#also thinking about how Anne Leckie was So Right in her Imperial Radch verse

[elexuscal]

Imagine, if in two thousand years, everyone was obsessed with Omelas.

Alright, not everyone obviously. But you'd be hard pressed to find someone who didn't at least know its name. You were absolutely told the story as a child, might even have watched a movie or played a game about plucky kids rescuing the child of Omelas from their cell and taking down the city's corrupt priesthood. You definitely have vague memories of browsing the holo-channels as a kid on a sick day and watching a documentary about how the city fell, analyzing the texts of the historian Le Guin, and attempting to track down its "true" location.

There are whole societies dedicated to that question. Not just people on the Feed Boards, but like, actual archeologists and historians (that's how they describe themselves, at least) who literally head out to various moons and dwarf planets, doing all sort of complicated scans and digging up rock formations and old habitat ruins that they claim, based on ancient texts, to be a prime candidate for where Omelas was located.

It goes deeper than that, you realise later, if you dig deeper. There are entire belief systems based on Omelas. Many claim that Omelians were not humans at all, but actually advanced aliens or even gods, who granted humanity the first technology for space flight. There are political parties, some quite popular-- and powerful-- who claim descent from the Omelians, and who argue that descent makes them rightfully superior to all other races. These people rarely, if ever, bring up how the moral question at the story's heart about the Omelian's corruption. Omelians were wise and just and powerful, obviously, and that's why they should be in charge now.

This is what happened to Plato's story of Atlantis.