Veridis Quo

Chapter 54 - The Waiting Game

I enjoyed modernity. Accessible information, hygienic commodities, an abundance of produce and cheap transport, those were a couple of the many perks of living in the modern age. Whoever belittled the present was ignorant to the absence of medicine and order in the past, when crime was as common as disease and justice was a faraway dream. Nowadays, we could pretend it existed in the theater they call a court room.

Why do they use big boy words when the average man doesn't understand or care to? Why use a vocabulary at their disposal English majors instead of layman's terms so the jury could give an accurate verdict in the case? I got a bit off track.

Back on topic, the DVD set was an inseparable part of my modern childhood. Cable was still around in my earlier years but it cost a pretty penny and my dad had like three album books full of discs! He had everything from cheesy action movies to the best sellers of the 20th century, from hand-drawn cartoons with female animals a little too curvy and seductive for a boy's unsuspecting eyes to classic horrors that actually aimed to frighten the viewers with anything but jumpscares.

I wouldn't trade my internet for- well, I would, because the internet as a whole has done more damage than good. What I meant is, I wouldn't trade modern communications and readily accessible information for a DVD set. Pirating movies had become trivial in the age of the web! Video games were no different! All you had to do was download the onion browser, configure a few settings, set up a firewall if you wore a tinfoil hat and you were ready to roll!

I wasn't a pirate though, sailing the seven seas was for the bold and crass and I didn't have a cutlass to call my own.

Why was I so hooked on pirates all of a sudden? It was the damn TV. If it wasn't the phone, it was the television! If it wasn't the television, it was the radio! If it wasn't the radio, it was the telegraph! Never underestimate the capability of the older generation to find something new to blame.

In all seriousness, it was the damn TV, the movie playing on the old screen. Calling it a movie wasn't accurate, it was more of an unprofessional documentary.

"With the evidence you've been presented, I'd like to propose a new theory," the narrator said, the British accent a little off the stereotype.

A photograph of the pyramids appeared. Although I didn't remember what they looked like back in my day, the fact they had lost a lot of their bulk due to erosion had me convinced they were the very same ones the ancient Egyptians had constructed.

"What if, the narrator paused for dramatic effect, "it wasn't us... who built the pyramids? The dinosaurs couldn't have built them, the asteroid that wiped them out collided with the world millions upon millions of years prior!"

I knew where he was going with this, yet I listened for the heck of it.

"Aliens could very well have done so, but think about it; why would aliens build something for us? Would an advanced civilization care about a primitive world? If you have a basic understanding of history, you'd know what the consequences of colonization were for the native populace of the Americas."

Preach, brother!

"Maybe, just maybe... it wasn't us who built the pyramids," he paused again, "it wasn't an alien race from the other side of the galaxy or another galaxy! It wasn't our ancestors who left these priceless structures to waste in the middle of a desert!"

I shook my head in amusement.

"The builders of the pyramid were..." he really liked his pauses, "...humans."

There we go! Finally got to the point.

"The humans built the pyramids! And the sphynx, too. Allow me to present undisputable evidence..."