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A FOOTPATH SCENE IN A HUMAN COLONISTS' SETTLEMENT TOWN, BUILT FROM RE-PURPOSED COLONY SHIP STRUCTURES ON AN ALIEN PLANET NEXT TO a colorful GREEN PRAIRIE full of exotic COLORFUL WILDFLOWERS on the alien colony exo-planet, depicted in the style of Ivan Bilibin and Darwyn Cooke using the precision rendering of Boris Kostygov and Daniel Gerhartz and Thomas Wells Schaller
Where did these little people come from? It's possible that THEY CAME TO LIVE ON EARTH'S SURFACE AFTER HUMANITY BECAME EXTINCT, and now they are free to pursue their own endeavors, albeit mostly using salvaged parts. They could be extraterrestrials, but then why can't they make miracle machines instead of using 20th century tech made from salvage? They might even be flesh-and-blood "dimension-hopping" scholars cataloging the factory as part of that world's history. They could be cryptoterrestrials or ultraterrestrials, like the Dero or other Hollow Earth species, or cryptids like Mothman. They could be part of Earth's own Daimonic Reality, e.g., the fae. Once humans are gone, any number of species might want to take possession of the Earth.
OR, perhaps this is an alternate Earth where EVERYWHERE IS LIKE LILLIPUT in GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, and people on this Earth are all very small. They just happen to be having their Industrial Revolution right now.
OR, WE COULD SAY that WE ARE ON A COLONY WORLD where humans co-exist with a smaller, indigenous Stone Age species, which the humans are trying to bring up to the Iron Age. The humans couldn't outfight them, so they're going to try destroying their culture. Their young are convinced to learn iron-working, so they go to factories like this one...or would they? And why such crude tactics from interstellar colonizers, people who beat the light-speed barrier and could presumably have many miraculous technologies, e.g., when you can turn anything into any other thing using 3-D printing with subatomic particles, why get your raw materials from inside a gravity well like Earth's?
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"...To A Post-Human Earth ? Lilliput's Industrial Age ? An Exo-Planet ? And Is That A Moon or a Dome?" © 2026 A.J. Jones. All rights reserved.
Accompanying text is ©2026 A.J. Jones. All rights reserved.
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A.J. Jones hereby asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work and all accompanying text.
