The dust on the moon of Kaelus IV tasted like ozone and old bone. Elara brushed a layer of gray sediment away from the object embedded in the rock. It wasn't a fossil. It was chrome.

The universe is mental; thoughts manifest reality. Correspondence: "As above, so below; as below, so above".

"Carbon dating is useless here," her assistant, Jorel, muttered, checking his scanner. "The isotopes are scrambled. But the stratigraphy suggests this layer is forty thousand years old."