Not a single lilypad held the key to the future. I turned them all over like loose bricks on a patio, searching, searching. But there was no sign of the missing piece. 

"God, you're stupid," my supervisor said. 

I glanced up at her from the bank of the riverbed. She stood and glared at me, arms crossed and galoshes splattered with mud. Behind her, three whole search teams fanned out around the pond, metal detectors in hand, wetsuits clinging tight to their muscles, revealing everything, absolutely everything. 

"It wasn't like it was on purpose," I said faintly. 

She shook her head with a click of the tongue, turned away and strode towards the boardwalk. 

I sat silent in the mud, all my excuses waterlogged. 

A moist frog hopped up from the shallows, splattered itself messily into my lap. I jumped, threw out a curse word of shock. 

The frog blinked at me innocently. Its eyes were glass marbles with glitter trapped inside. Metal glinted at the back of its gullet.

"Did you eat the key?" I asked it quietly, madly. "Did you swallow it whole?"

No response, save for blinking. 

They wound up draining the whole pond in search of it. The key. A thin metal rod with prongs attached - one that the scientists had tested, one they had proved beyond a doubt would open up the door to a new world, somewhere free of fear and disease, somewhere perfect and immutable. One that had been given to me to deliver, to hand off to the ruling dictator of the age. 

And I was planning to. I promise, I was really planning to. 

But on my way to his great palace, the pond had been there. Barely thirty feet from the road, cold and green and stagnant-still with mold. So big that you couldn't see the bottom. A little disgusting, as all good things are. 

I had let myself float, right at the edge, just for a minute. It was fear, in the end, that had seized me. The fear that this was the last chance I'd ever have. When we made a new world, there'd be no place for this gross old pond inside it. 

They drained the whole dirty, duckweeded old pond as I sat and watched. 

But they didn’t find the key.  

So they set to scratching open the muddy earth, and then slicing open the animals, and then scraping open the people responsible. Searching. Searching. Still searching. The sounds of searching and suffering rang out, intermingled, like terrible tiny wind chimes. 

I sat silent in the background and waited. I hoped with a wild hope that my frog had hopped away.