chisel-clean.
She had no difficulty transcribing the symbols. Pulling up a graphics package, Finn began the painstaking process of tracing the first one, saving it as a clean layer so that she could study it independent of its surroundings.
Peculiar , she thought, and not for the first time. The pyramids suggested an Egyptian influence, that much was obvious, but the thinking was highly suspect. The Olmecs and Mayans had constructed pyramids, and theirs were often stair-stepped like the central one in this image.
But that presented its own set of time line problems: Olmecs hadn’t started erecting pyramids until circa 1200 BCE (Before Central Event, which was exactly the same as Before Christ for the non-Christians of the world); the Mayans were an even younger civilization, their pyramids built closer to 1000 BCE, only three thousand years ago—so neither of those fit her flood-basin time line. There were the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, they were old enough to correspond with the estimated age of their discovery, but that civilization was half a world away in the cradle of humanity, Iran and Iraq, and with no evidence of Mesopotamian society having ventured as far as Europe, never mind the Americas, and even if the Great Ziggurat of Ur dated back to the twenty-first century BCE, most of the ziggurats were actually from the same time period as the Olmecs and the Mayans.
She removed the overlay to study the first symbol. It definitely wasn’t an Egyptian hieroglyph. There was no denying the similarity, certainly: it appeared to be a flower, definitely representational rather than phonetic, showing something instead of sounding something out. But Egyptian markings were more finely crafted than this. The hieroglyph for owl, for example, was a likeness of an owl, complete with beak, talons, and feathers. This icon was cruder. In a lot of ways it was closer to an Olmec representation, though it didn’t exactly match their more stylized symbols.
The fact that she didn’t recognize the language right away was exciting. Had it simply been Egyptian or Olmec or some other known variant, her job would have been a simple case of translating a few symbols. If they’d just uncovered a lost language, possibly even the oldest extant example of a written language, her job was only just beginning. She’d be the first to study it, to document it, and to try her hand at translating it. That didn’t happen more than once in half a dozen lifetimes in her world. It was beyond being career-defining. It was life-changing.
She knew she was grinning like a lunatic. She didn’t care.
She saved the first symbol, eager to see what else the underwater world had to show her. Turning back to the original photo, she selected the next symbol, created a new layer, and began tracing it. It was going to take awhile to get through all of the symbols, but she wasn’t in a hurry to go outside. She had heat, light, and quiet in here, what else did she need? Power bars and Coke? Check. There was an ample supply of both in the vending machine across the hall. There were spare clothes in her office closet, along with a few blankets.
She had everything she needed in here to survive a mini-apocalypse.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FOR A MINUTE, AT LEAST, HE’D FORGOTTEN about Sophie’s enigmatic message.
That was something. But in the grand scheme of things, not a whole fuck of a lot, really.
Jake grabbed the messenger bike and hauled it up off the ground where he’d abandoned it. He didn’t get on it. Anger, frustration, impotence welled up inside him and he hurled it away, hard. The handlebars hit the asphalt, but the back wheel kept spinning after the bike slammed into the door of a nearby truck. People were staring at him. He didn’t care. He was so thoroughly pissed off he wanted to break more things. A pipe or bat would make a fine weapon, but even sans weapon he was happy to start bashing the fuck out of things with his bare fists and
She had no difficulty transcribing the symbols. Pulling up a graphics package, Finn began the painstaking process of tracing the first one, saving it as a clean layer so that she could study it independent of its surroundings.
Peculiar , she thought, and not for the first time. The pyramids suggested an Egyptian influence, that much was obvious, but the thinking was highly suspect. The Olmecs and Mayans had constructed pyramids, and theirs were often stair-stepped like the central one in this image.
But that presented its own set of time line problems: Olmecs hadn’t started erecting pyramids until circa 1200 BCE (Before Central Event, which was exactly the same as Before Christ for the non-Christians of the world); the Mayans were an even younger civilization, their pyramids built closer to 1000 BCE, only three thousand years ago—so neither of those fit her flood-basin time line. There were the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, they were old enough to correspond with the estimated age of their discovery, but that civilization was half a world away in the cradle of humanity, Iran and Iraq, and with no evidence of Mesopotamian society having ventured as far as Europe, never mind the Americas, and even if the Great Ziggurat of Ur dated back to the twenty-first century BCE, most of the ziggurats were actually from the same time period as the Olmecs and the Mayans.
She removed the overlay to study the first symbol. It definitely wasn’t an Egyptian hieroglyph. There was no denying the similarity, certainly: it appeared to be a flower, definitely representational rather than phonetic, showing something instead of sounding something out. But Egyptian markings were more finely crafted than this. The hieroglyph for owl, for example, was a likeness of an owl, complete with beak, talons, and feathers. This icon was cruder. In a lot of ways it was closer to an Olmec representation, though it didn’t exactly match their more stylized symbols.
The fact that she didn’t recognize the language right away was exciting. Had it simply been Egyptian or Olmec or some other known variant, her job would have been a simple case of translating a few symbols. If they’d just uncovered a lost language, possibly even the oldest extant example of a written language, her job was only just beginning. She’d be the first to study it, to document it, and to try her hand at translating it. That didn’t happen more than once in half a dozen lifetimes in her world. It was beyond being career-defining. It was life-changing.
She knew she was grinning like a lunatic. She didn’t care.
She saved the first symbol, eager to see what else the underwater world had to show her. Turning back to the original photo, she selected the next symbol, created a new layer, and began tracing it. It was going to take awhile to get through all of the symbols, but she wasn’t in a hurry to go outside. She had heat, light, and quiet in here, what else did she need? Power bars and Coke? Check. There was an ample supply of both in the vending machine across the hall. There were spare clothes in her office closet, along with a few blankets.
She had everything she needed in here to survive a mini-apocalypse.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FOR A MINUTE, AT LEAST, HE’D FORGOTTEN about Sophie’s enigmatic message.
That was something. But in the grand scheme of things, not a whole fuck of a lot, really.
Jake grabbed the messenger bike and hauled it up off the ground where he’d abandoned it. He didn’t get on it. Anger, frustration, impotence welled up inside him and he hurled it away, hard. The handlebars hit the asphalt, but the back wheel kept spinning after the bike slammed into the door of a nearby truck. People were staring at him. He didn’t care. He was so thoroughly pissed off he wanted to break more things. A pipe or bat would make a fine weapon, but even sans weapon he was happy to start bashing the fuck out of things with his bare fists and
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