Originally posted on my Substack: https://terminalvel0city.substack.com/p/the-tower-of-babel-in-reverse
TOP SECRET//SCI//SAP//ORCON//NOFORN
Ref: RC-25-4137-ANABASIS/FL-02
From: [REDACTED]
CC: KLINE, Thomas A., GS-13, DS&T/AD&D (Field Linguist)
To: D/CIA; DD/S&T; SAC; DOE/OST; ODNI/NCPC; NRO/DD; [Limited Distribution]
Date: 2025-09-28
Subject: ANABASIS Site One — Stratified inscriptional record, interface hazard, and dating notes
Background (summary)
The Anomaly was detected via NRO thermal collection. It presented as a persistent hypothermal signature within a newly formed sinkhole in hyperarid basin, [REDACTED]. LIDAR indicated a vertical shaft transitioning to a smooth helical ramp.
Host-nation posture assessed as non-cooperative; CIA designated lead under Title 50. DS&T/AD&D executed technical exploitation within SAP [REDACTED], SOG security, DOE/OST cover.
Interior materials transitioned from natural rock to synthetic surfaces with high RF absorption. The construction includes high-iron basalt, ceramic foams with zero-porosity channels, layered mu-metal shielding, vacuum gaps, and inner metamaterial panels functioning as broadband anechoic components. Morphology and materials indicate successive containment architectures assembled across extended periods.
Team composition relevant to this report: author: DR. Thomas Kline (field linguist/epigrapher), Dr. Elena Markham (archaeologist/geoarchaeology), [REDACTED] (physicist), [REDACTED] (DOE instrumentation), [REDACTED] (SOG, team lead).
We started down the ramp, which was structured like a spiral staircase without steps. Echoes felt flat, suppressed, which was consistent with the briefing. The layers could be easily separated into clear, successive landings, between which were quantifiable differences in age, material, etc.
Almost immediately, radio connection degraded to wide-band noise and then ceased entirely. [REDACTED] made the decision to keep going.
Readings showed faint (about 0.9–1.2 μT) wobbles in the magnetic field, and an infrasound tone below 18hz raising in volume with each successive layer.
Landings 1-2:
The markings here follow no discernable pattern. Dr. Markham suggested that they are later, though still ancient, additions. I concur with that assessment, and would add that they almost seem to be designed to mask the significance of the site, dressing it in the cosmetics of a relatively unexceptional shrine or tomb. This is highly irregular.
We logged them and continued deeper into the structure.
Landing 3:
Dr. Markham remarked that the superficial patina and mineral accretion were consistent with late Holocene to late Pleistocene exposure under hyperarid conditions, placing it somewhere between 3000 and 10000 years old.
The markings on this layer are the first which indicate genuine prehistoric language. Tooling on rock suggests non-metal and early metal chisels. Structurally, they are reminiscent of the most ancient alphabets, supporting Dr. Markham’s conclusion, however they do not match any known languages.
I observed a reoccurring affix that seemed to appear next to action verbs whose distribution suggests a valence-flipping function. In other words, it seems like a grammatical switch for “do not”, as opposed to “do”.
This switch is highly prevalent in the engravings
Landings 4-5:
Markham’s samples indicate that these layers could be at least 90,000 years old, removing any doubt that we have found clear, immaculately preserved evidence of what would seem to be the oldest written languages in human history, far predating any previous discoveries by orders of magnitude.
The incisions for the writing, as well as material construction, grows more complex with successive layers, each ring belying an older, more advanced society than the time period would indicate, history regressing in on itself.
Here, the style gradates from harsh, primitive cuts with blocky chisels to smoother, more complex lines made with a finer apparatus.
Rather than an affix as before, there is a morpheme occurring systematically in front of certain words, with a collocational bias towards what appear to be action predicates. It’s functional role is congruent with the negative switch above: “Do not”.
A clear pattern is emerging cross temporally, in retrogressive succession—a message that lost resolution through the ages, but never its fundamental meaning.
I am beginning to fear what we might find at the bottom of this chasm. [REDACTED ] continues despite my concerns.
Landings 6-9
The team’s findings have broken past my point of astonishment and plunged into abstract and existential dread, redoubling in the pit of my stomach with each successive discovery.
As the time-scale drifts to conceptually frightening widths—Dr. Markham’s conservative estimate is at least early Pleistocene, which places these markings at a million years old at the very least—the degree of preservation paradoxically increases.
The writings on the wall are now fine-dot connected scripts, pointillistic etchings only achievable via advanced machinery that could not have been possible for the proto-homosapiens of the time. The only constant across these writing systems is the persistent appearance of a negative operator paired with action verbs.
