silas of trees

OMELAS—In the days following the Festival of Summer in which several people silently turned and left the gates, citizens living in the only city with an Omelas hole reportedly concluded Tuesday that there was no way to fix the situation. “This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said Omelas resident Shevek Anarresti, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of thousands of individuals who reside in a metropolis where a kid is kept forever in a torture pit and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to abruptly leave their homes and livelihoods for an unimaginable future than other developed city-states. “It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that would keep everyone happy aside from the heart-rending immiseration of a child.” At press time, residents of the only economically advanced city in the world with a child-pain-based utilitarian "one weird trick to utopia" were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”