Fire and Dangerous Things

If one can't blast open a hatch with a shotgun the way you do, squeeze through a narrow duct without their claustrophobia kicking in, and then crank out a hundred and twenty pull-ups inside a wrecked space pod, then they don't get to call themselves a scholar of the Armed Archaeologists. The Intelligentsia Guild's survey satellites once scattered across deep space like dandelion seeds. Now all that's left is the salvage waiting to be recovered in these ruins before you. The cold light of a glow stick cuts through the darkness, revealing sand and stone layered like scabs over the aluminum dome. Crude murals record the last hunt: fire, flint, bows, humans, altars, and spilled blood.

You can see it all unfolding in your mind: Over twenty generations, they lost their coordinates first, then their supplies, then their writing, then their speech. Faith in the stars devolved into a game of the hunter and the hunted. Out in the wilderness of space, the capsule became humanity's final cave.

You feel a little at a loss with this artifact.