A Short Story About Life

Let’s take another trip back in time to before I had a blog and wrote random essays in Microsoft Word and saved them away from a rainy day.

This is titled “Short Story by Ben Beard” with no other context. I don’t remember writing this, but it has a lot of interesting takes.

This was written over 10 years ago, right after I got married. Keep in mind this was drafted well before the founding of Musk’s company Neuralink.
The short story appears below exactly how I wrote it. Enjoy!


Marriage is a wonderful thing. You get to spend the rest of your life with someone whom you think is the only person that you could stand for that long. As I look out the window of our SUV I can see the rain drops forming trails down the glass. It’s a pretty long drive to the airport from our suburban home. I have lots of time to reflect on that last twenty years of my life. In my forties still with no children I wonder what is in store next. My wife of twenty years has never wanted to have children but I have still held out hope that someday this will change. “Jeff!” she yells from the passenger seat, “watch the damn road, we’re going to be late!” In fact we were 2 hours early for our international flight out of Pittsburgh. A rainy Sunday morning that we have been looking forward to for quite some time.

After two decades we have finally reached our twentieth wedding anniversary and are celebrating by going on cruise around beautiful Europe. We have been saving money for the last ten years for this since traveling in Europe has become so expensive. Money hasn’t come easy to us lately, we have had many obstacles to get over to achieve where we are today. My wife Annie has struggled with her career and now finds herself in another job change. Starting out working with computers, she changed to marketing. While she made a lot of money doing that, she didn’t feel happy about lying to the world. Annie went through this phase of helping people and making the world a better place. Thankfully this didn’t last long because she made zero income doing that. Lately her passion has been for acting, although that ties in well with my career aspirations, I can’t cast in her in all my movies. While she waits for her late acting career to take off, she just finished neuro-nursing school and has a new job lined up for when we return. Luckily for us she will be involved with changing out and upgraded memory modules in the human brain’s neo-cortex. This will allow us to process new ideas faster and make decisions quicker than ever. They say by 2023 everyone will be completely outfitted with the new neo-cortex memory upgrade.

We’ve arrived at the airport and begin to look for a place to park. We just purchased our new vehicle so I want to park somewhere it’s not going to get damaged. This state-of-the-art SUV has all the bells and whistles, including drink dispenser, auto-steer, optional six-wheel drive, and of course neruo-memory uplink. Kia has been the face of luxury over the last ten years as Mercedes and BMW fell when Germany decided to become a socialist nation. That’s a different story that can be read out of every history book. We are happy with our purchase and see this as a new start for us. This vacation will be the beginning of our new life. When we return my latest and greatest movie production will be released. Set to be the biggest movie since ‘The Expendables 5’. I haven’t been making movies very long but I feel this is my big break. I had movie studios fighting for the rights to finance this and signed some of the biggest actors around to start in it. You will see the likes of Jaden Smith, Mark Wahlberg Jr. and established actress Tallulah Moore-Willis. I’m very proud of what I made and hope this career will be long and prosperous. Now I am focusing on having a great trip with my wife.