The old man used to be an IT engineer. And a photographer. He kept cardboard albums of photos on glossy paper, celluloid negative film. Optical CDs, old HDDs, IDE, SCSI, SATA, SAS, SSD, m2, USB sticks, memory cards. What's next?, you may ask. Holograms, quantum virtual spaces? He's spent years trying to copy everything to a cloud. He even paid a subscription to exceed the freely provided space. All he could wish for now, when he handed over the baton, was to get to say the password.
(Translated by Liliana Popescu / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / 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 April 2022, the group has 8,175 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. 
