a short story by: Danny Mendlow 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.