“IT’S MOSTLY BURIED BUT looks like a shoe or something. Interesting, though,” Sord mumbled.

“Unfortunately, the dirt around it is pretty packed. Can you hunt around to find something diggable and make sure it won’t cut my hand?”

Sord searched the ground around where they sat. A few seconds later, he came back with an angled wedge of bioplas.

“Thanks,” she said, continuing to scrape around the object. “You know, I’d guess a leather belt but it has an odd shape. Maybe a purse? You don’t see much leather in Prosperity, for obvious reasons. Appears like something created before GDII.”

Sord leaned over to observe. “Look at the threads and manufactured holes. It’s made by hand, for sure, or at least sewn by hand.”

“Why are you shaking your head, Dearie? It’s kind of annoyingly messing up my digging.”

“Not sure,” he replied. “Think I’ve seen threads like that before. I just can’t place it at the moment.”

She was digging harder now. “Perhaps in a store?”

“Maybe.”

“Hey, I can tell you this. If it’s a belt or a shoe, some of the leather appears to be melded into this bioplas. Could have been used in the lab to connect to something else, like a holder of some kind.”

“Nah,” he interrupted. “Gut tells me it’s a shoe, the top of a shoe. But what kind of sh. . .”

He stopped mid-sentence. “God, Daisy. It’s not a shoe, not a regular one, anyway. This is the top of a boot, like a cowboy boot. See those holes there? The two holes on each side? You use those to pull the boot onto your foot and lower leg since the foot must traverse down the boot’s neck to finally push it into place. I’ve seen my dad do that a hundred times.”

Both suddenly gazed at each other, eyes wide open.

“Do you recall what kind of cowboy boots your dad wore?”

Sord fell backward the other side of the bench, his mouth agape. “Could be anyone’s boot,” he thought. “Might not even be a boot at all. But the threads look very familiar. I can see my little hands on them. I can see him wearing these boots. Funny photos of me, a three-year-old kid in diapers wearing his dad’s cowboy boots.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” he whispered.

“Me? I’m not jumping, Sord.”

“No. No. Not you. Me. You see, ever since he died, somewhere inside my head is this thought floating around that nothing was ever found of him. They dug up everything in this place, that’s obvious, but they never found a trace, just the stuff he left in some of those offices we tried to access. Otherwise, no flesh, no bones, no clothing, no blood, and no identifiable DNA. They even had nanobots scouring the place and looking for human signs. Nothing.”

Then the vision hit Daisy. This could be his father’s boot and, perhaps, his father’s foot was inside. The image was too morbid for her to consider further.

“Are you okay to continue investigating, Sord?”

He was silent.

“We can stop here,” she offered. “Maybe we should start back.”

“Nope,” he confirmed, shifting his mind to more important and immediate things. “You’re not getting out of this so easy. I need my dose of Daisy, and I can’t let a bit of old shoe leather get in the way. Priorities are priorities.”

“Indeed, Dearie,” she agreed, kissing him on the forehead.

Suddenly, they were startled by a man’s raspy voice.

“Hey, what are you folks doing down there? Didn’t you see the signs?”

***

Their heads snapped upward, surprised at the sound and concerned they had been caught at committing a minor crime.

“I’ll take it,” Daisy offered. Turning to the man, she waved him over. “Hello, sir. Can you give us some help?”

“He’s a mech,” she thought, noticing the telltale jagged movements of his arms. Despite many years of integrating flesh with metal alloys, the current state of tech could still not perfectly replicate the gait and body movements of a non-augmented human.

“What kind of help?” he asked.

Daisy had learned how to handle strangers by watching her father do it. His job was to onboard stragglers who stumbled upon Durango and determine if they might meet the selection criteria to become citizens. By the time they reached the periphery, many of them were confused and confrontational, and most lacked awareness of Prosperity and its purpose.

Occasionally, she would visit his place of work and see him in action as he defused stragglers’ fears and established trust. One technique of focusing their attention was to ask if they’d be willing to help him achieve some goal or challenge, though the challenge was mostly focused on orienting them to their new surroundings and opportunities.

“I’m Daisy and this is my friend, Sord,” she continued. “His father was working here when the accident happened.”

The man was thirty meters away at the top of the depression, but she could sense she was getting through.

“Really? Never met anyone related. I noticed your digging the last few minutes. Is that why you need my help?”

