The Prank — A Short Story

Mark Farragher
Jul 21, 2017 · 10 min read

This is a short story I wrote, inspired by the following Reedsy writing prompt: “A cell phone is found inside a sealed Egyptian tomb.”

I was at home, getting ready to relax after a long day. I had just opened a bottle of red wine when my phone rang.

“Hello, Mr. Jones? This is Steve, I’m the assistant to professor Hoffman. There’s been a development and the professor has requested your help”

Wow, Hoffman. That name brought back memories.

“I remember the professor. Didn’t he discover the tomb of Ramses VIII?”

“Yes, that’s him. He has recovered an artifact from the site and needs your help with the translations. Will you come?”

I hesitated. Drop everything and rush to the other side of the world to help the professor with a difficult translation?

“Hell yeah” I said. “I’ll come!”

Fourteen hours later I was at the museum, a place I remembered well from my Egyptology classes. It was very good to be back.

Steve looked worried. “It’s good that you came”, he said. “The professor has not been the same since the excavation. I am worried about him. Maybe you can help?”

We stood in front of the main library where the professor had set up shop. Steve politely knocked on the door, opened it, and waved me through.

I stepped into chaos. The room was a total mess. Books were everywhere, strewn across the floor and stacked high on tables. I almost tripped over a half-eaten takeout meal near the door. I noticed the professor standing near a window, his back turned to me.

“Paul, it’s so good of you to come. Please, come in”

He turned around and I almost flinched, he looked that bad. His skin was pale and lifeless with deep lines of worry. There was an air of defeat around him, as if he had met the greatest challenge of his life… and lost.

“Karl, my god, what happened to you?”

The professor beckoned me to a chair.

“Please Paul, take a seat. I want you to look at something. I need your help with a translation”

I frowned. “With all due respect, Karl, my language skills are actually not that good. You have honor students that can run circles around me. Why did you ask for me?”

The professor smiled, and for an instant he looked like his old energetic self again.

“Paul, remember that prank that you pulled on me, years ago?”

Oh yeah, I remembered. I had snuck into his office late at night and reprogrammed his laptop to show everything in hieroglyphics.

“I remember”, I said. “You gave me an A+”

“It took me hours to fix my laptop. At first, I wanted to expel you. But then I realized you had translated absolutely everything, including words like “printer driver” and “hard disk”. You didn’t just switch the language, you also created hundreds of new hieroglyphic triliterals from scratch”

I grinned. “Yeah, it took some work”

The professor handed me a golden box. “I need your unique skills to translate this artifact for me”

I flipped the box over in my hand. It felt smooth and surprisingly light. “Where was it found?”

The professor sighed. “We found it in Ramses’ right hand when we opened the sarcophagus”.

The box was weird. It reminded me of a gilded spice box, but it was much too thin to hold anything. And the surface didn’t feel like gold at all, it was too smooth.

“What kind of material is this?”

The professor buried his head in his hands. “It’s plastic”

What?

“Plastic, Paul. It’s plastic. I know what you’re going to say, but we carbon-dated it and it all checks out. The box is three thousand years old, and it’s made of plastic”

I tried to say something, but the professor cut me off.

“The ancient Egyptians didn’t have plastic. You think I don’t know that? It should have been metal or gilded wood. But it really is plastic. And yeah, we checked the tomb. It was completely sealed before we opened it. It’s not a prank!”

Yeah, right. This had to be the professor getting back at me, a revenge for what I did to him all those years ago. I decided to play along.

“Okay, so look”, I said. “It’s a plastic box from ancient Egypt. But that doesn’t explain why you asked me here. I can’t find any hieroglyphics anywhere on the box”

The professor choked back a hysterical laugh. “Oh, Paul. It’s much worse than you think. Here, let me show you. Keep holding the box like that for a minute”

The professor grabbed a flashlight, switched it on, and pointed the beam directly at the rear of the box. Nothing happened at first, but then it vibrated gently in my hands. The entire front lid changed color, fading slowly to black, and a grid of gold icons appeared.

