Extremely Dense Black Monolith Found at World Trade Center Site

By 2024, the diggers had forgotten why they were digging. The diggers were the last workers with houses and legally enforceable pensions, negotiated in the time before President Palin, so they never stopped digging. Otherwise they’d be trash-eaters like everyone else. The diggers knew about the pictures on the Internet of two tall buildings at the foot of Manhattan that had supposedly stood in the pit. Sometimes the diggers would argue about these pictures.

“Those are Daniel Libeskind’s assistant’s original plans for Magical Commerce Sky Towers that were rejected,” one digger would say. “What a joke! Look how tall they are-they are like many, many houses, stacked atop each other!”

“No, that’s a conceptual drawing by Fumihiko Maki,” another digger would say, “and they were two kilometers high and people used to go on the Internet and laugh about it.”

As tall as these imaginary buildings seemed to be from the fake photographs, the hole was even deeper. Down and down: beneath the many layers of lost keys, beneath the slave bones, beneath the aboriginal bones, beneath the immense schooner which was later found to have been scuttled in 1752 to form a reef, down even beneath the bones of some cat that must have stood 15 hands tall, one day a digger found his digging exoskeleton had become fastened to the spot.

Others came and dug down around, their spotlights picking the rooted digger in the deep murk of the hole where the sun barely penetrated. When they were done, careful all the while not to also became magnetically attached, they found that the trapped digger’s frame stood atop a standing rectangle. It was so black that it ate the light.

They got the anti-magnet machines out and pulled it up; it made a little subsonic pop, like a tooth coming loose.

A few of the old scientists came to look at it for a while. They pushed their shopping carts over. All the workers stood back because of the stench.

“Greable murghle dlah,” raved the scientists.

Eventually the police tased the scientists off. Sammy, one of the diggers, put the monolith on his truck, and, driving slowly between the armed guards of the Green Zone Highway, took it back to his two-bedroom palace in the Walled City of Great Neck. Sammy turned the monolith on its side and put his TV on it.