“Um-hum,” she admitted matter-of-factly.

Sord was silent. He was rarely in trouble. In fact, beyond the racnine incident weeks ago, he couldn’t recall doing anything even slightly on edge.

The man waved. “My name’s Eli. Coming down to help.”

“Well thank you, Eli,” she responded.

“Wow, a full-body mech,” Sord whispered.

Eli sprang across the boulders and broken bioplas like a frog in a pond, arriving in an instant. “Heard that,” he said, winking at Sord. “Absolutely full-body mech. It helped me get this security job, part of which is to keep trespassers out, especially the kind who might not read the signs or obey the obvious hints.”

Eli grinned widely. He was six foot six, in his thirties, and everything about him displayed immense physical capabilities. His arms and legs were an amalgam of muscle, sinew, and machine. Though his hearing had been augmented, they couldn’t tell what else was.

“I can’t believe how fast you got here,” Sord observed.

“Yep. Not that many mechs like me in the Durango area. I’m not originally from here, as you might expect, given that Prosperity’s citizens don’t consider it proper to implement such tech within their bodies. My original home is the old Pacific Northwest, close to where Seattle once was. I lived a few hours north of that by shuttle, in prior times. Of course, shuttles weren’t working at all where I came from. Nothing worked; not well, anyway. But being a mech helped get me out of there in one piece. Luckily, I somehow made it to Evanston where they allowed me to join this wonderful place. God love it, that was the best day of my life.”

Despite his imposing figure and the knowledge that Eli could easily kill them before their brains could even register the act, Daisy was fearless. “How long ago?”

Eli’s face was dark, severely pockmarked and wrinkled from too many years unshielded in the hot sun and exposure to the ever-present methane emissions from the layers of rotting plant and animal matter of the once-lush Pacific Northwest.

“Seven years,” he said. “Seven great years of life. Are you originals here?”

“Yeah,” Sord interjected. “Both of us. Parents or grandparents came here long ago, but Daisy and I were born here.”

“Oh,” he replied, his brown eyes darting along the ground as if he didn’t want to recall what he was about to say next. “I’m sure you’ve heard stories like mine. Tedious, sad stories; some so horrific, you can’t believe they’re true. Yet, you mentioned ‘full-body mech,’ and that’s right. I had only one choice for survival out there, way up in the north. If you didn’t mech in some way, you’d not likely make it long, not if you’re a guy anyway. Even so, many with more advanced capabilities than you see here never got out alive. But that’s neither here nor there, right? Not a second of self-pity. Live in this moment and take advantage of its wonder. What are your names again?”

“Daisy,” she replied.

“And I’m Sord.” His hand was outstretched, shaking slightly.

It’s not that he had never encountered a mech before. He had met a handful during his short life. But he was always concerned when someone stood before him who had the power of instant death over him. It was like facing a person with a loaded weapon on their hip.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, shaking their hands. “I don’t get to see many new people in this job.” Then he laughed. “Most visitors actually read the ‘Don’t Enter’ signs. They generally obey them so don’t technically become visitors. Did you happen to see any on your way in?”

“Kind of,” Daisy smirked. “We weren’t paying much attention, honestly. The chain with the sign was laying on the ground as if it was calling out that it was okay to pass right on through.”

He grinned, nodding. “My fault there. One boring day, I took a little tug at the bolt embedded in the bioplas to see how much pressure she could take. Pulled out in a snap. Something I should repair, I imagine. Now, reverting to the help you need. What were you two digging at back there?”

Daisy held her left hand up. “We didn’t come here to dig, honestly, only to investigate. But then, I happened to put my hand over that little bioplas seat back, and all this dirt and grit stuck to my finger like I glued it on. In fact,” she displayed, “these pebbles are stuck so fiercely on to my ring, I’m not sure I’ll ever get them off.”

He grabbed her hand in the air, frightening Sord at the speed of movement. With his other hand, he quickly plucked off a few of the pebbles. “Hope you don’t mind,” he apologized. “I’ve seen weird things like this a few times before around here. Similar unusual physical manifestations, if you get my drift. Things might suddenly show up as a crazy magnetism defying all explanation. Now, I’ve picked off the bigger pieces, Daisy, which for whatever reason are the hardest to pick off. Good luck in removing the rest. You’ll need to find a way to get that ring off your finger. I’d use soap first, then cooking oil if that doesn’t work. But I’m afraid your ring will always have some grit on it. Once crazy-magnetized, always crazy-magnetized, I’ve discovered. What are we looking at, you two?”

