PROMPT: Humans are not native to earth. After aliens defeated the human race, they banished captives to earth stripped of modern technology. Over time history became legend and legend forgotten. That is until in a mountain cave a mural drawing is found and an ancient metal object unlike ever seen before
Jack was someone I took with an ever-increasing grain of salt; he’d been one of the smartest of the group of us at B.U., but as the rest of the group worked their way into STEM fields he went down the Humanities hole, coming away with a degree in Anthropology and then hieing himself off to Arizona State, of all places, to pursue his doctorate.
Of the rest of the little crowd we’d formed that first year of college, most of us ended up in computers; it was just... what happened to STEM students in that time and place; whatever you started off studying, the nineties’ computer industry just sucked you right in and made you a programmer.
I ended up in Interface Design, which may have contributed to the barely-concealed distain I felt for Jack and his line of work: Interface Design people are relatively low on the techno-totem-pole, being one of those disciplines where you’re either wizardly good at it or you’re a Fine Arts major with a license to talk a lot of bullshit.
Maybe I flatter myself by thinking I belong in the wizardly-good category, but at least I wasn’t an Anthropologist.
Then Jack ended up on the front page of every magazine and website over the course of a couple of summer months a couple of years ago; I’m sure you remember the stories, a cave complex in central Siberia where aeon-spanning paintings far older than the ones at Chauvet painted a vivid picture of early human life.
Jack’s team was the group responsible for the find, and he had one of those moments that every science kid fantasizes about: Outsider with a wacky idea is vindicated by spectacular public evidence, and has the opportunity to rewrite the textbooks, liberally sprinkling a latinized version of his name over the discipline.
I had just published my second book, and it was being hailed as groundbreaking by the small number of people who knew enough about my discipline to care -- a small number of people which did not include the majority of actual professional Interface people. It’s disheartening to realize that most of the working professionals in your field don’t know enough about the theory of it to follow you; the royalty checks reflected that.
So it was with a certain sigh that I tool Jack’s call, stepping out of the movie theater and away from a date. His little station outside Yakutsk was, what, 14 hours ahead of me? So it’d be, like, noon there.
“Teddy,” said Jack from the other side of the world, “Teddy, can you hear me?”
His voice was heavily artifacted, and there was a noticeable lag in the line; probably a satellite somewhere in the connection.
“Yeah, I hear you, what’s up buddy?” Undergraduate speech patterns falling neatly into place. “I’m on a date.”
“Sorry.” Jack didn’t sound contrite, he sounded gleeful. Maybe a little more gleeful than just pulling a friend out of a date would account for. “Listen, I just sent you some pictures, can you take a look at them? I’ll hold on, I don’t know if redial will get you back connected to me, it took me a while to get this connection through.”
“Sure, one sec.” I closed the phone app on my phone and pulled up email; there was one from Jack, received about twenty minutes ago. Two photos; one of them showed a very beat-up looking computer touch screen displaying a -- well, it looked like a dial of some sort, for the entry of numbers, or a sequence of some sort. Twelve nodal points arranged in a circle, like a clock, one in the center.
I’d seen that before; I’d drawn it, in fact. It looked like an instantiation of one of the touch-screen unlock mechanisms from my first book, glowing back at me in green and red.
The next picture was a set of squiggles that looked like some of Jack’s cave paintings. All very similar, different shades of paint, overlaying each other; a sort of lopsided, unfinished star-shape. A couple of the oldest had a circle around the star-shaped squiggle, and...
Twelve dots, marking points around the circumference, intersecting with points of the star. I began to try to put them together in my head, to make a story of the two photos and Jack having sent them to me, and I came up with something so literally unbelievable that I sat down, right there in the hallway of the movie theater.
I flipped the phone-call-in-progress back up to ‘active.’
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“I’m not,” said Jack, sounding gleefully tinny down the other side of the dented and misshapen digital tube carrying his voice to mine. “We cleared a rock fall from an area that seemed to be of some importance, and found... well, we found panels, something nobody recognized but clearly... you know, made.
“So this morning -- about twenty-four hours after we uncovered those panels -- this little patch of wall, what looked like smooth quartz, lit up, with the pattern you see, right next to...”
“Right next to where someone spent a long time making sure the combination didn’t get forgotten.”
“Yeah buddy.” Jack was reverting to undergrad too. “So what do you think, should I try and sign in? Or should I wait for the experts?”
“I... I think you’re as expert as we get, Jack,” I said. “I mean...”
“I meant you,” he interrupted. “I need someone who understands this stuff, the, uh...” There was some mumbling as he took his mouth away from the phone. “‘Universal symbolism that arises from the limits of what a computer can do intersecting with what a person can understand...’” I recognized the bones of a quote from my book.
“Yeah,” I said, “Hell yeah, of course I’ll...”
“Great,” said Jack. “There’s a flight out of SFO tomorrow at noon, stopovers in Shanghai and Harbin, I’ll see you in a couple of days.”
“Yeah,” I said, “Thanks, I’ll be there as fast...”