“The back is a solar panel, Paul. I can briefly recharge it with a flashlight.”

I looked at the rows of icons. The layout looked very familiar.

“Karl, are you kidding me? This is a smartphone”

The professor had calmed down. But I understood why Steve was so worried. Egyptology was the professor’s life work, and this artifact had turned everything he thought he knew on its head. His sanity must be hanging by a thread.

“Okay Karl” I said. “Let’s get to the bottom of this. May I?”

“By all means, Paul. By all means”

I took a closer look at the display. It was very familiar. There was a grid of hieroglyphics, probably application icons, and a bar across the top with symbols. One of the symbols was blinking, I guess that was the battery indicator.

I tapped one of the glyphs, and the screen filled with new symbols. I tapped a few more.

“What are you doing?”, the professor asked.

I kept tapping at the screen. “I’m trying to find the ringtone. Ah, here we go, I think I found it. So, this was Ramses’ ringtone”

I tapped the display. The artifact came to life and started playing music. I almost dropped the device in shock.

The professor giggled hysterically. “Yes, my dear boy. It seems the ancient Egyptians played the electric guitar”

I jabbed at the display and the music stopped. I started flicking through screen after screen of hieroglyphs, determined to figure this out.

“Alright, so this is…. messages I think. Yes, messages. The last person he chatted with was… someone called Nubhesed. Maybe his wife?”

“We don’t know much about Ramses VIII”, the professor said. “The names of his wife and children are still unknown”

“Well, he was definitely texting Nubhesed. His last message says…. “Tonight, I want you to wear your… clothing… then take off your… garment? … you make me feel….”

I stared at the professor. “Karl, he was sexting his wife”

The professor started laughing. “Oh, dear god, yes, why the hell not?”

“But do you know what this means, professor? It means Nubhesed also had a phone. There’s another one of these out there”

I tried to calm the professor down, but I wasn’t doing a very good job. He clenched the phone in his hands, manically pacing the room and muttering to himself.

“Okay old boy, think this through, think this through. Ancient Egypt didn’t have a society capable of producing smartphones. So how did Ramses get phones for him and his wife? Somebody must have given them to him. Maybe aliens, or a time traveler? But why would anyone do this in the first place? It’s completely over the top. The only thing that makes sense is if somebody is trying to get our attention. Three thousand years ago, somebody planted this phone in Ramses’ tomb to get our attention. But what are they trying to say? What is the message?”

He walked towards the door. “Paul, I’m going to show this phone to everyone. Somebody is sending us a message, and I have to get the word out”

“That’s quite far enough, Karl”, I said.

The professor spun around and noticed the gun I was pointing at him.

“Paul! Are you… one of them? Is this your phone?”

I laughed. “No professor, it’s not mine. But I can’t have you showing it to everyone. Please sit down. I will tell you everything”

We sat down. The professor sat on the edge of his seat and threw me a suspicious glance. But I knew he wasn’t going anywhere until I told him my secrets.

“Karl, how old to you think the Earth is?”

The professor smiled. “I am going to say four billion years, but I’m sure you’re going to correct me”

“That’s right, Karl”, I said. “It’s only a fraction of that. My company built the Earth fifty thousand years ago”

The professor frowned. “Built?”

“Yes Karl, built. That’s what we do. We build planets, fill them with billions of years of fake history, and seed them with humans. Your entire history, the dinosaurs, the megafauna, the giant insects, the mass extinctions… it’s all fake. Our PR division created it for you”

“But why?” the professor asked.

“Humanity first reached out for the stars about ten million years ago, on a planet quite like this one. We built our FTL-starships and eagerly ventured out into the cosmos. And you know what we found? Zip, zilch, an empty universe. Dead planets, dead solar systems, not even ancient ruins. The universe is unbelievably large, and completely empty and dead”

I leaned forward. “It devastated us, Karl. Can you imagine? Discovering that you’re the first and there’s no one else out there. It’s like being invited to a party and no other guests show up. You’re just standing there, holding your drink, and thinking, what am I doing here?”

