The glyphs at Abydos were photographed for the first time in 1848, and mistranslated immediately, which was the only mercy the century had to offer them. They sit on a lintel in the Temple of Seti I, high enough that a visitor must crane to see them, in a corridor the guides move through quickly, and what the visitor sees, what every visitor has seen since the photographs began circulating, is unmistakable and impossible in the same instant: a helicopter. Beside it something

Gold does not come from the earth. This is the first thing they teach you wrong, and they teach it wrong on purpose, the way you tell a child the light in the wall is just electricity so the child will stop asking what electricity is. Gold comes from the deaths of stars — this much even the textbooks admit now, neutron stars colliding somewhere in the dark, forging the heavy elements in a single annihilating second and scattering them across the void. Every atom of gold on ea