Message in a bottle, says android Andreea Esca, version 3050, with a perfect smile and a questioning tone, on the news that starts, for more than a millennium, at 7pm. In her hand she holds a bottle with a piece of paper in it. With a slight disgust visible on her face, she opens the bottle and slowly removes its contents. She blinks confused, unable to read. It's a message in a dead language, she calmly says pointing to the camera the crumpled paper with a single word written in large block letters: SHE LIVES.
(Translated by Denisa Dărăban / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)Real Fiction is a collective project started in 2013 by Florin Piersic Jr. The concept of Real Fiction continued to exist as a Facebook group, after a volume of stories was published at Humanitas Publishing House. (In November 2021, the group has 7.500 members.) The authors write ultra-short stories, with the texts limited to 500 characters (in Romanian, so the length of the English translation might be a little different) - a flash-fiction exercise on a topic that changes every few days. The group's coordinators are Florin Piersic Jr., Gabriel Molnar, Răzvan Penescu, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
