate.
Slowly they improved and added to what they were making – weapons
of war, bits of copper, technical tools, instruments, stones with sharp edges,
hardened steel, bits of fabric.
Bradley worked out a religion and began creating idols and myths
to go along with everything else. There were idols and statues, distorted
shapes, elongated necks, heads of creatures, symbolic designs representing good
and evil. There was a well-thought-out hierarchy of gods and accompanying texts
and relics.
Hatcher developed an evolutionary timeline and they mapped out the
rise of their strange and imagined people. They planned a peak high-state
moment for the civilization and then a quick decline. They didn’t know what the
calamity was that struck, but they figured they could develop that later.
Perhaps it would be a war, or a plague or famine. Bradley petitioned the others
to make it a mysterious disappearance. There would be no reason for it. The
time line would just suddenly stop and there would be no more advancement, no
more artifacts, no more society. The others instantly liked the idea. It played
to their fictitious sensibilities.
Their friends embraced the ideas and began adding to it on their
own. Some of them helped create the antiquities. Others wrote legends and
historical documents. They all took part in the hiding of the materials and the
subsequent scavenger hunt digs of discovery.
Then the news reports began. Someone wrote stories about the lost
civilization and the discoveries and posted them on the internet as if it were
real. It was sort of a spontaneous generative moment. There had been no plan
for this step, but in retrospect it seemed inevitable.
The stories ran and more stories were written. And then legitimate
news sources picked up on the story, but somewhere along the line the fictional
aspect was lost in translation and it was run as a real news story about a real
discovery.
This was quickly disproved, but it didn’t matter. The story was
out there. It had been posted and reposted and linked to on the internet.
People read headlines but never the retractions. People remembered hearing
something about something, but hardly ever knew the actual facts. They story
was alive and it was repeated. Their civilization was added to the history of
the world and the collective unconsciousness. It was real enough. People knew
about it and talked about it. Evidence only mattered so much. But the belief,
and the desire to believe, that mattered a whole lot more.
The conspiracy theorists told the stories and the fact that the
mainstream media rebutted the story somehow only legitimized it more and acted
as proof that there was a cover-up. It was dubbed ‘suppressed archeological
information’ and was considered part of a larger conspiracy.
The legends grew and ran wild. The internet told the story over
and over and the story grew and grew and grew. More and more strangers took to
the story and added to it on their own. A linguist invented a language. A
military historian developed an outline of their weapons and battle formations.
Alex, Hatcher and Bradley had no idea who some of these people were and had no
idea how they heard about the lost civilization.
The most marvelous moment came when a conspiracy theory stylized
television show covered the attempt to suppress the truth of the discoveries.
They knew they had created a beast, but they had no idea it would ever be that
ridiculous. There was too much information saturation and any truth was lost,
unable to be filtered from the fiction. Their civilization lived. It was real.
Even if it wasn’t. It didn’t matter. It was beyond their control now. The great
lost civilization had risen, and there was no destroying it now.
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