The Information Paradox

Prologue

el-Amarna Egypt, August 1939 C.E.

Sir Richard Townsend-Smythe looked through a magnifying glass at a fragment of an ancient clay tablet and smiled. "Thomas, you say that this was found in the north dig site, near the ancient oasis?"

The young grad student from Oxford gestured to the tablets covering the canvas camp table and smiled at his mentor. "Yes sir, a cache of a dozen or so were found in what appears to be the remains of a wooden box that had been burned."

The older man looked again at the tablet and then referenced a small leather-bound notebook from a pouch at his belt. He compared the characters on the tablet to those in the small book. He flipped a few pages back and forth and frantically wrote down a few short lines of text in English. He then offered in an excited tone. "Yes, yes I have it now. Indeed Thomas, this is quite a find. The top half of this tablet is in Akkadian and the bottom half appears to be the same text in Demotic. See here my young friend, after all of the diplomatic niceties this appears to be a letter to the Hittite King Suppiluliuma from a princess of Egypt named Ankesenamun. You know my theories about her, yes?"

The young man nodded again. "Indeed sir, you intend to prove that she was the wife and half-sister of Tutankhamun."

The old man nodded enthusiastically. "Indeed I do. I shall show, and these tablets will surely help in that regard, that the young princess who commissioned this letter was the daughter of the so-called heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten and his chief Queen Nefertiti and that she had been married to her half-brother Tutankhaten as he was known at the time. Mr. Carter claimed that Tut was the son of Akhenaten by his junior Queen Kiya."

The old academic pointed to the north. "...and after Tut died in Memphis at such a young age, possibly murdered by the Vizier Ay who was his uncle or possibly his grandfather, his young wife disappeared from history."

The young man filled in his professor's theory. "...or was deliberately erased like her husband the boy-king!"

"Yes, yes, exactly! Here, let me read you my first rough translation of this letter."

"King Suppiluliuma, oh exalted one. My husband has died and I have no son. They say about you that you have many sons. You might give me one of your sons to become my husband. I shall make him the Pharaoh of Egypt. Never shall I pick out a servant of mine and make him my husband!... I am afraid!"

[History records that the son of Suppiluliuma, Zananza, never arrived at his destination. He was killed at Egypt's border and intercepted by General Horemheb. The Vizier Ay became Pharaoh after Tutankamun and General Horemheb was Pharaoh after him. Ankesenamun disappeared into time, lost forever.]

The student gestured to another collection of artifacts on a smaller table. "Sir, you should also look at these strange metal bits, Akmed found them in a buried crater of sorts 100 meters further into the desert from the old oasis where the tablets were found. Based on the rock stratification and seashells found in the layers above them, these artifacts could be far older..."

Thomas then uncovered a wooden tray with a few bits of a dull gray alloy that had been melted apparently at extreme temperature. The largest had some unidentified characters etched on them which if translated would have read Fusion Core Initiator and Antimatter Containment Field.

The young man removed a Birmingham steel knife from a sheath on his belt and dragged it firmly along the dull grayish surface of the strange artifact. "You see sir, the sharpest knife I have won't even scratch it, quite unusual don't you think? Surely it's not ancient Egyptian."

The older man picked up the strange object. "You are sure that Akmed found them where he said?"

"Yes sir, I supervised the dig myself, these bits were indeed quite deep in the ground."

The old man examined the largest artifact and chuckled. "My boy, I am an Egyptologist, not an Engineer. Very well then, catalog those items along with the rest and we'll have the lot shipped to the British Museum in Cairo. Surely someone there can make sense out of those strange characters and that odd metal. Remember, the Huns excavated sites in this area before the Great War. Could've been something of theirs, you know how Krupp and Zeppelin are always working on new alloys and they all use those damnable secret codes, one never knows what those clever bastards will come up with next."

Two days later Nazi Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. Sir Richard never returned to Egypt. Thomas was awarded the Victoria Cross (posthumously) for his actions as an RAF pilot during the Battle of Britain. The strange alien metal fragments and most of the clay tablets from Amarna were lost at the bottom of the Mediterranean when the cargo ship carrying some of the treasures from the Cairo Museum was sunk by a U-boat while enroute to London.