Gold Rush

A heart-shaped locket. What an incredible piece of trash. I kick it off my way and continue my search. My search for the core. It has been thirteen months and nobody has found it yet. Layer after layer, we hit another dead end every day. We are tired, hungry, injured even. People are hitting rock bottom, and yet, no one has come close to finding the gold mine. Yes, a dragon-protected kind of treasure cave full of gold. Or was it a literal sea of gold? Maybe it comes in grains? rocks? I’m not sure.

Anyway, this gold rush is the best apocalypse we could have asked for. After a massive earthquake shook the very core of this planet, the director of NASA kind of lost it and turned all the ships around to launch a rocket to the center of the earth. Absolutely nothing and nobody survived the trip, but a piece of the Earthship miraculously made it back to the ground, generously covered in gold dust. 24K gold apparently. After much careful study from the scholars of Reddit, a post went viral with a new theory that the center of the earth is no longer made of nickel-iron lava. It is made of gold.

Everyone lost their minds and sold everything and anything to buy excavators, bulldozers, power shovels, and all sorts of earth-digging machines. We all started to dig holes in our backyard until we eventually ran out of excavation areas and tore down our entire houses, our neighbors’, the school grounds, every Target in the area, and all those useless corporate buildings until there was no standing structure in the valley. The rest of the world eventually followed the madness and turned upside down. The market crashed, money is used as toilet paper now, and cryptocurrency became nothing more than forgotten blockchains. About a year in, we now live in a new era of minimalism and nomadism living in tents and trailers, moving in bikes and motorized diggers, living off of food trucks, and trading excavating tools for any type of supplies. The entire world is after the core for the long run until one lucky fella finds that solid, inner core of gold.

A big group of us gold diggers has been on the lead for quite some time over here. We fought, we conquered, and we settled in these grounds by the desert, near a new hot spot of the core. I only ended up with this crew because I impersonated a miner back in the day, and I was guaranteed I would escalate to some sort of platinum level on a pyramid scheme if I worked for them. I mostly get away with not being the real deal by loosening some dirt here and there and dislodging rocks, and I recently snatched a metal detector to avoid more heavy lifting. So here I am working day and night, sorting through the sand, finding only car parts, soda cans, bobby pins, and the now unlucky pennies.

And here I am today. Walking in circles, pretending to care and tired of the same old same old. Until my metal detector gets completely pulled to the ground by a shiny, pretty object. This must be it. I take a look and I frown. The heart-shaped locket again. In disappointment, I kick the locket off like I did the last time, but the chain gets pulled back to its spot. I kick it again but the sand hauls the chain again and again then starts to bury the locket down the sand. Jackpot. I call out the guys and we start to dig with our bare hands out of excitement. We bring the heavy machinery and start to excavate deeper and deeper, and suddenly a strange force swallows the bulldozer, and we all go down. Our machines start to spin around, getting pulled down the layers of the earth, getting swallowed into some sort of rabbit hole, while crushing noises get closer behind us. I am scared to death but I quickly adjust my gear in an effort to not get buried or killed. I lose track of the rest of the crew and somewhere in this black hole I catch a glimpse of light: golden light. I keep holding on to my rope hoping my feet will touch the ground anytime now. Not seeing the end of it, I let go of the rope and make a jump for it. I get swallowed by this beast of a mouth and immediately get spit out.

My body gets thrown out like a piece of garbage, but I get up to face the treasure cave that must be glowing behind me. I turn around and my eyes could not believe what I was seeing. It was a big pile of lustrous, magnetic...trash. Waste all around. Being spit in and out by a nickel-iron golden sun. Not a hint of 24K gold. Not even diamonds. Just a giant hunk of junk. I catch the heart-shaped locket falling right on top of the mountain of rubbish. Cherry on top. Well then, anybody got some spare change?