A Deep Dig

The cell chirped. I sighed. It had to be Sue, calling me in to work on the weekend again.

"'Lo," I answered curtly.

"Winston? Is that you?"

"'Fraid so," I replied. I was doing laconic until I heard some reason to do otherwise.

"Sue here," said Sue unnecessarily. "What? You think I won't recognize your growl, if you keep it short?"

"Grumble, grumble," I said.

"Look," she continued, "I need you ..."

"To come in today," I cut in.

"Wrong!" she rejoined triumphantly. "I need you and Jess to go out to that dig near the Hill Country immediately!"

I groaned silently. Maybe I shouldn't have married another archeologist.

"What are you groaning about?" asked Sue.

So, maybe it wasn't so silent.

"Who's supposed to look after the kids?" I whined.

"Oh, get off it!" snapped Sue. "Your kids are big enough to look after themselves for a while. This is big. Do you have any idea what they found out there?"

"Sure," I yawned. "'Nother new civilization, isn't it? Excavating to build a great big new computer manufacturing site and ran into some old ruins. We're lucky they followed procedure and reported the find instead of just turning it back under. Why can't this wait until Monday?"

"The findings so far ... kind of contradict the Good Book," said Sue. "When the President finds out, he'll have the site bulldozed. You know how he is ..."

"Yeah, him and the bloody fundamentalists," I sighed. "So, the site is more than 5,000 years old, eh? Older than the supposed age of the world. So what? There are lots of sites like that. The fundies just deny it. Don't believe in carbon dating, unless it refers to a social occasion. I'm still thinking Monday ..."

"No," replied Sue. "You don't get it. This is not just another old civilization. In the first place, 'old' doesn't adequately describe it. We're talking millions of years here, not thousands. And here's the kicker: we and they are not the same species. Now, there's a contradiction to scripture that can't be easily explained away. I need you guys out there now!"

Icy tendrils ran up and down my back as I tried to come to terms with this new information.

"That's ... impossible," I stammered. "Isn't it? We're the only significantly intelligent species ever known on this planet ... aren't we? Uh, how are we supposed to get out there? Shall we check out an agency car?"

"Heck," said Sue. "Just fly!"

And so we did. I filled Jess in on everything I knew on the way to the site.

"Apparently, there are remains," I told her.

"How could they have survived this length of time?" she asked.

"Don't know," I admitted. "Probably has something to do with keeping the plot from collapsing."

"Hmm, well," she mused. "And now we have to out run the politics, if we don't want to blow the biggest discovery in history. Who made that moron President, anyway? With his wars and his deficits and his religious bigotry and his environmental destructiveness and his disdain for science..."

"The voters, I think," I said grudgingly.

We had entered the dig and were approaching the ruined structure that Sue had urged us to visit first. It must once have been a building, though the architecture was way different from what I was used to. Just then my cell chirped again.

"Hi, Sue," I said, holding the cell out so Jess could hear, too. "We've arrived."

"Right." Sue seemed hesitant. "There was one more thing I wanted to warn you about before you actually saw it."

"And that was ...?" I prompted.

"Remember when I said these ... beings weren't of our species?"

"Ye-e-s?" I urged encouragingly.

"Hell," she said, "they aren't even in the same phylum." And she disconnected.

Jess and I looked at each other, shrugged, and entered the ruined building. The floor seemed to be laid out in squarish structures. It looked like a place of business - probably too big for a residence. I was still taking in the general layout of the place, when I heard Jess gasp. She was staring into one of the squarish structures. I followed her gaze...

It was hideous. Draped across what must have been a chair of sorts, it stared with hollow eye sockets at a screen. The screen sat on some sort of synthetic board.

"They had endoskeletons," Jess said. "Like those pesky little orkwats that you can never keep out of the house. I didn't know they could be practical for anything so large."

"Couldn't have been too practical," I observed, "since these things are extinct."

"Yes, but look at the technology they achieved," she said. "I do believe that thing on the ... board thingy is a computer."

"No way!" I objected.

"Way," she said quietly. "But walking around with all their meat hanging out ... they must have been extremely vulnerable. Why, the radiation alone! They couldn't possibly have lived on this planet without a sturdy, chitinous shell. I don't get it."

"Maybe there wasn't that much radiation 50 or so million years ago," I suggested.

"Hmm. Could be," she agreed. "Oh, my! Look at that!"

On the board, next to the screen, was a likeness, perhaps a photograph. I can tell you, if I thought they looked hideous without their meat, they looked downright gruesome with it.

"It looks like a family!" crooned Jess. "Aw, they almost look cute!"

Well, "cute" is not a word I would ever associate with those ugly spuds, but Jess has a soft streak. There were four of them, two big, two little. She was probably right about it being a family, although gender was impossible to determine.

"We don't even know if they reproduced sexually," I pointed out.

"Oh, come on," she chided. "Everything complex on this planet reproduces sexually."

"I can see why Sue was in such a hurry," I said. "The Good Book says God created us in His own image. It doesn't say anything about these things. This sure gives a thumbs up to evolution and a raspberry to 'intelligent design.'"

"I always thought evolution was an intelligent design," she remarked.

Then I noticed something truly odd: the screen in front of the endoskeleton was glowing! Just as I turned my attention to that, something popped up on the screen. It was some sort of script, but nothing I had ever seen before. I record it now for posterity, in the hopes that someone may someday be able to translate it: "Welcome to PVCS!"*

"He sure waited a long time for that," Jess observed. "It must be really important."

"Or their technology wasn't as good as you thought," I suggested.

"Chirp!" went my cell.

"The 'dozers are on their way," said Sue, "and they have no orders to make sure the site is unoccupied before leveling it. In fact, pulping anyone who's seen what's in there would probably be considered a plus. You have to get out of there now."

And so, first testing the wind with our feelers, we spread our tired wings again and headed for home. We may never learn any more about the culture of those odd, meaty creatures, or discover what led to their extinction. It probably has no relevance to roachkind, anyway. But I can tell you one thing: the nymphs will sure be a sight for sore eyes.

* Pa-dum-pum

I really wanted to call this "Once More, With Feelers."