Sunfail by Steven Savile Page A

batten down the hatches. That was the reality of America today, and it wasn’t just the rednecks.
    Given all of the portents over the last few months—the dogs, the birds—Christ, last week there was talk of the animals fleeing Yellowstone and other woodland parks, heading for the high ground—all of it just made everyone even edgier. They were living day-to-day, expecting the worst, some of them even wanting it to happen, she was sure. She’d seen the doom patrol out there preaching their end-of-the-world gospel, bless their hearts.
    Six hours.
    A lot could happen in six hours.
    She didn’t want to find out exactly what. Not yet.
    For now she just wanted to immerse herself in the wonder that was scientific discovery. She had lost worlds to explore, digitally at least. It was a gift that put her on the autism spectrum, she knew, but like a lot of obsessives she could forget the world even existed when she wanted to, especially when confronted by the unknown.
    It was more than mere intellectual curiosity, it was compulsive, like she needed to turn the lights out five times before leaving a room or knock on any closed door three times to announce her presence. She liked to think of it as a quirk, the kind of thing that made the Sheldons of this world adorable, but that need was what made her good at what she did.
    She studied the latest geological tests.
    The geophysics suggested that the entire area was made up of granite: close to twelve square miles of granite bedrock. That was several times the size of Central Park. It was difficult to adjust her thinking to account for something on that scale. If she was right, it meant they were talking about something on par with a city, not a couple of ruined buildings, which really was beyond her wildest dreams. And ever since that first image had come in she’d been dreaming big.
    She was banking on that making her job easier as opposed to looking for the proverbial linguistic needle in this very wet haystack. She was more likely to encounter writings on a larger site, and the more samples she had, no matter how eroded or unclear, the easier it would be to run comparisons on them.
    Her primary aim was to identify the language. Her secondary one, to build a lexicon.
    Anything that could add to the greater knowledge pool of ancient languages, offering some new understanding, some new glimpse at the way things might have been back then, was better than gold, even if it was something as mundane as Jesus’ shopping list. Not that any self-respecting messiah did his own shopping , she thought, grinning as her train of thought derailed.
    A lot of it was about joining the dots.
    The raw data was out there just waiting for someone to interpret it. Sure, it wasn’t all ones and zeroes of strings of hex or whatever it was the guys in the computer labs were using today, but it was there, every bit as concrete—or in this case granite—as the mathematical strings they used when it came to examining the building blocks of the world.
    There shouldn’t be any granite in the region, it was as simple as that. The sheet rock was anomalous. Cuba was mostly limestone, so the granite had to have been brought in by whoever built the city beneath the sea.
    The exploratory team had only taken a few preliminary photos and videos of the find so there wasn’t a whole lot for her to look at yet, but it was obvious that time and tide had worked their damage, with entire levels of the pyramidal structures missing and whole sides of what may have been temples collapsed.
    On the plus side, granite was a hard stone, capable of withstanding the battery of the elements, and even after all this time lost to the sea the granite had survived the worst of the erosion virtually unscathed. That meant the few symbols she could make out in the images were sharp. They’d been carved deep into the stone blocks, and even though the top layer of strata had worn—or broken—away, the remainder was still