Eli crouched his long frame over the small seatback, his towering body obscuring most of it. They stood silently as he fumbled in the dirt for a second before turning around.

“Seen a lot of leather in my day. Nice, fancy stitching here, like the top of a boot. I used to wear boots, in fact. Lots of stores everywhere up north with no customers, not for many decades, at least. In most cases, the goods in them are as fresh as the day they were made, excepting the food, of course. My boots were not like this, though. Mine were very practical, thick as could be, and I liked them fully water-proofed for traipsing through the muck. These ones are pretty fancy.”

“My dad wore cowboy boots like those. I think that’s what they could be.”

Eli turned with a quizzical look on his face. “And your dad worked here? At this facility?”

“Yes,” Daisy replied. “Sord’s father was working here the day it happened. The day of the accident. They never found him.”

His weathered face paled, and his head shook with uncertainty. “Don’t tell me we’re finding his boot. I don’t see how that could happen. I understood the whole place disappeared, the entire oval and lab, along with the people in it.”

“People?” she responded. “Well, we’re not sure it’s his dad’s boot, but we think it is somebody’s boot. Could you help us dig it out?”

He clicked his tongue. “I’ll assist folks, but no guarantees on what we might find here. I hope you both are mentally prepared. Likely nothing to see, nothing gory anyway, but there could be something. I’ve seen lots of gore in my day and am fairly immune to it.”

Daisy thought she’d state the obvious, as being forthright and fearless was part of her learnings. “I sense no evidence of body parts, Eli, only the top section of what we think is a boot. Problem is, it seems to be partially embedded in the bioplas as if it’s melted there.”

Eli was actively digging. “You know,” he observed, arms moving at great speed, “I wasn’t working at this place when the event happened. Not at this job five years ago. But I do hear things about what was going on then, though nobody apparently has the full story. Pretty rare for there to be secrets of any kind in Prosperity. But that’s what I like about the place. An air of unsolved mystery.”

Daisy was captivated, thinking this might lead to another clue in their quest. “So, do you know something about what physics experiments were happening here?”

“Not much, really. I talk to Lily sometimes. She has more history than I do. For me, this scientific malarkey goes in one ear and out the other. I was never chipped when young, so I lacked instant access to all the knowledge bases I could get my hands on, unlike a few lucky others. As a result, I did mostly manual jobs given my mech augments. It’s what I’m best at and what I like to do. The job is fulfilling, you know, keeping this place and the surroundings safe, except for the few intruders who fail to heed the signs.” He chuckled. “Again, considering the alternative lifestyles outside Prosperity, I’m perfectly happy.”

“Lily?” Daisy asked.

“Yep, but give me a second.”

He drew both arms far downward, bending his entire upper body over the seatback. “Think I might have loosened it.”

“Beyond this Lily person,” Daisy wondered, ‘you also said ‘people’ a minute ago. What people?”

At that moment, he lifted a box-sized chunk of bioplastic into the air, then placed it down gently in the dirt at their feet.

“Would you look at that!” he observed. “Half cowboy boot, I believe, and half bioplas.”

Daisy was exuberant. “That’s interesting, as if the bioplas and leather were intentionally manufactured together. And look, there couldn’t be any bones in here, at least not in the top half that’s showing. Appears to be just the two upper sides of the boot flopping around. Can you reach inside?”

She peered at Sord who seemed catatonic. “Wait. Wait, Eli! Dearie?”

Sord was thinking about the last time he saw cowboy boots, probably even those boots. As citizens of Prosperity, their apartment was necessarily spartan. Dogmatic attention to integrating Stoic principles within their daily lives mitigated most personal desires for differentiated wealth or possessions. Fulfilled by a commitment to self-actualized lives, most people didn’t require such things.

As might be expected, some people were better-abled at certain jobs and activities than others, and in any capitalistic society, their skill sets might have afforded them prestigious positions, income, and conspicuous displays of wealth. But after two Great Debacles in a half century, Earth was now a different place. Prosperity was an experiment intended to focus primarily on species longevity and not repeat the convoluted distortions of inequality and comparative success that humanity had suffered in prior times.

Nonetheless, most citizens retained a few favorite personal objects, as modest as they generally were. For Sord’s father, it was his cowboy boots.