“We did not take it well, it almost wiped us out. But then we found the solution. We started the project and have been working on it ever since, for millions of years. It’s what gives us purpose. We terraform dead planets, add a rich evolutionary history, and then seed them with animals and people. We change the mix to make every planet unique. There’s no telling how you guys will develop”

“In a few hundred years, you’re going to crack FTL and venture out into space. But you won’t find it empty. You will encounter thousands of cultures out there, all variations of basic humanity. You won’t be alone but part of a big family, and together, you will stand strong against the horror of the empty universe”

The professor leaned back in his chair. “That’s quite a story, Paul. But what about the phone?”

I smiled. “It wasn’t Ramses VIII’s tomb, Karl”, I said. “Someone built this tomb fifty thousand years ago, long before the ancient Egyptians showed up”

The professor frowned. “Paul, I’m sorry but that doesn’t make any sense. We found artifacts, written texts, and this phone is showing hieroglyphics. How is this possible if the tomb is much older than Egyptian society?”

I slapped my hand against the table. “Don’t you see? Our prankster was brilliant. He probably seeded the valley with rocks covered in ancient hieroglyphics. When the Egyptian ancestors arrived in 10,000 BC, they found plenty of knowledge to work with. Their culture grew and thrived, guided by those inscriptions, and eventually became very similar to what you found in the tomb. From today’s viewpoint, it seems like the Egyptians created the tomb but in reality, it was the tomb builder who created the Egyptians!”

The professor leaned forward. “But why, Paul? Why go to all that trouble to send a message to humanity?”

I smiled. “No, Karl. Not to humanity. This is a message to me”

I pulled the trigger and shot him.

I took the phone from the professor’s limp hand.

These things sometimes do go to our heads, you know. It’s quite something to build an entire planet and lay down billions of years of history. It makes us feel like gods, and the urge to add our signature to our creations can be overwhelming. The company understands this, and the penalty for graffiti is not too harsh.

Usually we spot it in time. The group of dinosaurs wearing sneakers, or a fossil of Devonian insects playing scrabble, or the caveman art of a Neanderthal hunched over a laptop … the company has filters to detect these things early. We erase the graffiti, find out who did it, and fine them.

But sometimes, just sometimes, one of these pranks gets through. And that’s where I come in.

I flicked through the phone apps and opened the photo gallery. And there it was, just as I expected. I tapped the screen and the video started playing.

There they were, all my old crew, in the company café on Antarctica. Everybody happy and smiling after a long shift. This was recorded at the end of construction, just before the new colonists arrived in Africa. My entire crew was holding drinks, and already quite drunk by the look of it.

I recognized the guy in front of the group. Of course, it must have been his idea. My head of operations, always the comedian.

“Hey boss, remember us? Construction crew 213, the best in the universe! We just heard you volunteered for Culture Guardian. So you think you’re too good for construction work, eh? Well, we’re not letting you go without a proper send off. Boys, let’s give him the official 213 salute!”

The comedian gave a drunken impression of a military salute, and the crew behind him broke out in boisterous cheers. Everybody raised their glasses, downed their drinks, and threw the empty glasses at the camera.

The image flipped on its side when something hit the camera. Then the video stopped.

By god, they had done it! My crew had successfully graffitied the Earth, hid their work from the company filters, and used it to send me a message fifty thousand years down the line. What a prank!

Of course, it also meant I now had to clean up the mess.

I glanced down at the sleeping form of the professor. I had shot him with a memory-rewriting dart. In a few hours, he would wake up and remember that the Ramses VIII expedition was a failure. The sarcophagus was empty, looted long ago.

Oh well, back to work. These humans won’t shepherd themselves to the stars.

)

Mark Farragher
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