The line went dead, and my brain started making the downshift from ancient aliens to how to explain this to my date.
Jack was someone I took with an ever-increasing grain of salt; he’d been one of the smartest of the group of us at B.U., but as the rest of the group worked their way into STEM fields he went down the Humanities hole, coming away with a degree in Anthropology and then hieing himself off to Arizona State, of all places, to pursue his doctorate.
Of the rest of the little crowd we’d formed that first year of college, most of us ended up in computers; it was just... what happened to STEM students in that time and place; whatever you started off studying, the nineties’ computer industry just sucked you right in and made you a programmer.
I ended up in Interface Design, which may have contributed to the barely-concealed distain I felt for Jack and his line of work: Interface Design people are relatively low on the techno-totem-pole, being one of those disciplines where you’re either wizardly good at it or you’re a Fine Arts major with a license to talk a lot of bullshit.
Maybe I flatter myself by thinking I belong in the wizardly-good category, but at least I wasn’t an Anthropologist.
Then Jack ended up on the front page of every magazine and website over the course of a couple of summer months a couple of years ago; I’m sure you remember the stories, a cave complex in central Siberia where aeon-spanning paintings far older than the ones at Chauvet painted a vivid picture of early human life.
Jack’s team was the group responsible for the find, and he had one of those moments that every science kid fantasizes about: Outsider with a wacky idea is vindicated by spectacular public evidence, and has the opportunity to rewrite the textbooks, liberally sprinkling a latinized version of his name over the discipline.
I had just published my second book, and it was being hailed as groundbreaking by the small number of people who knew enough about my discipline to care -- a small number of people which did not include the majority of actual professional Interface people. It’s disheartening to realize that most of the working professionals in your field don’t know enough about the theory of it to follow you; the royalty checks reflected that.
So it was with a certain sigh that I tool Jack’s call, stepping out of the movie theater and away from a date. His little station outside Yakutsk was, what, 14 hours ahead of me? So it’d be, like, noon there.
“Teddy,” said Jack from the other side of the world, “Teddy, can you hear me?”
His voice was heavily artifacted, and there was a noticeable lag in the line; probably a satellite somewhere in the connection.
“Yeah, I hear you, what’s up buddy?” Undergraduate speech patterns falling neatly into place. “I’m on a date.”
“Sorry.” Jack didn’t sound contrite, he sounded gleeful. Maybe a little more gleeful than just pulling a friend out of a date would account for. “Listen, I just sent you some pictures, can you take a look at them? I’ll hold on, I don’t know if redial will get you back connected to me, it took me a while to get this connection through.”
“Sure, one sec.” I closed the phone app on my phone and pulled up email; there was one from Jack, received about twenty minutes ago. Two photos; one of them showed a very beat-up looking computer touch screen displaying a -- well, it looked like a dial of some sort, for the entry of numbers, or a sequence of some sort. Twelve nodal points arranged in a circle, like a clock, one in the center.
I’d seen that before; I’d drawn it, in fact. It looked like an instantiation of one of the touch-screen unlock mechanisms from my first book, glowing back at me in green and red.
The next picture was a set of squiggles that looked like some of Jack’s cave paintings. All very similar, different shades of paint, overlaying each other; a sort of lopsided, unfinished star-shape. A couple of the oldest had a circle around the star-shaped squiggle, and...
Twelve dots, marking points around the circumference, intersecting with points of the star. I began to try to put them together in my head, to make a story of the two photos and Jack having sent them to me, and I came up with something so literally unbelievable that I sat down, right there in the hallway of the movie theater.
I flipped the phone-call-in-progress back up to ‘active.’
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“I’m not,” said Jack, sounding gleefully tinny down the other side of the dented and misshapen digital tube carrying his voice to mine. “We cleared a rock fall from an area that seemed to be of some importance, and found... well, we found panels, something nobody recognized but clearly... you know, made.
“So this morning -- about twenty-four hours after we uncovered those panels -- this little patch of wall, what looked like smooth quartz, lit up, with the pattern you see, right next to...”
“Right next to where someone spent a long time making sure the combination didn’t get forgotten.”
“Yeah buddy.” Jack was reverting to undergrad too. “So what do you think, should I try and sign in? Or should I wait for the experts?”
“I... I think you’re as expert as we get, Jack,” I said. “I mean...”
“I meant you,” he interrupted. “I need someone who understands this stuff, the, uh...” There was some mumbling as he took his mouth away from the phone. “‘Universal symbolism that arises from the limits of what a computer can do intersecting with what a person can understand...’” I recognized the bones of a quote from my book.
“Yeah,” I said, “Hell yeah, of course I’ll...”
“Great,” said Jack. “There’s a flight out of SFO tomorrow at noon, stopovers in Shanghai and Harbin, I’ll see you in a couple of days.”
“Yeah,” I said, “Thanks, I’ll be there as fast...”
The line went dead, and my brain started making the downshift from ancient aliens to how to explain this to my date.
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