The Record
The structure beneath the permafrost was not a building. It was, as nearly as Anya could determine after a week of analysis, a storage medium — a single, continuous surface that extended laterally in every direction beyond the reach of their ground-penetrating radar. The surface was composed of a material that did not match any known mineral or alloy. It was warm, slightly above body temperature, and it vibrated with data the way a hard drive vibrates with the spin of its platters, except that the data density was orders of magnitude beyond anything human technology could achieve. Pavel estimated, conservatively, that the surface they had exposed — a section roughly two metres square — contained more information than every server farm on the planet combined.
The data was not encrypted, which was either a sign of supreme confidence or supreme indifference. It was structured in a format that took their cryptographers three days to parse — not because it was complex but because it was simple, so simple that the analysts kept looking for hidden layers that were not there. The format was a chronological record. Entries, timestamped, sequential, beginning at a date that their carbon-dating equipment could not resolve because it predated the range of carbon-14 by a factor that made Anya sit down and stare at the wall for ten minutes. The record was old. Older than the permafrost.