Under the earth-like sea, two dozen kilometers down into the crushing depths, where liquid water and exotic forms of ice mingle into slush and the triple star far above is wholly extinguished, a clay tablet lies in fragments.
To the extinct elephant-like creatures of the archipelago, who in a bygone age wove the fragile threads of their own hair into boats during the milder, first summer, the tablet was perhaps a record of an oral history, a proclamation, or an advertisement. What words were imprinted there have been crushed, degraded, and shattered—the language lost and none to notice besides.
Among the ruins of the tablet, an empty aluminum canister, well-preserved, much more recent, and colorless now in the abyssal darkness, reads “Coca-Cola”: token of that race of spacefaring primates that crossed the still-grander ocean of vacuum to settle here.
The humans continue to believe they are alone in the universe, for they have not yet discovered the ancient megafauna that once roamed this world. Here, though, at the bottom of the ocean, the refuse of two species lies side-by-side, in knowing kinship.