Foreword:

This is a bit of an experimental, multi-genre (science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction) story I've been working on that's told not so much as a narrative as it is a series of documents a future researcher trying to figure out the anomaly might uncover and view. That is to say this is meant to be read as more archival than plot driven. Though it is intended to eventually shift into a narrative plot following a single, 22nd century researcher, after all the files have been revealed.

I hope you enjoy it. And please let me know if you want more of the documents. I'm almost finished with Part 2, which tightens the evidence around the artifact, and further annoys the researchers through some more decades.

As I write more documents in the artifact's file, I'm also going through great pains to try to match the terminology that would be used by various scientific disciplines across the decades.

A history in documents, 1934–2134

PART ONE: THE FIND

From the field diary of Dr. Evelyn Marsh, Director, Fitzwilliam–Cairo Expedition, Western Valley of the Kings

28 November 1934.

The doorway is intact.

I write those words and my hand is not entirely steady. Twelve years since Carter and Carnarvon, and every season since, the Valley has been declared exhausted by men who did not care to dig in the western arm because the western arm is a long walk in bad light. We dug in the western arm.

Necropolis seals in the plaster, unbroken. The jackal and nine captives, and below it a cartouche none of us can place, Bishara reads it Neferkare Setepenre, a throne name unattested in any king list. An ephemeral king of the dynasty's chaotic end, reigning perhaps months, buried in haste and forgotten so thoroughly that even the tomb robbers, who forgot no one, forgot him.

The rubble fill behind the door is cemented with flood silt. Whatever is below has not been entered since that silt came down the wadi, and Bishara says the flood debris in this stretch of the Valley has lain undisturbed since before the Third Intermediate Period. Wilkes has photographed the sealing from nine angles. Tomorrow we breach.

1 December 1934.

Sixteen steps, a descending corridor, a second sealed doorway. Antechamber modest by Tutankhamun's standard, this was a poor king, or a rushed one, but complete. Chariot fittings, boxes of provisions, dried garlands, dockets in ink. The air was old. There is a smell an unopened tomb has that I will not attempt for this page.

4 December 1934.

The burial chamber.

I must set this down carefully, because I am aware that this page may one day be evidence, though of what I cannot say.

The sarcophagus lid had been displaced in antiquity, not by robbers, but by the burial party itself, it appears, who lacked the tackle to seat it true and shimmed it with limestone spall. Through the gap, by torchlight, we could see the coffin, and the coffin was open. No, not open. Never closed. The mummy lies wrapped and garlanded in an open anthropoid coffin of painted wood, and the funeral goods are heaped close about it, and everything speaks of a burial conducted at a run.

Resting upon the chest of the king, square upon the crossed arms, placed with what I can only call reverence, is a carton.

I mean the word precisely. A carton. Printed paperboard, perhaps ten inches by four, in colours, red, gold, a lurid cream-yellow, that do not belong to any palette I know from the second millennium before Christ, because they do not belong to the second millennium before Christ. There is writing on it. The writing is in English.

The writing says TWINKIES.

Wilkes made his exposures in absolute silence. Bishara stood at my shoulder and did not move for some minutes, and then said, quietly, in French, which he retreats to when upset: "Madame, someone has been in this tomb."

And I said: "Girgis, you sealed the corridor photographs yourself. Someone has not been in this tomb."

We looked at each other for a long time.

We have touched nothing. Wilkes will photograph everything twice, on separate plates, and I have posted Ahmed and his brother at the tomb mouth with instructions that no one, I told them: no one, effendi or not, descends without myself and Mr. Bishara together.

I do not know what I have found. I know what it looks like I have found, which is the end of my career, my expedition, and possibly the credibility of Egyptian field archaeology for a generation.

Letter, Dr. Evelyn Marsh to Prof. Lionel Grieve, Trinity College, Cambridge, 19 December 1934 (marked PERSONAL, BURN, not burned)

Lionel,

You will have seen the Times. "INTACT ROYAL TOMB IN THE VALLEY OF KINGS, UNKNOWN PHARAOH." All of it true. The tomb is real, the king is real, the finds are magnificent, and the Antiquities Service is delighted with us.

What the Times has not seen is Object 113.

I enclose one print. Look at it before you read on.

Yes. It is what it appears to be. It is a box of Twinkies. I am told, I have made discreet enquiries through Hartley's cousin in Chicago, that "Twinkies" are a sponge-cake confection introduced by the Continental Baking Company in 1930, sold two to a packet in waxed paper for a nickel. Four years old, Lionel. The product is four years old.

Except that the object on the king's chest is not that product. Hartley's cousin sent me a genuine packet by post. It is a flimsy thing in waxed paper with a paper band. Object 113 is a printed carton, claiming on its face to hold ten cakes "individually wrapped," in a slick material that is not cellophane and not waxed paper and which none of us can identify. The printing is finer than anything I have seen on any package anywhere, finer than the printing in books. There are blocks of dense small text in a tabulated format listing quantities of things called "sodium" and "polysorbate." There is a rectangle of narrow black stripes, and a smaller square of black-and-white chequerwork like a tiny abstract mosaic, and strings of letters and numerals that mean nothing: a code of some kind.

