The Great Wall’s Ruins

A flash fiction piece I wrote after the idea popped into my head.

The tour guide stepped over a chunk of rubble, leading her group along the well-worn path under the glaring sun. She stopped in front of the wall they had been walking beside and turned around to address the group of 14 tourists as she adjusted her hat to protect her neck from the sun’s harsh beatings.

“The wall was completed several hundred years ago, but the effort proved futile. In the end, it didn’t quite fulfill its purpose and was doomed to be a relic of a lost age.”

A younger boy with a squeaky voice spoke up. “Is it true that you can see the wall from space?”

She gritted her teeth before answering, with only the slightest bulge of her cheek muscle betraying her annoyance at his question. “No, that’s a silly question. The wall is too narrow to be seen from space.” Her voice returned to a more neutral tone as she addressed the entire group again. “And now if you tune your holo-lenses to channel A07, you can see what the wall would have looked like when it was in was still in one piece.”

Her feet ground the gravel as she spun to point to the wall. The squeaky-voiced boy grimaced as he heard the noise of the rocks rubbing against each other, and the tour guide took notice.

After tuning their holo-lenses to the correct channel, the tourists were presented with an overlay of what the wall looked like before time and the elements had largely worn it down.

Their holo-lenses looked like normal glasses, but they had microscopic LED arrays built into the lenses themselves. Using a multitude of sensors built into the lenses as well as small points installed throughout the wall, their glasses could create the illusion of the wall right on front of them as if they were standing before the original wall in a perfectly recreated 3D model.

The small gap in the wall they had stopped in front of was now filled in and towering over them. Animated soldiers stood vigilant in the nearby watchtower that was now restored. The tourists, and more so the kids, looked around with open mouths, tapping each other on the shoulder and pointing to what they currently found interesting. The tour guide wasn’t so interested in looking at it, though.

She had seen it many times before. Instead of observing the wall like the rest of them, she took the moment to close her eyes and imagines the comfortable research job she should have had before moving here with her at-the-time boyfriend and getting a job answering the questions of stupid, dribbling brats. She despised children and constantly regretted not doing something else with her life.

A now too familiar squeaky voice wormed its way into her temporary solitude. “Was this wall built the same time as the one in China?” he enquired.

She paused a moment before withdrawing from her limited peace and opened her eyes.  Making a point of spinning around again and grinding the gravel just to see him squirm, she looked down at him before snapping at him another time.

“No. Like I said, this wall was only built a few hundred years ago. The Great Wall of China was finished over 700 years ago.” She turned to face the gap in the wall, using the chance to roll her eyes at his stupid question while twisting the ground beneath her. She started walking towards the wall and spoke over her shoulder to the group. “Now if you’ll follow me, we will go to the northern side of the wall, where the former United States of America was before it spiraled into ruin after too many bad decisions were made with long-lasting repercussions. Make sure you turn off your holo-lenses; a lot of people get disorientated by walking through a ‘wall.’”