The Gospel of Elon Musk

Vlad Mușat
I landed on planet Pax7. 153 of us left at the last minute in two ships. Earth is burned to the ground. I'm trying to get in touch with the others. They're probably wandering through the galaxy. Maybe they got lucky or maybe they came across a civilisation with access to advanced weaponry who knows how to use it. I'm looking at the Paxiens and I'm reminded of my family. There's still a trace of soul left in me, and that is why I hope that the end of these beings will be quick and painless. I'm sorry, but we're the last (terrible) people.

Monica Bologa
People from the city realized that the world is in constant change. It's more difficult to make the ones living in villages undestand the future. So we mobilised and left for the nearest village. We gathered the villagers in the community centre and told them about electric cars, satellites and chips, about how technology will make their future days easier. After the meeting, the people ran to the priest to tell him that they just met the devil. They found him sitting under a walnut tree with a laptop in his arms. He was searching for a trip on the internet, somewhere in space.

Paul Dârvariu
The undersigned Vasile Avăcăriței, known as Tesla, carpenter by profession, asks you to rectify the slanderous article from your journal, titled Elon Musk, the father of Tesla, because it ain't true that my son Serbanel Avacaritei, also known as Tesla, was made by my wife with our neighbour Ion Muscă[1]. I can prove it with documents and witnesses that during the child's conceiving the so-called Muscă was gone off to work in Spain, and so therefore he can't be the daddy of Serbanel. Furthermore, the word around town's that the aforementioned is empotent.(Translated by Raluca Sălcianu / 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 July 2023, the group has 11,540 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, Luchian Abel, and Vlad Mușat. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)

Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.