Futures : A hypertext short story

5A2: Deluge

At first, the inhabitants of Priory Street thought that there had been an earthquake or an airliner crashed on their town.
   The terrible, grinding crash during the night had been just one of the semi-detached houses collapsing internally and taking a large chunk of its neighbour with it. The noise, confusion, fear and morbid interest roused the whole street. And then the riot began. It took three dozen baffled policemen to restore order. When a uniformed police inspector managed to get close enough to inspect the scene of the catastrophe, he found his torch beam lighting a bizarre spectacle.
   According to the fire brigade's chief officer, who was supervised recovering bodies and survivors from the pair of houses, the floor of one of the bedrooms had collapsed, spilling a bed, its occupant, chests of drawers, bookcases and hundreds of paperback books into the living room below.
   And there was the money. It was everywhere. Bronze and silver coins threw back his torchlight. Notes of all denominations were growing soggy with the books in light drizzle. Scavenging neighbours had depleted the fortune somewhat, gathering up notes that had been blown into the street, but the coins filled the spaces between larger debris to a depth of at least three feet.
   It was no wonder the floor had collapsed with all that weight of metal on it, the inspector reflected.
   Where all the money had come from and how the occupant of the house had managed to store it until the moment of collapse were to remain mysteries. When they dug him out of the wreckage, Michael Darnby had no further use for his funeral fortune.

END of this route through the story.

In Conclusion

I wrote this short story in September of 1980, before the computer technology needed to create a hypertext story was available to the home user.

Fifteen years later, in September of 1995, there were much fancier hypertext programs on the market than the one which I wrote [using QBasic 4.5, for anyone interested in that sort of thing] to display the hypertext version of the story, but what really counts is the content of the story, not how it looks, and the author chosing to make the effort to go all the way with his vision.

The story is featured in the second volume of my collected short stories [first edition 1997] and this HTML version was created in January, 2000.

This is the end.

Use the navigation panel on the left to explore another route or return to the front page by closing or this window. The BACK button will not return you to the front page as this is a separate window.