January Bloom: “Connections Without Borders"”

Many thanks to Cronin V. for inspiring this month’s Bloom Good flash fiction story titled “Connections Without Borders.” His passion as an amateur genealogist sleuth has helped people, including our family, piece together ancestral ties, sometimes with surprises that he calls ‘reckonings’ rooted in DNA. Here’s an excerpt from what Cronin said:

Wild, hey? Keep in mind a result like this doesn’t change who anyone actually is. You’re all the same people you were. It’s just you now know something about yourselves you didn’t previously know!”

"Connections Without Borders"

Family Discovery Tree.com reigned supreme in the relative-seeking business until its traffic and subscriptions ceased on January 1, 2023. No hits, inquiries, or sign-ups for two days. “Maybe the system froze, or perhaps a hack?” shouted a cacophony of voices from the firm’s Utah headquarters.

Ten years ago, Jesus Molina launched Family Discovery Tree.com with childhood friends who specialized in genetics, genealogy, and generosity. The DNA enthusiasts mixed well with the historical lineage experts. The visionary software entrepreneurs grew the enterprise. Molina overtook his competition by augmenting the firm’s databases with coveted dental, surrogacy, and other state-of-the-art kinship data, besides DNA, census, birth, marriage, and death records. Molina had projected another year of record growth in subscribers and revenue based on favorable trends until now.

Desperate instant messages flooded devices across the firm’s worldwide offices. Tech crews mined cyber trenches for glitches. Data analysts dissected algorithms. Molina’s marketing team scrutinized December’s traffic and surfaced hefty hits from a miniscule site called The Advance Peace & Abolish Hate Council (The Council).

Their rapid research revealed that last fall The Council asked school districts around the globe to have students complete a family lineage homework assignment, and recommended Family Discovery Tree.com. In December, three quarters of a billion children had flooded Molina’s site to map relatives’ connections.

In late December, The Council secured breaking news airtime on worldwide outlets after reviewing millions of completed family trees. “The Advance Peace & Abolish Hate Council reports that all of earth’s 8 billion people share DNA of various gradations- we are all connected.”

Māori 4th graders in New Zealand wrote to family in the Schichan Province. Brazilians contacted relatives in Antarctica. Virginian third- graders called cousins in Botswana. Europeans embraced everyone across several lands.

Members of various cultural, political, social, religious, civic groups and clans merged in honor of their shared human family lineage. Demand for Family Discovery Tree.com ceased forever, with all connections found. So Jesus Molina embarked on a new venture for these promising times.

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