Name: Drake H. Damerau

Background, assignment and act of volunteering:

I work for the Department of Defense as a Metallurgist and failure analyst. I have a PhD from MIT and a PhD from the Colorado School of Mines. Having high security clearance comes with its rewards, as well as its liabilities. I was told I volunteered to go MEB.

Assignment: Classified: Above Top Secret

She wouldn't shut up! She just wouldn't shut up! It's been almost nine months since we left the moon base. Other than at our briefing, I had never met Saffron before. She was beautiful. Not the kind of beautiful that you see in those magazines. I mean real beautiful. I thought this would be a great mission, especially since I was the chief science officer and she was only an archeologist. It was only 6 months after they completed the Mars base and they already discovered life on Mars. Sure it was only bacteria, but it was life. Last month they began the excavation of Cydonia. Who would have thought that the face on Mars was a face? And now life?

She insisted on calling me doctor. I'm a very informal kind of guy. In fact, I don't even like people to know I have a PhD and a bowl of alphabet soup after my name. I'm just a regular guy really. I kept telling her that my friends call me "Doc" but Saffron didn't care. She called me Doctor. "It was more appropriate." She wouldn't listen then, now she just won't shut up!

The ship was full of scientists. We had Archeologists, biologists, mineralogists and even geologists. But why me? Why would they want someone that specializes in metals and mechanics? What the hell did they find? The biologists were discussing what type of life they may have found. Everyone on the ship was excited. I don't blame them. Me? I was scared.

As we approached the camp we flew over the face. How could anybody mistake it for anything but a face. It was beautiful! It looked human, but somehow it wasn't. The implications of it took hold and I began to cry. The emotions flooded in like a tidal wave. Fear, panic, awe, excitement, wonderment. Who built it? Why? Was it us? Are we them? Where did they go?

We landed at the new Cydonia camp and shown to our quarters. I was surprised how quickly they assembled it. They must have taken several modules from the Endurance Base and brought them here. Some of the modules were new.

The next day we headed out to the excavation site. It was a small team, only me, Saffron and Sharam. He was one of the scientists that came with us. Nobody knew him and he didn't talk much. The biologists and most of the other scientists stayed at the camp to work on the samples that were brought back. It was a short ride to the excavation site. All around us were giant pyramids. Some were stepped, some had smooth sides. We went to a giant statue carved out of rock about 100 meters from the face. There was no mistaking it, it was the Spynx! The head was different; larger. It looked like a face, but not quite human. It didn't take a scientist to figure out that this place was just like the Giza plateau in Egypt. The implications were earth shattering. Between the statues front legs was a door they excavated. As we proceeded down the corridor, we saw writing on the walls. There were two kinds. Sharam immediately looked at the two writing and began to weep. He shouted, "Look here! This is ancient Hebrew! This is ancient Egyptian!" I asked him what it said. He pointed up at the largest writing and said

"Remember".

Sharam remained in the giant corridor as we continued down the corridor. He was reading and deciphering out loud. To me, it sounded like he was speaking in tongues. As we headed down we could hear people talking, working. We entered a giant hall of sorts. The walls were dimly illuminated. There were no lights, but the room was lighted.

They had a makeshift laboratory set up in the corner. All the equipment I use was there. Most of it was still being set up. One piece of equipment got me excited. It was the newest scanning electron microscope with every option available. I've been asking for one back home but the 2 million dollar price tag was always out of the question. This made the whole trip worthwhile!

In the center of the room was some kind of console. Some of it was lit up and appeared to be working. One corner of it was smashed by a piece of the ceiling that had fallen.

"Fix it!"

What? Fix it? "How am I supposed it fit it if I don't even know what it is?"

"We think this is a library or some kind of repository of knowledge. The console runs this place. You have a staff of technicians ready to help. We've been working on it since we found it but nobody can figure it out."

They had all the pieces laid out on the floor right next to it. There were no wires or gears or anything resembling any machinery or computer I've ever seen. They were just pieces of metal.

None of the pieces have been analyzed or tested because they were waiting for me. I immediately grabbed a small piece off the floor and ran over to the test area. I thought: "how cool is this!? I get to play with the new electron microscope and look at something like this!"

Under the microscope, I could see that the metal was in fact made of several layers. Each layer was less than a micron thick. There was no process I have ever even heard of that could make such thin and perfect layers. There were several layers; a dark layer, a gray layer and a white layer. These layers alternated and were just stacked up the form the piece. I recorded the images and began the processes of running an elemental analysis on it each layer. The dark layer was the first layer I tested. The screen showed that it was pure manganese. The gray layer was pure bismuth. The white layer showed two spikes: Iridium and cobalt. Why? Why would anyone want to make layers of these elements? There is no metallurgical reason to do this. (Or so I thought at the time.)I couldn't tell how much of each element there was in this layer. It seamed to fluctuate. I increased the voltage to see if it would stabilize the readings. That should have worked, but instead it seamed to make the other layers glow and interfere with my readings. My next trick was to widen the beam. Instead of trying to read the single layer, I tried to read several layers at once. The screen showed spikes at bismuth, manganese, iridium and cobalt, but the whole thing started to glow and vibrate. It didn't make sense, but the more I turned up the voltage, the more it glowed.

I thought: "what if I put two pieces in the chamber? What would happen if I had more layers in the beam?"

I took the piece I had back over to where they had the pieces laid out and found the piece that matched it. I put the two pieces in the chamber and readied the electron microscope for another session. When I hit the two pieces with the electron beam, they jumped from the screen! When I opened up the chamber to see what happened, the two pieces had jumped off the stage and mended themselves back together! I didn't know how it happened, but I shouted "I can fix it!

The first thing I did was to reassemble the small pieces into larger pieces that would fit into the chamber. It went pretty quickly because they had all the pieces laid out like a jigsaw puzzle. Once I had all the small pieces assembled, I immediately began disassembling the electron chamber and removed the electron gun. We assembled all the larger pieces on the floor using the makeshift device. All that was left was to move the assembled piece into position and hit the seam with the gun. Just setting the assembled piece in place made the light in the room grow a little. We started to fuse the seam back together and the room began to hum. Before we were half way finished, it began to repair itself! The seam was gone!

Now the room was bright. Light everywhere, but coming from nowhere. The machine came to life and 3 dimensional text appeared before each person standing in the room as if they were the only ones there. By then, Sharam had entered the room and began to read the text.

"As the atmosphere thinned we set out to colonize the 3rd planet. We took with us only what we needed. We will settle in an area we will call Eden and from there we will travel out to colonize the new world. We will build Pyramids to remind us that nothing can endure forever."

"Remember."

So here I am standing amongst the most important discovery in human evolution and all I can think of is the trip back to earth with Saffron. This time I wont be able to shut up.