***

Daisy and Eli knew not to be insensitive.

The three stood silently, staring at the light brown leather boot top and taking wonder at the fanciful stitching.

“I wear girl’s biomat boots,” she said. “Nothing fancy like that. Things made in nature tend to feel better, as much as you’d like to think we can manufacture any equivalent product with our biomaterials.”

She peered at Eli who was scratching his head. Both acknowledged with a nod.

“Dad’s,” Sord realized, his head moving in acknowledgement. “Those are my dad’s. I remember wearing them as a kid, thinking how I might be tall like him some day. Six foot two. Dumb luck I got my mom’s height.”

He crouched on his knees to touch it, and tears dropped on the leather.

“Sweetheart,” Daisy whispered, “I can’t imagine. Are you okay?”

Sord wiped his eyes. “Seems like yesterday. That vision remains of what happened and the loss you feel. I felt. But to see his boot. Feels bad, but I know it’s good; good to see something of his. I hope . . .”

“You hope what?” Eli interjected.

“I hope to hell it’s only his boot we have here,” he finished.

Sord jiggled the two sides of the boot top back and forth to make sure nothing long and stiff was within, like lower leg bones.

A rectangular object fell out, covered in dirt and pebbles.

“What’s that?” Eli inquired.

Daisy picked it from the ground and held it in her hand, brushing some of the dirt off. “Name tag,” she observed, “of somebody called Tian Lamb. Looks official.” Rubbing it briskly on her jeans, she took another look. “Here, right here,” she pointed to the top of the tag. “Says ‘Prosperity National Laboratories’ at the top. Tian Lamb, whoever that is. Not sure why this was hiding in the boot. Appears he was the thirty second employee by his badge number.”

Eli reached inside his shirt to extract a similar tag. “I know those tags well. Occasionally, official people come here to hunt around in the dirt and rock, and they still use these tags. I get my paycheck from PNL, but honestly, everything about the job has been virtual. Even in my job interview, nobody physically showed up. I figured the PNL was just a Prosperity government division to pay folks like me, though I’m not aware of any PNL building or active management around here.”

“What folks come by now and then?” Daisy wondered.

“Just folks. Often ones I’ve never seen before. Must be from somewhere outside Durango, like Evanston or Silver City.”

“What do they do here?”

“Pretty much what you two seem to be doing. Digging around in the dirt, taking samples away in glass vials and boxes, and being pretty damn secretive. But they’re nice, as you’d expect in Prosperity.”

“Lamb,” Sord mumbled. “Like Miss Lam, but an ‘b’ at the end?”

Daisy was taxing her mind to put the clues together. “Hmm. Odd coincidence. Eli, you said something earlier about this Lily person. Do you know her last name?”

He scratched at the stubble on his chin. “You mentioned a Miss Lam, Sord. Were you talking about the nice lady at the Chinese food place in the town center?”

Sord grinned. “I’m not sure she was all that friendly to us, Eli, but yeah, that’s the lady we saw with ‘Lam’ on her tag. Didn’t ask her if that was her first or last name, to be sure.”

Eli’s head was shaking. “Yep, same person. Your Miss Lam is my Miss Lily. Lily Lam. On the flip side, it’s close, but not the same name. Lam versus Lamb. Lam-buh.”

Still scratching at the top of the name tag, Daisy piped in, “Did you boys notice how the clip on this tag is obscured by rocks, just like my ring? I can’t remove all the dirt from it, either, but I’ll bet it’s a metal clip. Usually hangs onto some sort of, what do they call them? Oh, a lanyard.”

“Got one here,” Eli stated. “Can I see that?”

He lifted Tian Lamb’s tag into the air. “Indeed, Daisy. Whatever happened to your ring there clearly occurred on this clip. That oddly strong magnetism. My clip is steel, I believe. You said your ring is what?”

Daisy pulled the ring from her pocket. “Titanium-gold alloy. It’s not supposed to be magnetic except at very cold temperatures.”

She held her finger up in the air, signaling the conversation to stop for a moment. “Wait. Wait. You know, this reminds me about old shoes. My mom and dad had some. Sure, there was stitching on the heels and all, but a few pair also had nails. And I remember once, when traveling with my dad, he had to take his belt and shoes off to get past the security booth.”

