I’m Saving That

He had only been on the run for three days and already exhaustion was setting in. Deep, trembling, undeniable exhaustion. And where, after all, did he suppose he was running to? And why?

As he paused, hidden among a cluster of bushes in the woods, he considered whether he was covetous? No. No material advantage could possibly come to him for all his trouble. No material advantage could come to anyone, for that matter. The days in which material items were arbitrarily appraised for their values had long ago passed, like a bad dream imperfectly remembered upon awakening. For the most part, people had whatever they needed, although they didn’t always have everything they wanted. That was the price they paid: needs were given at the price of wants.

That was why he was running. It was a want.

It was not a big want. It wasn’t even a selfish want. But it was something that cut against the grain. A simple desire, the desire to save some piece, however tiny, of a distant past.

He had found the object, which was cradled reverently in his backpack, quite by accident. He was digging up clay along the shore of a stream when he noticed a small, roughly cylindrical object embedded within it. He brought it home, cleaned it off, and tried to imagine what it might be. The more closely he examined it, the more convinced he became that it must be quite old. Ancient, in fact. Which meant that it had to be destroyed. That was the law of the land: Any physical object more than 100 years old had to be destroyed.

Centuries earlier it had been determined by economists and social scientists that antique and ancient objects were responsible for skewing their calculations, calculations by which they were trying to render the global economy as predictable and controllable as humanly possible. Now, several centuries later, they had achieved great success in this area. Not perfect success. There were, after all, the vagaries of Mother Nature herself to contend with. But great success, nonetheless.

This success could not have been achieved in a world in which a single penny, for example, might be valued at millions of dollars for the simple reason that it was old, or that it was in some way unusual or rare. The fact that collectors coveted some thing — some physical object — meant that fifty dollars’ worth of paint and canvas could sell at auction for hundreds of millions. If this happened only rarely, it would not have made much of a ripple in the global economy. But it happened all the time, and each little ripple reinforced the others until waves of economic instability resulted. There were entire organizations devoting resources to the appraisal of objects made out of metal, wood, glass, and glue, objects with no real intrinsic values in and of themselves. Mere artifacts.

In the end, the meaning of value itself was reevaluated. It was not enough for an object to be rare, or even unique. In order to attach value to an object, it had to serve some useful purpose. If it was a purpose for which that object was uniquely suited, its value increased accordingly. Only once an object had passed this test — only once it was determined to be uniquely useful — was its scarcity considered at all.

This led to a radical upheaval, and not everyone was pleased about it. The period of “cleansing” which followed the adoption of the new laws regarding antiques and antiquities resulted, in fact, in one of the last major periods of civil unrest in the history of the world. But eventually this, too, passed. All old coins and old stamps; all works of art, paintings, sculptures, drawings; all books, newspapers, magazines, documents, even manuscripts; all furniture, clothing, tools, utensils; even buildings and monuments; in short, every physical object more than 100 years old was tracked down and destroyed.

This is not to say that all content was lost. In fact, great pains were brought to bear in order to digitize every object before it was destroyed, and the resulting repository of images and 3D models became a global treasure house which was equally available to all people. Replicas could be produced of any of the objects destroyed with the sole proviso that these replicas would, in turn, be destroyed after no more than 100 years.

And now, here, hiding in a clump of bushes, a very small and very ancient artifact was concealed inside a backpack. He still didn’t understand why he was compelled to save this object which he couldn’t even identify. Was it the thrill of the taboo? Was it an inborn iconoclasm? Not likely. He had never run afoul of the law yet in his 43 years. But something called to him, like a voice from the past: “Save me! Let some trace of the past survive.”

His curiosity had been his downfall. In trying to figure out what the object was, he had shown it to a small handful of confidants. And one of them had betrayed his trust. He was now a fugitive, fleeing not only the destruction of this one small piece of the distant past, but his own certain imprisonment. He had violated a law which was defended scrupulously, and he could look forward to growing old and gray in a prison cell, vilified by the infamy which he had already brought upon himself.

He pulled the object from his pack and examined it for the thousandth time, imagining that it might be a part in a great machine, or a symbol of status, or some type of art which had been lost to the ages. It looked like a wide, squat thimble for an extraordinarily fat finger. It was red, made of hard but slightly pliable plastic, had writing on its flat outer surface, was knurled around its edge with a series of small, straight lines, and a spiral had been molded or inscribed upon its inner wall. It looked a little bit like a tiny plastic cup. At the bottom of the cup, on its inside, was a translucent blue plastic disc with a series of numbers printed on it, and a few more numbers molded onto its surface. That was all.

He heard a twig snap. He stood, gun raised, to see what had caused the sound and, as he broke from his cover, a shot rang out. He fell over, dead. The object rolled from his hand.

The officer who had fired the shot strode up to the now lifeless body, bent down, picked up the object which had caused all the fuss, and examined it closely.

“What the hell is Coca-Cola? he said.