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Proof Through the Night
STELLA Aldrin gasped for breath. Her small capsule was nearly depleted of oxygen. A fadingHolographic Pinpointer showed a half-buried object near Luna Sector II. Stella’s eyes were buzzing, her head was spinning, and she was barely able to make sense of the “sacred epitaph”that was rumored to lie under the blanket of dust deposited by the polluters who ran theabandoned thermoelectric conversion plants which once brought power to Old Moon Telluriansearly in the twenty-first century.Tedd Armstrong, like his lover, was also an amateur archaeologist. They had beensearching for the relic during their final days of their third honeyearth vacation in the outback of the Luna Veldt. Two previous expeditions had failed to turn it up; countless treasure-seekers hadrisked death in the dry, remote Mare looking for the “epitaph”. Its fetching price on the Trans-Galactic Black Whole Market was no secret.Stella and Tedd knew it bore a profound message, inscribed in Paleo-Anglican somefive-hundred years ago by pre-mutant ancestors; it was supposed to be some sort of gesture of  pre-halocaust goodwill, or so they imagined. Stella fancied it to be the ultimate riddle of theSphinx, a message to humans encoding secrets of stellar evolution, the key to expandingTellurian consciousness to spiritual levels of Magico-Technology. The two were determined tolocate it once and for all. They were in the right place, but the wrong time was running out.Stella strained to decrypt the hologram and make sense of the illegible message:
W AM IN ACE R A ANK D
Tedd was furiously making an adjustment to the holocomputer. “We should have thiscryptogram decoded in a flash!” he said. “And what is that “ank” all about anyway?”
 
Stella messaged her temples, closed her eyes, visualized: “What’s any of this all about?Were the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Rosetta Stone, Capra’s Quark Conundrum, or Mayan Infiniti-Calendrics as difficult to decipher as this ancient plaque?”Stella felt tears welling up. Tedd was a lump of frenzied emotional energy. Just a shortyear ago they had come to Livingston, Luna to begin a new life after Telluria became too polluted. They landed cush jobs, too: researching Spinoza’s phyto-replication biota theory tocreate oxygen on Luna—long considered an eccentric’s fantasy, but recently met with a degreeof success owing to Stella’s chance discovery of photoautotrophic bacteria near the CO2-bergsof Sere Mare.Before the events leading up to the end of the world as everyone was about to know itforever and ever, Tedd and Stella had been vacationing in the magnetic outback, deep in theForbidden Zone of Velikovsky’s Volcanic Veldt. Four centuries ago, in the celestially perturbedyear of 2076, this archaeo-explorers’ paradise became impossible to visit, indeed, the entire OldMoon was off limits for the next 398 years after a series of unimaginably severe convulsions onLuna caused by meteoric bombardment, castoffs no doubt from Bode’s Fragmented Planet(formerly known in the New Dark Ages as the
 _
Asteroid Belt
 _
). Tedd and Stella wereconsidered lunatics for wanting to visit the Veldt, but such was their determination and desire tolocate the epitaph.During their explorations of the Veldt they found two rare sparkling tectites that wouldfetch more than diamonds back on Telluria. They poked around at abandoned Phase IV Tri-Plenipotentiary colonization projects. They visited the confounding Cairns of Caleidi,monuments composed of robin’s egg blue and sunflower yellow crystal balls stacked hundredsof feet high, left by a mysterious and largely unknown ancient star-trekking culture from theMultiverse’s “West Bend” (or so goes the generally discredited theory of Wurm Hool, a German
 
astrophysicist who in 2020 discovered the Cairns and claimed to have met the Caleidians aswell.)Macabre as it was, a highlight turned out to be wandering on their sore knees, absorbedfor hours, in the labyrinth catacombs of the extinct Proserpine Android Vole cult (discovered in2039 by psychistorian, Cayce Mitchell IV). Their life on Luna was exciting, and this was thecrowning moment of their achievements—until the one, sudden brutal moment when theyreceived news that a sickening nuclear conflict had erupted on Telluria, the land of their birth,and now had spread to Luna like a cancerous contagion. All the hopes, dreams and visions of humankind up in nuclear smoke and megaton brimstone.Tedd and Stella learned from the reports that the war raging on Telluria was much worsethan the Quasi-Armageddon of 2076. That abominably idiotic conflict had erupted over renegade, crazed nuke-nations armed with plutonium molotov cocktails. After the Seventeen-Year Depression (from 2030 through 2047), the world’s pressure cooker blew its lid and hell broke loose. But how on Telluria could it have happened again? After so many years of peaceand prosperity fostered by the compassionate embraces of the Luminous Orwellian VisionaryEcstatics? LOVE had divided the post-nuclear world into Tri-Plenipotentiary states consisting of the Soviet Hegemony of Independent Territories, the Plutocracy of Indoamerican SocialistStates, and the Federation of United Circum-Afrikkan Kingdoms. In theory, this division of  pwer was an experiment with utopia, positive steps toward the eradication of nuclear weaponsforever. A great step forward in evolution, lessons learned by little boys, you don’t play with firewithout getting burned. A heralding of a Golden Age of irenic co-existence of cultures, with thesublime goal of respect for and harmony amongst all living beings on Telluria. The killings,massacres, butchering and warmongering mayhem were barbaric pastimes of primitive people.
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