Rob just sent me this transcript of a text chat we had the other day. I was going to let him leak it, but he’s still setting up his own blog.

Bob Kruger
12/5, [4:04pm PST] 7:04pm EST
When I was ten, my elderly cousin put something in my hand that she had found in the Montana wheat fields as a girl. She told me I could have it if I could tell her what it was.

It was a trilobite fossil.

And I told her so.

And I have it.

Rob Furey
12/5, 7:05pm EST
Was she angry?

Bob Kruger
12/5, 7:06pm
No, she was fine with it. She was impressed how much biology I knew.
She had a master’s in marine biology from UW, back in the 20s.
She lived in Billings, and young Bob Knievel was in her class.
She said he was a naughty kid.

Rob Furey
12/5, 7:08pm
Well . . . Evel . . .

Bob Kruger
12/5, 7:10pm
I recently picked up the trilobite, and polished it on my shirt. A flake of the shale came off, and there was something stuck underneath, a small piece of metal.

I pried it out, and looked at it under my daughter’s microscope.

It’s a tiny cylinder of some kind. It’s says “DNA Storage” on the side.

Rob Furey
12/5, 7:13pm
That’s weird. There are a few anachronisms like that showing up, you know? The spark plug found in the geode and those Moab skeletons? And not too long ago they found a Swiss watch in some Chinese tomb still sealed after centuries.

Bob Kruger
12/5, 7:15pm
“DNA” wasn’t a term until the fifties. She found this before WWI. I think it’s an artifact as old as the trilobite.

Rob Furey
12/5, 7:16pm
Could be. The trilobite might be the time stamp for a 350 million year old artifact. But then the artifact might be time stamping the fossil and making it less than a 100 years old.

Bob Kruger
12/5, 7:18pm
Maybe we can tell by what’s inside. Can you get someone to try to open it and study what’s inside?

Rob Furey
12/5, 7:20pm
Yeah. I can do the basic stuff or send it upstairs if it gets too weird.

Bob Kruger
12/5, 7:21pm
What if it’s the trilobite genome? It would be possible to deduce, right? You could match it to other arthropod sequences.

Rob Furey
12/5, 7:21pm
Yeah, if it is trilobite stuff we can make a case.

Bob Kruger
12/5, 7:23pm
And what if there’s a hidden message in the DNA along with the trilobite? That would put them both at the same time period.

Rob Furey
12/5, 7:26pm
If there’s DNA in there with an encoded hidden message I’ll already be amazed, no matter how old it is. Send it. I’ll prep the lab space.

Bob Kruger
12/5, 7:29pm
Thanks. I’ll put it in a glass vial and hire a courier service.

If there’s actual DNA in there and it’s trilobite DNA, this could change our understanding of the Conspiracy. I always thought that the earth would have to be a copy from the time of the first Singularity, that is, in the mid- to late-twenty-first century. Before then, the technology didn’t exist to make a copy. The trilobite DNA would have been as long-lost on the progenitor earth as on ours, which means that if this is trilobite DNA, it’s either a high-tech fake…

Or the first human Singularity was not the original Singularity.