“That’s … a Plan”
Sila took a deep breath, then knocked on her son’s door. “It’s open,” he called. She walked in to see her son Pedro sitting on the far side of the room while his friends Miguel and Lucé played some video game.
“Can I talk to the three of you?”
The game paused and Lucé turned and asked, “What’s up, Mrs. Fortuño.”
“I have a favor to ask of you. Not as Pedro’s mother, but as the President of San Elche.”
Miguel and Lucé both sat up straighter, while Pedro rolled his eyes. “Sure,” Lucé said, “President Fortuño.”
Sila smiled. “I would like you three to go online, and – probably with fake accounts – post to Tik Tok or … whatever Twitter’s called now, the ‘fact’ that our tiny island doesn’t exist.”
Pedro beat his friends to asking, “What?”
Holding up a hand, Sila explained, “There are three outcomes. The first, most likely, option is your posts get swallowed up in the online noise and nothing happens. The second option is this does take off enough so that in a few years travel YouTubers will show up to ‘prove’ that San Elche does exist, which will be a nice boost to our tourism industry.”
Pedro smacked the back of his head on the wall. But Miguel, whose family owned the only hotel on the island, smiled.
Sila continued. “The least likely option is crazy people online will just believe that we don’t exist, just like they think the world is flat, or whatever the latest, stupid conspiracy is.”
Sila sat down on the bed. “The mainland is full of insane people. But instead of giving them the medical or educational help they need, many of them are given political or corporate power. And insane people with power are dangerous. And if they think we don’t exist, maybe they’ll leave us out of whatever world ending events they come up with.”
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For each story I publish, I like to give the backstory, or anything interesting that happened while writing it. You can see what I wrote for this story on my Published Works page.
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If you liked this story, you might want to check out Useless Cogs, my collection of forty, science fiction stories.