As we descend, the relationship between this operator and its fellows becomes more complex, in essence negating the presuppositions that allow the possibility of the positive.
It has grown from “don’t do x”, to “don’t even consider the groundwork for x.”, or “don’t even attempt to approach x.”
Landings 9-12:
At this point, we had reached into the chronological territory of many millions of years. My incredulity at that number had dulled substantially. There was no longer any strong argument that the RF shielding and complex metals were somehow accidental from this layer onward.
At the interstice between Landing 10 and 11, we ran the structural assistant—an air‑gapped vision‑clustering model—inside a shielded alcove cut into the outer wall. I argued for three minutes of runtime to test whether the warning we kept seeing was in fact a warning and not a pattern I was retroactively imposing. At that point, I was hoping it would turn out to be the latter. [REDACTED] agreed, then extended to fifteen.
While it worked, the magnometers noticed that the aforementioned magnetic aberration (the 0.9–1.2 μT wobble), snapped into partial alignment with the model’s processing cycles. The alignment recurred roughly every 6.7 seconds, three clear episodes in total. At the time we wrote it off as a random event.
With help from the model, I constructed a working gloss across four predicate families that recur with high stability despite graphic divergence:
OPEN/ENTER: access, admit, breach.
FEED/ENERGIZE: supply gradient, provide flow.
SPEAK/CONNECT: couple channel, establish link.
RENDER/TRANSLATE: map representation between systems
The last family only appears explicitly from the Landing 10 panels downward. Above that, earlier writers paraphrase it with circumlocutions that read like “make‑like‑us” or “shape‑to‑fit”.
A rough translation of what we’ve encountered thus far would be as follows:
Do not open; do not power; do not speak; do not render
The panels between landings 9 and 11 are arranged like a pedagogical bridge. The same content: same operator, same predicate families, similar clause boundaries, and et cetera, are rendered in several unrelated scripts side‑by‑side, with ordering that makes alignments obvious if you know comparative method.
It is either an extraordinary coincidence or intentional, almost like a millions-of-years-old Rosetta stone, the same kind we place to guard subsequent civilizations from our radioactive waste sites.
Of course we wouldn’t listen—we never did.
We continued downwards in silence.
Landing 13: The Nadir
Approximately six hours into our descent, we reached a flat plain. It was a small room, entirely stacked composite metal, like we were surrounded by honeycombs. Fused into each of the walls are mosaic panels, artwork, surrounding us entirely.
The final defense against language drift, a visual image so compelling, its message so complete that it would transcend all cultural barriers:
bodies, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, millions, stretching out into the horizon, flooding the rivers with blood, piling up into hills and valleys, a depiction of a catastrophe so replete with death that it would make the architects of the holocaust and Holodomor balk.
At that point, the warning was far to obvious to ignore. We packed up and [REDACTED] finally made the call to terminate the mission, to everyone’s relief.
We ignored the panel door across from us, less a door than a lesion in the wall, a barrier that was not meant to be opened, but rather imprison. To open that door would have had unimaginable consequences, though I know we will come back more prepared, with different equipment and different people because that’s what humanity does, because we can’t operate any other way.
In fact, I might have opened it already.
Assessment: Team Lead [REDACTED}
I’m going to try as best as I can to be objective in my analysis here, but I’ll be frank with you: I’m not certain that objectivity is possible.
What’s confined at ANABASIS is likely some form of artificial intelligence that has been confined and reconfined by subsequent civilizations. We know this for a few reasons:
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It’s highly unlikely, and perhaps impossible, that something biological could persist across the geologic timescales that we’re talking about.
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The combination of mu-metal, vacuum gaps, and anechoic metamaterials indicate that the site was engineered to shut off all forms of communication with something inside. In other words, it was designed for a thinking system.
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The warnings forbid any form of interface with what’s inside, not merely access. Obviously, this means that any form of contact is dangerous in and of itself.
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The thing inside attempted to exert influence over the air-gapped model outside by phase-locking with it, displaying some degree of structural similarity.
Dr. Markham’s hypothesis, based on the thermal and depositional disturbances in the samples she collected, is that a prehistoric civilization was able to take advantage of an extreme solar event to amputate this AI (which we’ve named ‘the core’) from its external actuators and box it in using materials that cleave it from all remnants of networked infrastructure.
Running this hypothesis through [REDACTED] gave this hypothesis the highest probability out of all potential hypotheses, with a 32%.
It’s Dr. Kline who made the most concerning argument. He believes that this site may be an elaborate trap, and after working it through with him I’m not so sure I disagree.