So: a hoax. Obviously a hoax. A hoax requires a hoaxer with access, and here is my difficulty, and I want you to attend to it with that merciless mind of yours, because I have been three weeks trying to break my own evidence and I cannot.

The corridor fill was cemented with ancient flood silt, photographed in section as we cut it. The necropolis sealings were intact and are themselves now under seal. The dust, Lionel, the dust. There was better than a centimetre of fine grey dust upon every surface in that chamber, laid down in visible fine layers like a pastry, and it lay upon and around Object 113 in perfect continuity with the dust on the mummy, the coffin, the floor. There were dried insect fragments in it. A hoaxer must have entered a sealed and flood-cemented tomb without disturbing it, deposited the object, and then replaced a centimetre of layered dust, undisturbed, over the whole chamber including his own footprints.

Alternatively the hoaxer is on my staff and did it during the four days between breach and burial chamber. Wilkes's plates rule it out. The object is visible, I have checked with a glass, and you may check the enclosed print, in the very first exposure made through the gap in the sarcophagus lid, before any person had entered the chamber, in dust.

I have considered whether the hoaxer is myself and I am mad. I have considered whether it is Bishara. Bishara has considered whether it is me. We have concluded that we trust each other slightly more than we trust the alternative, which is nothing, because there is no alternative.

Here is what we have done, and I want your blessing or your veto by return post.

We have suppressed it. Object 113 does not appear in the register; the numbers run 112, 114, and if anyone asks, 113 was a duplicate entry struck out. The carton is crated, sealed, and will travel to Cairo as "ostraca, misc." Wilkes's duplicate plates and a set of dated prints have been lodged, sealed, with Barclays in Cairo, with a notarised statement by the three of us.

We cannot announce it: we should be laughed out of the profession, and worse, the tomb would be called a fraud, and every genuine object in it poisoned by association. We cannot explain it. We cannot bring ourselves to destroy it, because we are, God help us, archaeologists.

Therefore we shall study it. Quietly. For as long as it takes to understand what was done to us, and by whom, and how.

I expect it will take a year or two.

Yours in some distress, E.M.

Memorandum of understanding, handwritten, three signatures, Cairo, 4 January 1935

Known informally thereafter as the Concordat.

Object WV27-113 ("the Confection") shall be preserved unaltered save for sampling as agreed by all custodians. Knowledge of the Object shall be confined to persons approved unanimously by the custodians, each of whom shall before death or retirement name and instruct a successor. No public statement shall be made until the Object's nature is understood. Every test that can be brought against the Object's authenticity shall be brought against it, as methods allow, in perpetuity. All results shall be recorded, however embarrassing.

E. Marsh. G. Bishara. T. C. Wilkes.

Beneath, in Marsh's hand, added later in different ink:

Clause 3 was written in the belief that understanding was a matter of months. (E.M., 1949)

Comparison memorandum, Prof. L. Grieve, Cambridge, March 1935

Subject: materials of Object 113 versus commercial reference specimens (Continental Baking Co. product, purchased Chicago, Feb. 1935; sundry British and American packagings).

The board first. The carton stock is a machine-made paperboard of remarkable uniformity, clay-coated on the print face. Fibre furnish is chemical wood pulp. Nothing impossible here, only implausibly good: calliper variation across the blank is under a thousandth of an inch. No mill I have consulted (discreetly, as "a question from a client in lithography") holds such tolerances in production.

The print. This is the sticking point. The image is composed of minute regular dots, as in half-tone work, but in four transparent inks laid in perfect register at a fineness I estimate at three to four times the best rotogravure of my acquaintance, and by a process that has left no impression in the board whatever. The ink film sits on the coating as if breathed there. I do not know of this process. I have shown a cropped fragment (lettering excluded) to two trade printers. Both asked me who had done it and one offered to buy the plates.

The inner wrappers, visible through the carton window: a thin, glossy, flexible film, isotropic in appearance, heat-sealed, heat-sealed, note, not gummed. It is not cellophane; it does not behave like any cellulose derivative I possess. Density and burning behaviour suggest a paraffinic synthetic. I am aware of laboratory curiosities in polymerised olefines. I am not aware of anyone wrapping cakes in them.

My conclusion. If this is a forgery, it was not made to deceive an Egyptologist. Every element of it is wrong for antiquity and half the elements are wrong for the present. It is as if the forger had set out to imitate not the past but a rather breathless future, and had then hidden his masterpiece where its only effect would be to make three respectable scholars doubt their sanity.

I confess the problem is growing on me. You may put me down as a custodian.

L.G.

u/Ghost_Alice

Coca Cola Starlight

[SP] The Impossible Artifact: Part 1 - The Find

PART ONE: THE FIND