Comic Archive

Alana: A display about skiing and snowboarding… why is this in a history museum?
Steve, reading a sign: “Sliding down snowy slopes used to be affordable to the general public, but these sports are now nearly extinct, except for the few super-rich.”

Alfred: I have seen videos of people skiing. They need to be taken by helicopter to the few mountain tops where the snow has not yet melted or that aren't covered by cities. Mighty expensive.
Adil: This future is sucking harder by the minute.

A window is being shattered by a brick coming in at high speed. Max manages to dodge it just in time.
SFX: KLANG!
Max: What the…

Max has picked up the brick from the floor.
Heidi: Max! Are you OK?
Max: Yeah, and even if I would have been hit… it's only a simulation.
Heidi: I am almost forgetting, it is astounding how realistic it is. But, who would launch a brick at a window of a museum?

Alfred: It's all OK, it is just a brick squad.
Zhang: A what?!
Alfred: Don't you know? People drive around in trucks with bricks, and throw them at random buildings. It is supposed to be good for the eco… nomy. It creates work for many, even doctors when the brick hits someone.

An outside view of the museum, with a pick-up truck marked ‘BS’ driving away in the foreground, a person in its cargo bed next to a pile of bricks is ready to throw another brick.
Zhang (voice from within museum): This is officially sanctioned? I want to meet those in charge… or maybe not.

Steve: I bet they have a saying here: “a brick a day keeps the doctor's pay.”
Alana: Their economy seems based on deliberately breaking and repairing things. No wonder this all feels less futuristic than I expected; they are running in circles.
Steve: I think rather in a spiral, towards certain doom.

Alana: What's your opinion as marketeer about this, Adil?
Adil: It all sucks.
Alana: Well, I guess that about sums it up. Anyhow, I'd like to see the section about this “event” thing.
Alfred: It is right here, in the next hall.

A hall is shown with a large sign reading “The Event”, filled with various objects, a significant part of which are what seem to be destroyed server racks.
Max: Well, for once they managed to correctly spell the sign.
Heidi: That looks like the remains of a data center over there…

Alana: Alfred, given that this is your favorite part of the museum, maybe you can guide us around?
Alfred: Sure, … what is your name again?
Alana: Alana.
Alfred: OK, Alana. Well, as I said before, people used to hold information on paper, and then shiny disks. But later, they moved almost everything to machines which for some reason was called “the cloud.”

Alfred: Sometime after the start of the old 21st century, something bad happened, which destroyed a lot of these machines. We do not know what… because all information was on the machines. We call it “The Event,” we could not find a better name.
Alfred: It was chaos for a long time, there was not even electricity. People fought each other for basic things, like food.

Alfred: After some time, people stopped fighting and became organized, using information we could read from the disks from before the Event and some of the surviving machines. Nobody even knew what the date was, so a new calendar was started with the year 1945.
Zhang: Why that year?
Alfred: We know a big war had ended in that year… Our war had also ended, it seemed a good choice.