Back in 1986, Anand Narasimhan and I wrote a short story titled “We all fall down,” that was published the popular-science magazine Science Today. Science Today, edited by Mukul Sharma who wrote science fiction himself, was maybe the only outlet where you could publish science fiction. Anyway, the story was published in the August 1987 issue of the magazine.

I had forgotten about it completely but I know I had scanned it years ago – so I wouldn’t have to hang on to the paper version. Of course I didn’t have a clue as to where the pdf was, what I had named it etc. etc. An hour or so of digging around on my computer I did locate it… reading through it after so many years was kinda fun. And then I discovered something interesting.

Back in 1987 when we were looking forward into the future we had to make a choice as to how far we should go in situating the story. It had to be close enough to be recognizable but yet far enough in the future that it could be a different world. So the year we chose to locate our story was (…wait for it…) August 2013!  Here is an excerpt from the story giving the date… 

26 years ago! A quarter of a century must have seemed so far away to a couple of 20 year old’s. Wow!

Anyway, here is a link to the PDF of the actual scan of the published story and of the cleaned up version. I should warn you that you are about to read the “creative” (in quotes, quite deliberately) ramblings of two kids in their early twenties. So click the links at your own risk.

Mishra, P., & Narasimhan, A. (1987, August). And we all fall down. Science Today.