“Steel shanks,” Eli responded confidently. “Older shoes, especially men’s boots, might not only use nails to attach the sole. They’ll sometimes have steel shanks, basically a short piece of flattish metal to keep the shoe’s shape intact.”

Sord had turned the bioplas-boot object upside down and was brushing dirt from the bottom of it. “I’m guessing that’s why some of this dirt and rock is sticking to the bioplas here. Never seen that happen before, but if there’s a steel shank or nails in the bottom half of this boot that are super-magnetized, then it might explain.”

Daisy also brushed at the blackish dirt and laughed at how it boomeranged back immediately after floating in the air for a second. “I’d postulate that this dirt and pebbles are actually very little dirt, per se. The color is too dark. It must be comprised of iron particles that are naturally in the ground. That, plus the hills and rocks around Durango have that reddish color for a reason. Very rich in iron compounds, so some of those pebbles are attracted as well.”

Eli spoke up, his head surveying the entire area around the depression. “Well, folks, it’s been interesting to go through all this, but I’d better get back to my job. Part of my responsibility is to keep people out. Prevents them from snooping around or getting hurt in this mess they left. So, can you do me a big favor and move along? Not that I’m worried about getting in trouble. It’s just that living in Prosperity, you know, gives you a sense of purpose and value. We understand that means following the rules, so it’s probably best to get following them.”

Daisy grinned at him sheepishly. “Is there any rule about not taking anything away from the site, such as his dad’s boot?”

Eli scratched his chin again and pondered for a moment. “Can’t say they ever told me ‘no’ to anything like that. They just said to keep people from snooping and getting hurt. One could deduce they intended for everything here to stay exactly where it was.”

She was doing her best to plead nicely with him. “But this boot does belong to his family, correct?”

“Sure appears that way,” Eli admitted.

“And I could only imagine how pleased Sord’s mother would be to receive some evidence of her husband’s clothing since everything else he was wearing disappeared into thin air, right?”

Eli laughed. “Oh, Daisy, you are a regular trickster and know just exactly how to bend the rules. But I consider this a minor infraction, so go ahead and take it away. Please, don’t advertise that I told you it was okay. Let’s just agree I asked you politely to leave, and you politely obliged. If you happened to also take the boot with you, then nobody’s going to argue with that. I look at it this way because of this poor guy.”

He pointed at Sord who was staring at the ground. “He lost his dad here, literally. Now he found something belonging to his dad, and that seems to be a sad thing, but also a good thing.”

“Great!” Daisy beamed, holding her hand out to shake his. “We really appreciate your help extracting it from the dirt. Without you being here, we never would have known.”

“No sweat,” he replied as he turned to walk up the incline toward an exit. “Be sure to gather anything else you might have left. I saw some water bottles and the like over at that table, for example.”

“Will do,” Daisy said, “and thanks again.”

Eli quickly bounded the thirty meters to the top of the incline and turned around once more, gracefully saluting them before disappearing into a tunnel.

Daisy turned to Sord who was still staring at the ground. “Sord?”

“It’s nothing, really” he uttered. “A little weird. Five years. You think your brain is over it, you rationalized through it, and all is good. Stoic reality. Things are what they are. The past has passed. Take appropriate actions for the near-term and future. Don’t overthink what could have been. Don’t dwell on negativity. Accept that which you cannot change. Then you get a reminder like this; something that shakes your beliefs.”

“Beliefs?”

“Yeah. Like a belief or hope or one chance in a billion he’s still alive somewhere, perhaps in a different dimension. People just don’t disappear. Whole laboratories don’t just exit the cosmos, right? Look at this place. Whatever was here couldn’t have simply evaporated as if it never existed; as if he never existed.”

Daisy sat next to him. “I understand. I agree. Conservation of energy principle. Something can’t simply disappear. Converted, yes. Moved from matter to energy or vice versa, sure. But no fire, no matter conversion, just gone. Sord?”

She picked up his chin and kissed him on the cheek. “We accomplished our goal today, so dwell on that. We delved deep into the mystery, our quest. And you know what? This entire event was so compelling, it even managed to divert your attention from Daisy and her accoutrements, didn’t it?”

He gave her a wry smile. “Not for a minute, Daisy. My mind may have been occupied for a few seconds, but lizard brain has only gotten more anxious in waiting.”

Daisy hugged him and whispered in his ear. “I do need to get back soon, but we still have time. Let’s locate a suitable alcove on the way back."