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"C'mon you guys. It's somewhere up there near some rocks."
Billy's younger brother, Chet, was huffing and puffing. To be so out of shape at only 9 years old was almost disgraceful.
"Wait, Billy. You're going too fast! Besides, there's rocks everywhere in these woods."
Billy could hardly hear his brother whining as he was so far ahead of him and Chet's friend, Milty.
Deeper and deeper they marched into the tangles of the forest.
The woods were dense with fallen trees and branches and it all looked the same. Billy wasn't sure which way to go. He decided to veer to the left where the sun was less blocked by the thick canopy of the trees and he'd have a better view of things.
"Your brother is a real douchebag, Chet. He invites us out here and doesn't even wait up for us," Milty complained. They were so far behind Billy they could barely track him.
Chet and his friend were two years behind Billy in age, and usually Billy had nothing to do with either of them. Milty wondered why they really had been invited along, and then suddenly it occurred to him that it was only himself and Chet that were carrying the shovels.
Billy had spotted it earlier in the day when he had been hiking with his unleashed dog down a forest trail. Cooter had picked up the fresh scent of a deer and tore off after it into the bushes. Billy heard the heavy hoofs fleeing as the dog chased the deer, and so Billy chased the dog. Eventually the deer outran the dog and easily escaped.
Billy finally caught up with Cooter near some rocks happily panting and satisfied after his adventurous romp, when Billy nearly tripped on the ebony thing protruding from the ground. He wouldn't have seen it unless he had stumbled over it due to its coloration.
He tried to loosen it with his hands, but it was buried too tightly. After securing the leash to his dog, Billy straggled his way back home to get reinforcements, forgetting to leave a marker. In the prior pursuit of the dog he had not paid much attention to where he was and was led into unfamiliar territory.
Now he had returned with a crew. He was approaching an uphill rocky area that looked a little familiar. Yes, he was getting close he thought to himself.
"Hey you guys! I'm up here. Where are you?" Billy screamed.
Shovels in hand, Chet and Milty followed his voice and trudged up to the spot where Billy stood. Rocks all around and piled high in places, they were covered in shadows, brush, fallen trees and branches.
"Okay. Where is this thing?" Chet puffed.
And like before, as Billy searched, he tripped over it again. There, wedged in the ground, was an ebony pyramid of sorts, about three inches high.
"There!" yelled Billy. "Start digging you guys."
Chet and Milty were so fascinated by the object that they forgot that they were the ones doing the labor of excavating and eagerly started digging it up.
Dull clangs were heard as the shovels hit both dirt and object. Within 10 minutes they had exposed a rectangular prism. It had been lying tilted to the earth, and thus the pyramid first discovered was really an exposed corner of the cuboid. Ebony, and somewhat glossy despite the earth still clinging to it, it was striking in appearance. It was about a foot wide, a foot long, and eight inches deep.
It was heavy. Too heavy for Billy alone to lift it, but with Milty's help they could easily hold it in the air.
"Hey. I wonder if we threw it down the hill onto those rocks if we could break it open. Let's throw this thing and see what happens," Chet said.
"Let's take it home," said Billy.
"It doesn't make sense.
"It's like a Rosetta Stone. No, it is a Rosetta Stone, for all the world's languages, "the spokeswoman for the research team asserted. The team was made up of noted scholars from the fields of linguistics, philology, cryptanalysis, and archeology.
Here in this windowless, paneled room, sitting around a huge rectangular table, they had been summoned here in secrecy to share their findings on the contents of the enigmatic prism.
"Well, certainly this could be explained I would think," suggested a senator on the congressional subcommittee suggested. "Couldn't someone just have compiled all the languages and put them on this tablet thing? Certainly it would be time-consuming, but it could be done I imagine."
"You're missing the point, senator."
"And that is?"
"That this tablet has been carbon-dated to over 6,000 years ago. None of these languages even existed before it was made! This tablet pre-dates all of them from ancient to modern day; Sumerian, Etruscan, Ancient Greek, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Avestan, Old Persian, Latin, to name just a few. And there's just one other that we have left to decipher. It probably belongs to some remote culture that we hope to identify soon. The point is that all of them were developed after the creation of this tablet."
Another senator interjected, "How could 37 languages be inscribed on a tablet before those languages ever existed? And one of the lines is modern English. So it had to be made modern day."
"The carbon dating emphatically proves otherwise," the spokeswoman reaffirmed. "There is no doubt about its age.
"And the cuboid itself which contained this tablet, well, it's just structurally genius. How was that thing even constructed?" the spokeswoman offered in both bewilderment and admiration.
"Thirty seven separate lines, in thirty seven different languages, barring as yet the unidentified thirty eighth one, and all of them have been translated to have the same meaning --
"'We are all part of the one.'"
~ Epilogue ~
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| (11 Years Later) |
The space probe Dionysus took a series of pictures of an unidentified spacecraft which entered our solar system passing through the orbit of Uranus. Attempts to contact it proved unsuccessful and it was determined to be unmanned and of alien origin. Back on Earth, the pictures were filtered and magnified. A plate was detected affixed to the exterior of the spacecraft with symbols in bas relief. The unfamiliar symbols were later determined to be an inscription. The inscription matched the unidentified thirty eighth line of the tablet found in the ebony prism.
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