Deity

Chief Petty Officer Beckett rocked forward on his knees for a closer look.

Reaching down into the freshly dug pit, the expeditionary archaeologist carefully scraped away the last cake of earth barnacled to the object. The high sun immediately locked onto the silver cylinder, bouncing a harsh metallic light onto his weathered face like a satellite. He squinted with sweaty joy at discovery.

The cup was an unusual find this deep in the Desert Valley Basin, he marveled. It was identical to the ceremonial drinking vessels he had helped unearth in the countless Urban Sectors years before. Reaching into the duffel bag at this side, he produced a sleek gun-like device, aimed it into the hole, and pulled the trigger. The spectrometer beeped its success, and he strained to read its tiny screen. “Three hundred seventy years,” he nodded. Early Twenty-First Century. Reaching back into his bag, he withdrew a small camera and photographed the find where it lay.

Snapping on a pair of surgical gloves, Beckett knew exactly what he would find next. He carefully pried the chalice from its dusty grave and held it close to his face. Rotating it around, he saw the barely perceptible image of a woman’s face. She smiled peacefully and wore a three-pointed crown.

Lieutenant Taylor, his superior officer, approached over the dusty terrain, “Looks like you have something,” he praised.

“Indeed, a ceremonial cup with deity markings,” Beckett answered. “Not in the best condition, but it’s remarkable that her followers were even out here.”

“Remember, Beckett, they had a robust transportation network,” the man reasoned, “one of the major arteries for combustion vehicles was very close by. Nearly 300,000 of them passed through this desert every day.” The man returned to his own excavation site twenty paces away.

Beckett rubbed his thumb over the faded illustration on the cup. The woman’s hair was long and wavy, and she pointed to her crown with upraised, claw-like hands. He knew her religious following originated in the Seacoast Sector (once called the Pacific Northwest), but was she amphibious?

He was first assigned to the Seacoast Sector in the Dead Frontier as a junior enlisted man many solar cycles ago. There, the Corps of Discovery teams would find her image everywhere: on shards of window glass, etched in wood, and painted on surfaces within the ruins of the old temples. He heard stories of other archaeologists finding tattered remains of ceremonial vestments (always green) worn by the temple priests and priestesses.

Many of the temples were near one another, he recalled disapprovingly. Beckett was not a religious man. He wondered just how productive a society could be if it worshipped in sanctuaries all day. Her image was everywhere. Often, the teams would find her depicted on broken illuminated signs with faded letters: DRIVE THRU.

The temple interiors were almost laboratory-like. Many contained well-preserved metallic cooking utensils and contraptions to provide food and drink to the masses of worshippers. Some of the machines were quite odd, with metal tubes, baskets, urns, and nozzles twisting every which way. Residue tests revealed that exotic leaves and beans (non-native to the area) were dried, burned, and ground up as part of the ceremony. Nearby, the team typically found packets of sweet granules, and, occasionally, steel pitchers containing petrified animal milk.

Beckett focused on the side of the chalice and saw another marking that had puzzled him since he was a young recruit. Next to the goddess’s image, in tiny contrast, were the old Roman letters ™. There were many theories, but no one had yet solved the riddle of why the letters appeared consistently. He believed it to be an abbreviation of her status, or an exhortation to pray when one’s eyes fell upon her image.

The ™ did not have anything to do with her actual name—he was sure of that. As a young man, in fact, he was part of the Corps of Discovery unit that lucked upon the deity’s familiar face paired together with her name for the very first time.

It was such BIG news back home, and it earned him his first promotion to Petty Officer Third Class! Beckett remembered it like yesterday. He was immensely homesick, having been away from his family for the first time. (The journey alone took eight solar cycles, and the days were filled with historical lessons on the Dead Frontier.) The courses did nothing to prepare him for the suffocating cement gray skies of the Seacoast Sector. The steady beat of rain quickly drowned his youthful enthusiasm, and he began to dread the mossy smell of this lost civilization.

Back then the young researcher was digging around the edges of a newly mapped temple in the Metropole Quadrant. Suddenly the soggy, brown earth yielded a pile of brightly hued rectangular cards, each about the size of a man’s hand. He tensed up excitedly and let out a childlike yelp as he furiously dug out the trove. More cards appeared -- stacks and stacks -- perfectly preserved and untouched for hundreds of years.

Unlike the monochromatic (always green) temple relics he had uncovered before, these flexible plastic cards were a riot of colors and patterns! Illustrations! Photographs! Paintings! The images varied (many with images of drinking vessels) but all of them included the deity’s face, with her wry smile, long hair, and crown.

Did the priests distribute the cards as gifts to worshippers? Perhaps they were exchanged among congregants on designated holidays. He shuffled methodically through the pile and read their long-lost messages:

“Happy Birthday!”

“Thank You!”

“My Treat!”

“Great Work!”

A magnetic strip and a Roman numeral code were on the back of each card. Beckett then noticed a unique word next to the goddess’s image on the cards. Their creator had dramatically stretched out the ultra-black, capitalized letters to emphasize her stature. At last, he had uncovered the deity’s sacred name:

S T A R B U C K S ™

“Lieutenant!” he cried, “The goddess they worshipped was called Starbucks!”