People liked my short story more than I expected today. Especially since I wrote the beginning and the end early this morning. I had the middle done last night, then got bad writers block and said "screw it, i'm going to bed." Anyway, I'm posting it on here, because i'm nice like that. Some sentances would be a lot better re-written, and i would have if there had been time. So here, enjoy, but i think i could've done a bit better.
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Home Sweet Home
Danny and Noreen rounded the corner into the residential district, both of them tense after a rather stressful day in which each of them had been kept late by their control bots for extra work.
“I wonder what it would have been to live in the twentieth century,” Danny mentioned aloud, “when people would have their own bosses and chosen jobs and not have to report to a robot.”
Noreen sighed, “Honey, it doesn’t matter, no one knows, and there’s certainly no chance of you finding out because I don’t think those times are anywhere close to coming back, and you know time travel is completely banned. It’s better now anyway, you don’t have to worry about anything.”
“Well, yes, I suppose,” it was how most of their conversations on the matter ended, Noreen never really understood.
The block they were on consisted of identically shaped houses with small lawns, the only noticeable difference between houses was color and either a garden or decorations in the lawns. Each home also had a colored light next to the door; most were lit up as green, except for a few on the end of the block whose color was red.
The couple went to the end of the block to a house with a red light and walked up the pathway. Danny scanned his finger into a box on the side of the door and waited a few moments for the house to prepare. The paint on the outside of the house turned from a drab gray to a light beige, and on the side of the lawn a small garden seemed to form on the ground from nowhere. After a few seconds, the red light turned green, so Noreen and Danny continued inside to a cozy, well styled domicile.
Danny and Noreen had been home for less than ten minutes and had barely had time to begin to relax for the evening, when an odd man came in through the front door.
Noreen went to greet him to find out who he was, but the man seemed to have just received a shock and simply stared at her dumbfounded, ignoring her increasingly demanding inquiries on who he was and what he wanted. After hearing the commotion, Danny decided to come to the foyer and asked the man who he was but received the same dumbfounded look Noreen had.
The visitor, obviously confused, finally spoke making long paused to figure out the words, “Who…are you two…what in god’s name are you doing in my home…and lastly, what have you done with all my belongings?”
This statement simply confused the couple, and now it was simply three people standing around and looking at each other in confused ways. Danny finally broke the silence with, “I don’t know who you are, but I’d like you to leave our domain, we were here first.”
“No you weren’t! A government official told me to live here yesterday, and I was the only one here then, everything was even furnished for me, with items from my own time.”
“Are you a time traveler then?” Danny inquired, almost getting excited.
“What? No, I was cryogenically frozen. I was just woken up two days ago. They told me I’m the first successful awakening of someone who was frozen before 2030. I was frozen in 2019.”
This interested Danny, “Wow, were you alive in the twentieth century?”
“I was, but you’re getting besides the point. Tell me what you’re doing in my house!”
Danny didn’t like getting bossed around, and even if this guy was from the past, he didn’t care, “I have no clue why you think you own this house but I suggest that you leave.”
“Then just call the police on me!” the man exclaimed, “They should be on my side.”
“Now he’s just making up words,” Noreen said, “What in the world is ‘police’?”
Danny replied, “No, it’s an old word. I remember hearing about police in school. They would go around and take into custody people that didn’t comply with common laws. Must have been back before thoughts of crime were suppressed and everyone became equal. If we even had ‘police’ in this time they wouldn’t have anything to do.”
He turned back to the intruder, “Listen, people don’t own houses now; they use any house they please, as long as it’s not occupied, and you were not here.”
The man’s mental condition seems to have been deteriorating through the whole conversation; it seems the pressure of everything new in the future is starting to weigh down on him with more and more force. His eyes are twitching around trying to look at everything and his hands are slightly starting to shake. He had been having trouble all day trying to work at the job that had been assigned to him because of everything high tech around him and was still confused. “Then what did you do with the few belongings I left in the house?”
Danny was already starting to get fed up with the stranger as he was not a patient man, “Good grief, they’ll still be in whatever house you choose to go too, when you scan your finger in, it will replicate whatever you had in your last house.”
This last bit of information seemed to be the last new thing to the man could bear. His eyes got a blank look, and he just sat on the ground and started to stare into space, mumbling things to himself only he could understand. The couple’s attempts to get him to move were ineffective as he was quite unresponsive.
Danny took Noreen to the side and they decided that he wasn’t going to move anytime soon, but neither wanted to leave him there while they were sleeping.
“I think we should just go to the next house,” Danny told Noreen, “and let him be someone else’s trouble.”
“I just feel sorry for him, it’s not his fault he’s out of place.”
“Yes, but there’s nothing we can do, lets just go next door, I’m pretty sure it had a red light.”
The two walked past the mumbling figure still sitting on the floor and out the door. After leaving, Danny scanned his finger into the box and the green light turned back to red. Quickly they walked to the next-door house, Danny scanned his finger, and within minutes they were in a beige, cozy, well styled domicile again, with the exact same layout as before, minus the man. And yet, it was just another house, not a home. None of Danny and Noreen’s houses ever felt like home again.
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i'm kinda mad about the math test. I should've gotten 4 more points but i made two bonehead mistakes. One was copying the answer into the blank incorrectly. The other was not finishing a problem. Stupid me.