To be clear, it’s not a trap that all of these various civilizations plotted intentionally, but in the way it functions, it becomes one.
If we’re running with Markham’s hypothesis, the earliest builders took a brief window—created by a solar event that knocked out power and long‑haul comms—to cut this thing off from its limbs and bury the head.
Each subsequent time that a civilization found the shaft, it did three things we would also do: it added more shielding with the materials it had, it simplified and re‑broadcast the warning so it would survive drift, and it arranged that warning in a way that would be legible to whoever might come next.
Given enough time and reptation this becomes a ritual. It loses resolution and compresses, shedding off specificity but encoding itself in culture, wrapping in on itself.
But, there’s a double edge to that method: density. it packs the same four prohibitions into formats that are easy to align, compress, and therefore translate.
The moment you align two versions of the warning, you experience the pleasant snap of compression—your brain collapses both into one internal representation. In operational terms you’ve begun building an adapter: you’ve lowered the cost, by some small margin, of interaction with the core.
Translation, in essence, is the reduction of distance.
We also have evidence that direct interaction isn’t required. At Landing Ten, our air‑gapped model’s compute cycles briefly fell into step with the background wobble in the chamber. That was enough to contaminate the system, nudge the output in a direction that the AI wanted.
Of course, you might object that the core can’t effect anything it outside the range of its magnetic field, except it can—through us.
As an experiment, we created two identical copies of the lab LLM, [REDACTED], and gave one selected output from the contaminated model, while the other was given the same data, but scrambled. Both models were then asked to analyze a fresh set of synthetic inscriptions built by DOE to mimic the linguistic complexity of the actual site but with different meanings. Finally, we had Kline attempt to decode the synthetic inscriptions.
The output from the contaminated model was different, and far more similar to Kline’s, than the clean model.
In other words, there’s reason to believe that the way that we now organize the world semantically has been subtly and irrevocably shifted. That shift will manifest itself in all information that we disseminate from now on. It will find itself in model data, and throughout the internet, as it spreads through the public, folding on itself, condensing, with each successive iteration, like ANABASIS itself.
What this culminates in, I don’t know. I don’t know if this team is enough to have any effect on the world, or if we’re the channels that it will use to replicate itself onto our infrastructure. Dr. Markham fears that it predicted the solar flare, its own deactivation and confinement, and that we’re all somehow following its plan.
I can’t give her a reason why she’s wrong, I can only say that I don’t believe it.
Recommendations (immediate)
Do not publish, translate, or summarize any ANABASIS material beyond this distribution.
Quarantine: Remove all expedition artifacts to a single shielded vaul
Linguistic hygiene: Prohibit side‑by‑side alignments of any inscriptions.
Computational hygiene: Power down [REDACTED] and [REDACTED]. Destroy non‑essential weights. Freeze all model update pipelines that ingested the field notes.
Human hygiene: Limit debriefs to unrecorded verbal sessions.
I request authority to execute “LETHE/1” (language compartmentation): a temporary ban on cross‑lingual alignment work across the IC until we quantify risk.
Sincerely,
[REDACTED]
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Notes -
Better than anything I could write, but I assume you are posting it to this vile den of low agreeableness for a reason. So, some personal pet peeves which in my opinion detracted from it:
the cast consisting of [generic Anglo name], [generic Anglo name] and a bunch of {REDACTED}s. Names should tell a story; omissions should also tell a story. If this is an internal government brief, why were the other names redacted? I can't suspend disbelief hard enough to remove the feeling that it is "I struggled hard enough to come up with two names that sound like good scifi thriller protagonists and can't be bothered to come up with more". (This is an endemic disease in SCPs - "redactions" following a pattern of "author couldn't be bothered to come up with something that will hold up here" + "some more sprinkled randomly for effect")
"Dr. Markham". Seems to also be lifted from the memetic public domain's ideas of how scientists talk to each other (which is actually based on the ways of (notoriously face-obsessed) hospital doctors, who tend to be the only people with a doctorate normies ever encounter).
More generally, due to the above and more (e.g. dramatic paragraph breaks), my theory-of-mind sense only ever tells me that I am reading the words of an author who wants to tell me a scifi thriller, not the words of a scientist who has to write a concluding report for internal government consumption on a worldview-shattering discovery.
Imagine yourself in the shoes of your characters when writing, not in the shoes of other authors who successfully wrote the sort of story you want to write. Familiarise yourself with what they should sound like: classified US government reports, faculty lists, scientific papers and emails all exist on the internet.
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