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A Short Story By: Danny Mendlow
Mitchell Mendlow
Copyright 2013 Zack Mitchell & Danny Mendlow
DBA: “Mitchell Mendlow”
All Rights Reserved
Short Stories by Mitchell Mendlow available at
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Including Their Debut, Full-Length Novel "Greegs & Ladders"
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https://mitchellmendlow.wordpress.com
It was an awful lot of gold that's for sure. But was it enough?
That was the question on everyone's mind, or at least on the mind of those in the know. What was supposed to be no more than 15 living humans at any point in history had, of course, ballooned to an unacceptably high number over the millennia But those in the know weren't as concerned with the far surpassed limit of 15... they were much more worried about the gold. Bars, ingots, trinkets, flakes, liquid vials and more assortments of jewelry than could be imagined.
Piles upon piles of gold bands, rings, chains, necklaces, broaches, lockets and watches. More gold than had ever been assembled in one place on earth. To the best of their knowledge, this was basically all the gold there was, or ever had been. It was close, that's for sure. But the question remained... was it enough? They'd find out soon, but for now all they could do was admire the sheer mass of it, and what it represented.
Entire empires in human history were merely minor sub-sections of the collective hoard. Billions of deaths, thousands of wars, millions of slaves and quadrillions of man hours of labour had gone into extracting and collecting and mining and finding and holding onto the stuff. Whole towns had arisen overnight and closed mere years later. Mountains had been pulverized, hollowed out, drilled, blasted and sifted through to find the shiny, precious gold. Rounding it all up at the end hadn't been nearly as difficult.
It was a simple manner of collapsing the economy and driving the price of gold through the roof. It was fairly easy to manufacture, since even the gold-based economy was a farce from the start. After removing the gold standard, it had been accepted as a widespread reality that there was a direct correlation between things going very bad in the world, and the price of gold going up. No one ever really questioned it. So when one by one, the economies of the world collapsed, their entire populations were sent into a mad scramble to gather up every scrap of gold that could be found and exchange it for ludicrous sums of money. This was easy to accomplish, as the money was simply pieces of paper being printed that had no real value.
It is indeed one of the great oddities of human civilization that they collectively never needed much explanation as to why finding and retaining large amounts of gold was of such great importance. The original 15 who had been given the initial instructions had puzzled for weeks as to how they could possibly convince their fellow man of the importance in finding and retaining large amounts of shiny rocks. Indeed, they weren't even sure it was a real thing at the time, but the instructions were very clear, the punishment very severe and "the gods" very godly. The original 15 figured that if "the gods" had the knowledge to descend from the heavens and rise back up again at will, they were surely not to be trifled with, and their requests not to be questioned by lowly humans. Luckily, that was all the explanation mankind ever needed.
More or less, all the original 15 said to their fellow man was this: "We talked to the ones that came from the heavens..."
"Where's the heavens?" shouted out a random member of the community.
"Up there," one of the 15 pointed towards the sky.
"Ooooohhhhh," said the community. "What do they want us to do? Tell us! Tell us!"
The leader of the 15 held up his fist and released a flurry of golden dust into the air. "They want you to go and find lots of this stuff."
And off to the races the human species went!
Thousands of years of human activities and behavior can be directly attributed to this humble beginning. Carefully and precisely, the story was changed many times, with multiple interpretations of what "the gods" that came from the heavans said, how many of them were there, what they really were, what they were wearing, when they were coming back, etc. etc. This was all deliberate however. The more clouded the real story the better, so long as the relentless search for gold was the end result. In the early days, the rules were followed. Never at any time were more than 15 people ever aware of the real reason for gathering up all the gold.
In time the gathering up of the gold became carefully separated from the story of "the gods" entirely. This was no accident. "The gods" would pop in every now and then and make necessary, slight alterations to the orders of the 15. With the careful, stealthy guidance of the 15, "the gods" were instead connected to all sorts of vague codes of conduct, rather than to gold. In order to ensure that various cultures were constantly suspicious of each other, and willing to kill other cultures and steal their gold, the 15 never gave the exact same code of conduct to two cultures. Tiny changes in the code of conduct was all that was required to divide people. People, after all, were very stupid and easy to manipulate. This led to a lot gold being obtained and a lot of people murdered. Exactly the kind of relentless gold questing "the gods" intended.
"When are they getting here?" yelled out an impatient acquaintance of one of the actual 15. "I wanna meet them and ask 'em some questions!"
"Kill him please," quietly mumbled the current leader of the 15.
The impatient acquaintance was immediately killed. This was not the time for people who didn't understand the levity of the situation, and an example had to be made.
The rest of the casual acquaintances shut up and waited. The second in command to the leader however, did not shut up. He was also growing impatient, but more so with advancing his own personal agenda. His code name was Flint.
"Do you think they are actually coming?" he prodded the leader.
"What kind of question is that? Of course they are coming."
"So you say, but none of us are so sure. We've never spoken to them directly. We've never seen the scrolls. What if this is a bluff? Or a hoax?"
"The scrolls clearly state that only the leader may talk to them. If I were to die, then you would be the one to receive the information and pass it on to the other 14."
"Oh come on dear leader, doesn't that sound a little familiar to you? Isn't that exactly the kind of nonsense the 15 has been using to keep humanity under our thumb since the first visit? Don't you see we're just as much pawns as they are?"
"Do not think for a second that if you continue down this path I won't have you executed as well."
"So when are they coming then?" Flint continued unphased. "And if they are coming, then why don't you just go ahead and tell the rest of us what's really going on? Let's see the scrolls."
The leader realized that he was no longer talking to just Flint, but to the other 13 as well who had gathered around menacingly. One, a particularly eager mutineer and the youngest of Flint's followers, stuck a cattle prod into the leader's ribs.
"Why don't you go ahead and tell us boss. You're not in charge any more. We are."
The leader couldn't help but smile. The number of times in the annals of human history that this exact scenario had played out was staggering. The end result was always the same. He'd expected better of the 15, but as Flint had just pointed out, the 15 were nothing more than humans after all. Subject to the same endless folly as the rest of the species they were manipulating. A
t this very moment, the 13 all genuinely believed they were going to change things by uniting and taking out the leader. They had all surely been promised by Flint their equal share of the knowledge of the leader. That the scrolls would be revealed to all members and that hence forth the 15 would be a co-operative, unified organization instead of a top down, microcosm of the very systems they were entrusted to enforce on the human species. But once they killed the leader, Flint would merely take his place, as so many had before. A new recruit would be vetted and trained to enter the 15 at the lowest place on the hierarchy. And all would continue as it always had.
"You can kill me if you wish. But it changes nothing I'm afraid. I don't think the leader's scrolls offer you the closure that you seek. Indeed, they have brought me no happiness, only sorrow."
"It's not the answers on the scrolls I seek. It's the privilege of the leader. I want to speak to them when they arrive. We all do. We want to read the history of the leader's correspondence and to confirm or deny our suspicions. We want all of the 15 to know. To really know."
"What's there to know? We have the gold, and we are in the designated spot. You know what I know. We have fulfilled our duty to them, and now we await our reward."
"No... that won't do."
The fight