Future's Discoveries

Future's Discoveries - Wonjung Jeon (7th Grade, Fay School)

The wind gently brushed against her lips, gradually melting into the bitter taste of gasoline and oil on her jawline. The bed she was sleeping on was a pile of deceased robots, drowned in their own bubble of energy: surplus bots to there to stifle the fragile girl’s desperate hopes. The girl stood up, with legs as fragile as the stem of a flower, and stumbled into the dark, searching for things to devour; fresh yet fertile soil with the hint of plants. The world she was breathing in was long in the future in the year 8036, as the sole flicker of humanity in the world, after mankind’s greed spilled blood gurgling over Earth, leaving only robots. 

After crawling over the smoothed stones just far enough to quickly brush past the electronics without alerting them of her presence, the girl grasped a handful of rocks, gently picked out dirt, and shoved them into her mouth, just before a small boy snatched at her hand; a boy so small and skinny, yet clearly a human. A human. There was another human aside from her. The little boy looked at her with eyes that pierced right through her, emerald green with eyelashes hanging down from his eyelids like necklaces. He was truly mesmerizing with clear skin and features like a statue of someone revered by humanity in a past age, but all that mattered was that he was a human. She had to know more. 

Curiosity overwhelmed her and she opened her lips to mumble a few words to the boy. “Where did you come from?” Her voice squeezed out like a croak, hoarse with lack of use and dripping with intense vibrations. The girl wanted to ask more, to know more, but fear was faster to strike. The boy said nothing, yet his lips were moving just the slightest, hesitating to let out a sound or not. The girl could tell. He was afraid. Aware of this, she flashed a quick smile, but her eyes were overflowing with the excitement of finding another life. The boy looked away, mumbled under his breath, and finally spoke; yet it was not a language that humanity had practiced through its time in history. That is how the girl realized; life had built a whole new colony.

The boy gradually moved away with fast paced-steps, and soon dissolved into the whispering darkness of the desert. Then the boy’s footsteps finally glided through a tunnel that echoed within the emptiness with the swollen hopes of an echo chamber. The boy, unaware of the shadow lurking behind him, exited the tunnel and swiftly melted into the crowd of people approximately 30 feet underground. This was new. This was something outside the boundaries of the girl’s imagination. There was a whole tribe of mankind sharing the same language and culture. Now she knew; she was not the only one who had to suffer all this time. The girl could clearly see; they were no different than the creatures marked through history. They had a leader, and a whole intertwined web of rankings. Once their eyes met hers, their expressions flashed with a greed that mirrored her own. What the girl failed to recognize was that she was not welcomed in this new realm of greed and hate.

After a girl suddenly emerged in their territory, the tribe exchanged gazes and all agreed upon the fact that the newcomer was a threat to their economic stability. She was a grenade that carried the infections of the upper-world, a creature that would steal their resources, a species that carried different unknown cultures, like a pebble thrown into the quiet of a lake. When Columbus arrived in America and demolished the lifestyle of the indigenous people on their land, and when he claimed what was theirs as his; what started as a little change making tiny ripples in the current of the lake, soon spread out to the ocean affecting everything else while the pebble remained unchanged. In their eyes, the girl was nothing but an animal, filthy and trembling with jealousy over the things they had worked so hard to build, come to make her claim as leader.

The men slowly grasped their polished rocks picked up from the ground; grey and dull with chunks of timber, soon made vibrant with red and brown.