The Pandora

Curiosity is arguably one of the first traits we human beings ever develop. A baby's wide eyed wonder at the world. An explorer's burning need to see with their own eyes. The strange, stupid little instinct that makes us go turn on the porch light to see what made that noise in the darkness.

Ignorance is bliss. A phrase that has never tasted so bitter.

In Greek mythology, this is illustrated by the myth of Pandora. Pandora was a woman made with insatiable curiosity. She was given a container, a box or a jar in most stories, which she was told to never open.

Spoiler alert: she opened it.

And with that, all the plagues of humanity were released to the world. Hunger, sickness, calamity, storms, crime, greed, every terrible thing that can happen to a person, a people, a world...all of it came pouring out.

Pandora managed to snap the cover back onto her box before the last thing within escaped: hope. It made a very nice story, warning those who heard it about heeding what we were told by those wiser than us. And at the same time, to never allow hope to escape our grasp.

Hope, in my time, is a very elusive creature.

The thing is, as the world changes so do the plagues that scourge humanity. Some dangers just don't threaten people the same way they once did. Or not enough to satisfy whoever decided it was time for Pandora's box to be baited again.

They call him Haunt. He's our version of the boogieman.

Haunt couldn't persuade the gods, or whoever decided all of these awful things needed to happen to us, to make another Pandora's box. Enough was enough they said. Hunger still gnawed at enough of the world. Sickness was a living thing, growing to prey on the population like a predator learned to hunt new prey. What human misery existed in the world was made all the more blatant by the fact that there were some who did not suffer as much as others.

Haunt wasn't satisfied.

Semel Utly became a hero when he pulled two curious children away from opening a box that had been left on the playground. No one understood what he was saying or why he was so vehement that no one should open it. He just said, again and again, that death was inside waiting for whoever opened it.

Officer Kacey Trey is remembered, not fondly, to this day as being the Second Pandora. He was doing his job. He doesn't deserve how he is spoken of, I think. He had to inspect the box that Utly claimed was so dangerous. That included its contents, because it felt suspiciously heavy. What emerged didn't look like it should weigh much. It was a pale woman with a dark smile and empty eyes. She let out a single breath, almost like relief.

And then she began to scream and the world shook.

The second Box brought back people's ability to see and interact with the departed spirits. And their ability to interact with us. That wasn't so bad at first. Until the first murderer decided the best way to carry on with his hobby was to do it as a ghost. It cascaded from there.

The third Box, not even a decade later, brought a disease that was eventually named Lycanthropy for the savage mood swings and physical changes it brought to its victim.

The fourth Box, eighteen years after that, dropped the western portion of the Americas into the sea, which raised the sea level world wide and flooded out a number of islands. After the fourth Box literally reshaped the world, the Utly was made an official part of every community that was still standing. Necromancy and people going rabid on a cycle had taken its's toll on the way people lived. Someone with fine instincts or a sense for danger who could discern if something was a Box.

A Box is not handled by any human. It how it contains what is inside, no one knows. It always appears without anyone seeing it being brought by someone. And if it vanishes after being ignored for three days, then you can be certain it was a Box.

Haunt had to get sneaky after the fourth Box. Humanity learned slowly. But they did learn.

The fifth Box, opened thirty two years after the previous one, looked like a guitar case that had been left on a teenage boy's doorstep on his birthday. He let out the Stills. A disease that paralyzed a muscle in the victim's body. Any random muscle large or small, skeletal, smooth or cardiac.

It took more than fifty years for someone to open the sixth Box and release aberrations into the world. Creatures like goblins, imps, and oozes, fairies and gnolls.

That wasn't the worst thing however. We could have survived not being the only sentient beings in the world anymore. No, what really tore down all borders and threw the world into chaos was one Utly recognizing that a bank vault had been replaced by a Box.

His warnings were heeded. Sure enough, the requisite three days later, the vault was gone. Its contents were left behind just as they had been arrange inside the original vault. But it made people lose faith in their banking systems. Which caused a worldwide crash in all markets.

It's now been eighty four years since then. I come from a long line of Utly's. People who have been able to tell when Haunt has touched something even without knowing that was what they were feeling. The world looks very different than people thought it would in the 23rd Century. There is no high tech, science fiction wonder. We don't travel the stars and regrow limbs.

We hunt beside centaurs, werewolves and other partially transformed people who were affected by Lycan and developed some animal features. We distill salt from seawater and line our homes with it to keep away the ghosts as a caution against unfriendly spirits. We hardly trust anyone.

I'm an Utly, and I remember seeing my first Box when I was just four years old.

It looked like a canned drink. But I couldn't look at it without crying. Neither could any of the other Utly's my age, brought all together as a group to begin our training early. There was never too much preparation for an Utly. If we missed detecting the Seventh Box, it would be on our heads for completing Haunt's collection.

"The world depends on your instincts and your ability to master yourself." Was what we, the brand new four year old Utly's were told after they had us say goodbye to our parents. We'd get to see them once a year, no more. The rest of the time was dedicated to training. How to detect Boxes. What to do when we found them. How to prevent them from enticing someone to open them.

I resented their blissful ignorance. They came with wide eyes and admired my sharp uniform, the dogs they trained to run with us. My face which had never been taut with hunger.

That my siblings got to grow up with our parents. And experience their love, not just their worry that I wasn't living up to my potential as an Utly. That my parents had given me up without a fight.

Yet, because they had...I had never gone a day of my life hungry, cold, or alone.

That burning bittersweet tangle of feelings kept me locked in a precarious balance. One one side was me. And on the other: a small, deceptively pretty, girlish locket that I should hate and fear with every fibre of my being.

I found it when I was six years old. It had barely registered as Box to me. It was just a small, pretty thing that I wanted to believe wasnt harmful. So I kept it hidden in my fist until I got it back into my room and stuffed it into my salt jar before we practiced banishing ghosts in the lengthening shadows of evening. It was my little secret tho this day.

I had observed, thanks to this, that Boxes only vanished if they were ignored. I had seen the heart shaped locket almost constantly on my mind. My single point of defiance from the strict, utilitarian regime I grew up in. I felt the need to open it, in spite of everything that I had been taught and could see in our history.

But buried underneath that long and well learned fear was a thought...

Haunt could not make a Box hold more than one thing. And if he was following the original myth of Pandora, which all our academics, theologists and strategists agreed that he was and would continue to do so. He had to put something good in one of them every now and then if he was to stay true to the myth. It made perfect sense to me to have Haunt place something good in our reach now, after close to two hundred years of him teaching us to be afraid.

Pandora the First held onto hope in her legend. She kept it from fluttering away into a world made too harsh to let it survive by all she had ignorantly released into it.

This part of the story seemed to be easily forgotten.

So, I wrapped the silver chain around my fingers, feeling the ridges of the tiny, intricate necklace press against the callouses of my palm. And I held on.

You might be another destruction. And you might make my name be forgotten and cursed as Pandora the Eighth.

Or you might be the hope we need to take this broken, cracked world... and start putting it back together again.