A Piece of Metal

The sharp pain pierced his foot, a hard metallic point between the soft grains of the dunes that had been cushioning his steps.

‘Ugh, what the hell?!’ he muttered, kneeling to examine the ground. There was a small metal sting sticking up from the sand. It looked peculiar, not quite like a nail, too large for that, and too upright, not something that was subjected to the drifting sands.

Curious, he began to dig. Deeper and deeper, exposing what turned out to be a pointy rod attached to a metal base. He tried to dig further but the sand was fighting back and there was only so much he could do by hand. He decided to call Janet.

‘Hey, what are you doing right now?’

‘About to eat, why?’

‘I need to show you something. Come to the dunes.’

She got there about twenty minutes later, and he showed her to his findings. ‘Look!’

‘Okay, it is a bit weird, but what do you want from me?’

‘You have employees and equipment! Help me dig.’

‘You want me to pay for digging up some weird fixture you found at the sand dunes? Are you insane? I’m not bringing an excavator for some piece of scrap metal!’

‘I’ll pay for it. Listen, aren’t you curious to know what this is? I don’t understand why something like this is here, under the sand. Maybe it is an archaeological find. Please?’

The next day Janet brought in a small crew, who quickly set up a white table, a selection of snacks and heavy machinery, and the excavation commenced. They moved piles of sand, carefully placing it far away enough so it won’t collapse back in. From the pit there emerged stone architecture, and the antenna turned out to be the lightning rod at the top of an Art Deco building, perfectly preserved.

‘What is this?’ he asked, staring.

Janet looked at him, and then back at the building. ‘I don’t know, but you were right.’

They expanded the operation. Janet went all out, bringing her crew and all the equipment she could get her hands on, paying them overtime just to get as much work on as wide an area as possible. And it paid off. More and more buildings were expertly rescued from the white sands. They had found a city.

Soon enough, the media came by. He suspected Janet had called them. They were already setting up and taking pictures of the city when he arrived. He could hear Janet saying to them casually, ‘Yes, we believe this is Atlantis, maybe Mu. You can see that their style is fairly modern, showing this is a city of an advanced civilisation.’

He had no memory of discussing any of this with her. It was a modern-looking city, sure, but that was all. ‘What is going on?’

‘The media arrived, I was just answering some questions.’

‘Sir! Are you the partner? I was told you were the one who started this whole thing, can we talk to you for a few moments?’

He recognised the reporter from their local station.

‘Um… I...’

‘Sure,’ Janet cut in. ‘Let’s do this!’

Later he could barely recall any of the interview, just that he told how he was walking on the dunes, as he often does, and found the object, and then Janet answered a bunch of questions. He thought she might have said something about ‘the greatest archaeological discovery ever made’.

When he got there that morning the sand was covered with reporters and media personnel. There were crews of producers, camera operators, reporters and phone-carrying influencers. He heard some exalting the operation as a great achievement performed by amateurs, others doubting it as a hoax, some even delving into Janet’s theories of lost cities, alien civilizations and other wild ideas.

Pushing through the crowd he finally got to his friend as she was standing on a bulldozer, looking at the journalistic crowd.

‘Isn’t this amazing?’ She was smiling wildly. ‘Look at them, they all want a piece of the action! We are going to be famous!’

He looked past her, at the excavation. The work was still going and he could see offices through the windows and some lavish apartments.

The police officer was waiting for them when he and Janet drove in the next day. The employees were already there, waiting on their equipment, talking among themselves and looking at the man who stood there with a stern look on his face.

‘Are you the ones in charge?’

‘Yes,’ he answered before Janet could say anything that would aggravate the officer.

‘Do you have a permit for any of this?’

‘Ehm…’

‘What were you thinking? That you could just start digging up cities wherever you liked? Here is a warrant to stop your work. I expect you’ll receive a summons soon enough.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ Janet said later, as they sat in the pub. ‘All of this work, and money, and they just take it!’

It occurred to him that it was mostly his money, but he kept silent. It was kind of dumb on their part, to not think about it and just open up the dunes.

After he woke up, he decided to go back, expecting to find an abandoned site, but at least he could study the city a bit. To his surprise he found machines operating at full speed, excavating more and more.

‘Sorry, sir, this is a closed site.’

‘What is going on here?’

‘This is the government’s business.’

‘I am the one who found it!’

‘Oh,’ the security guard looked at him. ‘Well, sorry, but we have taken over from now on.’

‘You can’t do this!’

‘That’s above my pay grade, now please step away, sir.’

He called Janet as he was leaving. ‘What? Those… Nevermind, I found us a way! We are going to be experts in a panel about the city!’

‘What? No, Janet, I am not comfortable with this.’

‘This is our discovery, our work. They just come in and steal it! We need to stand up for ourselves, or at least get what we can from it while we can. Please?’

And so he found himself being fitted with a microphone with a broadly smiling host, a somewhat nervous, somewhat confident Janet, and two more ‘experts’ looking rather stern.

‘And… we’re on!’

‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight, we would like to discuss “the city under the sand” as it has been called. For that we have brought our experts…’

He could feel himself sweating through his shirt. His suit, which he hadn’t worn in so many years he was finding it hard to remember, was too hot under the blazing studio lights.

‘So, you are the one who made this incredible discovery?’

He realised the question was directed towards him. ‘Um... yes, I was walking on the dunes, I do that sometimes, quite often really…’ he fumbled.

‘Yes, and then he stepped right on the antenna on top of the skyscraper. And then he called me and we started digging. And what a marvelous discovery. We could have been here with so much more to talk about if the government hadn’t just stepped in and taken over.’

He was left with his mouth half-open as the discussion descended into an argument between Janet, claiming firmly that this was Atlantis itself; another expert, a university physics professor as it turns out, who claimed this was without a doubt an ancient alien city, that came here from another dimension; and the third one, a famous influencer with a large internet following, known for his ‘unique’ takes on current events, who kept insisting that this was a secret government operation, accidentally stumbled upon, and this was in fact a mind control experiment, or an attempt to distract the public from its failings via sensation, before mentioning how his supplements can improve your resilience against such efforts.

The station paid for his taxi home, and he barely managed to take a shower before falling asleep.

He kept traveling to the dunes, to the site. At the start there was a significant crowd, trying to peek in. But as the days went by fewer and fewer showed up, until at the end, after about a week, there were just him and a few locals, who liked to observe it on their walks. He would talk to them at times, they were quite proud of their town’s ‘little discovery’, and hoped it may attract some visitors once they had finished digging it out. Not too many though, ‘Wouldn’t want this to become one of them tourist resort towns, eh?’

He usually smiled and nodded. He wanted to go in there, to see what they found. Were there streets? Roads? Smaller buildings in a different neighbourhood? Some suburbs maybe? He tried sneaking in a few times, but got caught. The guards had sympathy for him and let him go. He heard them saying once, ‘A bit of a crazy guy, that one. Stepped on a piece of metal, and started all this. Can’t let it go now. Sad, really.’

He sat down on the dunes, overlooking the hole of the excavation site, and felt a sharp pain, like a needle sticking up. He moved a bit to the right and sat back down.