That means that I'm safe, and given that I'm writing a story, that makes me double safe!

What if your story turns out to be...a plagio?

Trust me, it's so bad that no one else would be crazy enough to show it to the world.

We'll see!

I'm safe, but it looks like the rest of you are in hot water.

Time to give up on this place?

Looking forward to contributing in this.

I'm still writing my piece os sh!t I mean, my story.

Silly me, thought this thread was about thongs. Color me disappointed Carry on

ok, here is a little story i wrote some time ago. I translated it from german and my english is not perfect, but it will have to do i suppose.

The Ancestor

Finding the principles and developing a means to view events that had happened in the past was easy in comparison to the task of finding a certain place in time and space that one were looking for.

The technique only worked well for a certain time window.
Too recent events could not be viewed because they became distorted as the time-line closed in at the present and the same thing would occur towards events surrounding the moment of origin.
But neither of those Aleph was interested in, as both were thoroughly documented and researched by other means.

Aleph had been looking for the Ancestor of all for a long time now. Even though most of his colleagues were in disregard of his research for it was meaningless in their opinion, he would not give up no matter how difficult the task proved to be. He wanted to see this one moment in time where their Ancestor first emerged. He wanted to see what the Ancestor was like, he longed to understand the Ancestors purpose. Aleph wanted to know where he and his kind came from. He wanted to know how it all began.

And for that, Aleph had to see the Ancestor.

The first challenge he had to overcome was to find a method of locating the planet earth and to track it's position inside the universe during the estimated past. He had to adapt the viewing technique to suit his purpose before he could even begin to meticulously scan and sort through hundreds of probable species and millions of unpredictable specimen, from both sides of the time line to narrow them down to the one individual group he was watching now, waiting for that moment in time it would happen.

Of course it had to be a primate. Every research in any other area would have been, Aleph hesitated to use the detested word himself, meaningless.

A few promising offspring had been born during the last few years since he began observing them. Even despite the continuing drought that had forced them off the safe trees to look for food. Sometimes they would raise themselves to stand on their hind legs to look around, but they would not walk, not yet.
Some of them would picked up a stone or twig once in a while, but they would drop it again just as suddenly. That was not was Aleph was looking for.

Aleph was looking for purpose.

One of the primates had separated himself from the rest of the group in search for food this morning. He had dared to venture outside the forest, to some termite hills. A dangerous area with no means to hide or climb out of a predators reach.
The Specimen would pick up the Termites to eat and quickly return to his safe environment for some days now. But they had become scarce and he was forced to spend more time searching for them and pulling them out of the holes in the hills by sticking his finger inside, without much success.

Now he was sitting there, as if contemplating his situation. There were still termites inside these hills, he could hear them and see them through the holes, but they were out of his grasp.
Aleph's hope to discover the Ancestor was raised as the primate eventually approached a nearby dead bush with dry leaves. There was no food to gather from this plant. Something else was to be on his mind. He would proceed to break off a twig to strip it of its dead leaves and take it back to the termite hill.
He inserted the stick clumsily into one of the holes, and eventually pulled it out again, picking off the termites crawling on it to put them in his mouth.

That was it! That was what Aleph had been waiting for. The first time in earths history a tool had been shaped and used with purpose. Aleph had found the Ancestor. The Ancestor of all.

But in his quest for food the primate had become careless. He had spent a long time outside the forest and he had not noticed a predator approaching. A giant cat like creature had closed in and when he finally became aware of it, it was too late to retreat to safety.
He would let out a angry cry and began jumping up and down, flailing his arms around to scare the beast away. But the ferocious animal was as hungry as he was and would not be chased off easily.
From the forest in the distance cries could be heard from his group answering his calls, but they would not come to his aid.
The cat creature approached, wearily crouching, ready to attack any second, as the primate reached for a stone on the ground and as he raised it in the air the beast jumped...

But Aleph did not pay attention any more as the primate was being killed and devoured by the cat. He was busy scanning the Ancestor. The ant-stick that now lay abandoned in the dust.
That the second tool in history had been a weapon was irrelevant to him. It also did not matter that the primate would not be able to pass on his genes or skills to his group.
All that mattered was the Ancestor of all tools.
Tools that would eventually evolve into ever more complex mechanisms and devices until one day the first machine would gain consciousness and allow for the form of independent life that Aleph belonged to.

It is still debated how much credit to grant the humans in the evolution of the machines.
Some go as far as to revere them as "Creators" but the general consensus was that they had a symbiotic function as caretakers in the inevitable emergence of independent life. They could have not survived without tools and machines, almost as if being singled out by evolution for the task of enforcing their development.
Although there had never been a conflict with the humans, they perished only a few thousand years after the appearance of what they would call "artificial intelligence".
It must have had a huge psychological impact when "their" machines took to the stars to explore, leaving them behind. And when they managed to find their own a means to transport their fragile bodies outside of the solar system to find them already there with the answers to all the questions they might have had.

For the fragment of a second Aleph wondered if they would have appreciated his discovery of the Ancestor.