Thus did the great and the small, the wise and the foolish, chase endlessly after baubles and mysteries, each convinced of their own purpose, none pausing to consider whether the thing they sought was worth the seeking.
It was in the dim and smoke-choked parlor of the Miffen’s Repose that Professor Alistair Ellington first laid eye upon the map. The parchment, brittle with age and stained with what one might charitably call the remnants of a long-forgotten piss stain, bore the cryptic markings of a bygone cartographer.
“Behold,” quoth the Professor, adjusting his pince-nez with a trembling hand, “the Crystal of Oshit! Legends speak of its power to bend the very fabric of reality to the will of its possessor!”
Senator Brelia Daren tapped her fingers on the polished table. “The Phantom Fuel,” she said, voice low. “A single vial could power a city for a century. No emissions, no waste; just pure energy. Whoever controls it controls the future.”
His companion, the ever-skeptical Dr. Ignatius Vasquez, gave a derisive snort. “Poppycock,” he declared, mopping his brow with a silk kerchief. “The Crystal is but a gaudy trinket, a diversion for the gullible. The true prize lies within the Scroll of Azarath, secreted away beneath the accursed Temple of Forgotten Whispers!”
Unbeknownst to either man, the temple’s silent sentinel, an artificial intellect of ancient design known only as PISTOF, cared not a whit for their petty squabbles. It sought only the Neural Keycode, a device of such obscurity that none living could say with certainty what it did, only that it was of paramount importance.
But the corporations didn’t care. Bidding wars erupted. Spies bled in back alleys for data fragments. A rogue scientist fled into the desert with a prototype.
Meanwhile, in a den of ill repute upon the forsaken moon of Headinwall, a bounty hunter of some small renown, one Deez the Unlucky, traded the Blacklight Drive—a mechanism said to displace entire armadas across the void—for a bottle of something that might, in a generous mood, be called whiskey, and a whispered rumor concerning the Soul Anchor, an artefact purported to bind the spirits of the dead to the world of the living.
And all the while, upon the rain-slicked streets of London, a child of no particular consequence plucked a tarnished locket from a vendor’s tray. It hummed faintly, as though stirred by some unseen force, but none took notice, for such trinkets were common enough, and the hour was late.
In a diner in Nebraska, a trucker named Roy stirred his coffee with a spoon that never seemed to get warm.
Thus did the great and the small, the wise and the foolish, chase endlessly after baubles and mysteries, each convinced of their own purpose, none pausing to consider whether the thing they sought was worth the seeking.
Meanwhile, in a seedy bar on Whogivsfuk, a bounty hunter named Collin traded the Blacklight Drive (which could teleport entire fleets) for a bottle of synth-whiskey and a tip about the Soul Anchor, an artifact that could tether ghosts to the living world.
Back on Earth, a child picked up a shiny Pair of Shoes at a flea market. It hummed faintly, but no one noticed.
Ava Arnold sold them the next day for a handful of sweets, which she then promptly dropped into a gutter.
And in a café in Paris, a woman sipped her coffee and watched the steam rise in perfect, motionless spirals.
And so the world turned, and the seekers sought, and the treasures remained ever just out of reach – or worse, within grasp, and found wanting, across the galaxy, everyone chased something; something that didn’t really matter. And so it ever was, and so it ever shall be.
The End.