Continuing my 1 short story a week, but one of my short stories has evolved in to a bigger project. So I'm dropping some microfiction this week.
It had taken decades to recover enough to even understand what they were looking at, reading bit by bit with an electron microscope. It took years to decode the bits once they had them. There had been theories about the meaning of the plates ever since their discovery. Finally, professor Zadrand had an answer.
"It's hard to believe that such an advanced civilization existed, millions of years ago, on this very planet.
"The mathematics behind these programs are astounding. By interacting with this layered statistical model, we will be able to learn a lot about their history and their civilization. Even what we were able to recover so far will launch our science and mathematics decades in to the future."
The interviewer shifted, "Does it tell us anything about what killed them off or about our own story?"
"It does," continued professor Zadrand, "and it also explains the global radiation layer we call the HT boundary. As we've hypothesized, their extinction made room for our own evolution in to the dominant species on this planet.
"What we don't understand is why. The dominant hypothesis had been that the event was triggered by some sort of resource conflict. But this new evidence contradicts that," the professor's antenna twitched and carapace shuttered a bit, "Apparently they put this very statistical model in control of unimaginably powerful weapons. The result was surprisingly... predictable.
"The most surprising thing is that so many of them knew what would happen and did nothing to stop it."