"Utopia" -- July 22

Word count: 500

Utopia

A breeze kicked up swirls of sand across the dig site, eliciting a chorus of groans from overworked grad students crouching in shallow pits. Above the pits, two girls sat on a dirty tarp, eating sandwiches.

“Tell me about what you’ve found,” Maisy said, opening a bag of potato chips. “I really appreciate your help.”

Holding up two fingers, Nikki took another bite of her sandwich before answering.

“Ok,” she said, tucking the sandwich back into her lunch bag. She leaned forward.

“So, you know how everyone says this used to be the largest city here?”

“My senior class went on a virtual tour. All the people they’ve found here have been perfectly uniform and they think there was no disease.”

“Right. So, over there, by that white flag, is the huge building you see in all the pictures.”

Maisy squinted. “Wow.”

“Yeah. So then, we found these tunnels radiating out from the basement of the building. You can see, the purple bunting is strung along one of them. We haven’t managed to map all of them yet; there are just so many. See them?”

“What are they?”

Nikki shrugged. “Trevor found out that they run all over the city, leading to every building we’ve found. Dr. McCreedy thinks they were used for surveillance. They’re everywhere, which means either there were dozens of buildings that left no trace, or that they were doing surveillance everywhere, even out in the open.”

“Why didn’t we hear that in History?”

“It’s too new.” Nikki pushed her lunch bag aside and stood up, wiping her hands on her dusty pants. “This you have to see, though.”

Nikki led her friend down the embankment and toward a large, deep pit, where two sun hats bobbing at ground level indicated two grad students at work. Nikki knelt on the edge of the pit.

The two students inside looked up and leaned back on their heels, brushes and picks in their hands. “Hi, Nikki.”

“Found anything interesting today?”

One of the students handed up a box. Inside, carefully catalogued and labeled, lay a confused mass of tiny bones.

Nikki handed the box to Maisy. “Careful.”

“What is this?” Maisy took the box and balanced it across her knees. “They’re so small. Is it a baby?”

Nikki crouched over the box, pointing to the bones. “It is a baby. Actually, two. See the skull there; there’s an arm bone, there’s a femur. We’ve found at least six full skeletons in this pit alone, and all of them have had something wrong with them. Missing limbs, deformed skulls—you know.”

“I thought they’d eradicated defects.”

“We thought so too.” Nikki leaned her chin on her knee, her eyes sparkling. “But look here—these babies were joined at the hip. Here we were looking for the secret to utopia.”

Maisy studied the bones in her lap. “But…”

“But,” Nikki said, tracing the outlines of the bones with her fingertips, “it looks like it’s not exactly the utopia we had thought.”