Writing Prompt: In a future time your grave is robbed. Who is the theif? How do they see the “treasure” of your grave as salvation? How do they find it cursed? What is one thing in the grave that they do not dare disturb?
(a grave need not be a physical thing and treasure could be gold or information or anything rare) #writing#writingprompt
@futurebird
reminds me of a bad 1980s novel in which paleoanthropologists, while investigating Clovis graves and the mystery of the end-Pleistocene extinction, find some intact dried preserved meat from the pleistocene. They reserve most of it for analysis, but can't resist eating some of it. Turns out it contains a horrible virus that turns every infected person into murderous super-predator, as would be required by Paul Martin's absurdly fast "Blitzkrieg" idea.
@futurebird The plague kept spreading. It had even reached the outposts on Europa and Charon. Desperate, the archaeobiologists tore open the burying ground of a microbiologist rumoured to have wind of something that killed all pathogens. His final notes hinted at success, but he had insisted his research be buried with him, fearing it would be misused. They pried open the coffin, to find his hand clutching the tool to create his cure, and they wept when they saw it. It was a single, unlit match.
@futurebird Difficult for me to respond, because I want a sky burial. I suppose someone might find a beneficial compound or microorganism in vulture poop, but to link it with me you'd have to imagine that the nourishment I provided was somehow the thin thread that kept a species from extinction. (Which is a lovely thought, now I come to have it.)