With the North Atlantic's advancement above the natural fall line during previous 25 years, the ArchExp TG #2 abandoned it's dig at the suspected Old Fort Sumter site this year. The site, located near the village of the same name, yielded little evidence of being associated with the mythical Fort at the enterance to a great harbor.

     The long, narrow, lime based, artificial rocks extended over two miles in length but proved to be of little use as boat and ship ramps from land into the ocean. The ancient inhabitants built the things too flat, or too short, or too far from deep waters, and were situated such that the ramps were either dry or flooded by the tides.

     It was postulated that they were used for ship maintanence rather than actual load and unload facilities. Considering the shallowness of water at high tide such vessels would have been wide, long, flatbottoms and not suited for ocean travel. It was estimated that such vessels would have been 10 times wider than the artifical rock base we found. This contradiction leads us to believe the Old Fort Sumter site built for other uses.

     The local villagers told folklore stories of airships. These vehicles supposedly traveled in the air, at great speeds, and required long stretchs of flat rocks to get up and down. The dig did find locations, which contained iron and aluminium oxides, scattered about near the artifical rocks. This is comparable to finding fossilized bone except it's metal residue. Yeah sure, flying metal.

     One other folklore picked up during the expeditions' stay was that Old Sumter, the village, was once known as New Sumter. This suggests there was a previous Fort Sumter farther back in time. Included in the lore were stories of retreating inland before advancing floods. This suggests the original Fort Sumter may be under the Atlantic somewhere.

     Anyway, the bottom line is the site proved to be a bust in the search for the mythical Fort Sumter and great harbor. It's two fathoms under low tide waters as well now. It is recommended by this TG leader that the people over in CCC & OT's history research department re-evaluate the records for the location of the fort and harbor. Considering the reason for abandoning this site, the advancing tide line, I suggest they look about 200 klics to the Southeast, out in the Atlantic and a couple 100 meters down.

     ArchExp TG #2 bushwacked inland about 75 klics toward the Northwest, ten days of wacking away at lowland shrubs. As we gained a few tens of meters in elevation during the last couple of days, the shrubs gaveway to a broad leaf, creeping vine. I recognized it from a previous expedition, about 20 years ago to the highlands of the Picknesnese regions, and really didn't expect to find it this far Southeast. Or, at least not find it as dense as it has become. It's called Kudzu. Someone back at the CCC & OT home office needs to seriously think about starting up a research group into this vine. I have a feeling it's going to be a problem in the future. But that's not the new discovery.

     We were making out way upgrade and just had reached the crest of a ridge when I tripped over a rock hidden underneath all the big leaves. I got up, cursed a few choice words and kicked it. The damn thing didn't budge, I badly bruised a couple of toes, and let out some more choice words and phrases.

     Upon closer inspection I saw that it wasn't a rock but a perfectly, spherical, metal ball. Curiousity got the better of us and we decided to do a quick dig; it was late afternoon anyway and time to camp for the night. We cleared the Kudzu away, about a 40 meter square around the ball, and set up the camp. As we sat around the campfire and swapped stories and theories of CCC we heard in the background, among the moving shadows of leaves in the wind, a slow stretching sound. Kind of weird, but we went on to our tents and sleeping bags.

     The next morning, after an early breakfast, we started the dig. A few of us kept glancing around during the progress, there was some sense of the cleared area not being as big as we remembered it from the afternoon before. But anyway, we dug.

     We soon learned the ball sat atop a metal pole, not having any other plans we just followed the pole down. About a meter beneath the surface we discovered four metal rings, brass I think, with reminants of fibre, some 20th century, man-made fibre, I think again. We recorded the find and bagged the artifacts for home office analysis.

     A few more centimeters down the pole we made the next find, we actually had to widen the bore diameter by a couple of meters to uncover it. Attached to the pole, by some sort of metal differential weld, was a 2 by 3 meter sheet of titantium. Not a sheet of steel or aluminium with a molecular covering of titantium but a solid 3 mm thick sheet of the pure stuff.

     It wasn't pure white either, like the processed metal. It had a design on it, or I should say incorporated into it, which was reminescent of the flags and banners of the Middle Ages. There were no traces of surface pigments, whatever process was used to make the metal also processed the coloring into the metal. The design was basically red with two blue strips diagonally between the corners. The blue strips contained 13 white stars, seven along each strip with a common one at the interesection.

     We made some attempts to detach the artifact from the pole but all efforts failed. Even our arc-laser cutting torches wouldn't put a scratch in that metal pole. The CCC & OT physics office is going have fun with this one. That was fortunate for us field people anyway, there's no way we would have backpacked that big sheet of deadweight through the kudzu.

     Someone suggested we dig up the whole pole instead, so we proceeded with the excavating. About 5 meters below the surface we found it's mount. It was attached to what we eventually learned was the dome of a building. I'll just skip over the details of that part of the excavation. It basically involved one of the TG members jumping up and down on the borehole floor in frustration and sliding down an avalanche of material into the cavernous structure. The roof caved in so to speak.

     So much for what was suppose to be just a quick, morning dig. It was late afternoon by the time we got our co-worker back out. With his first reports of what else lay buried, we decided to spend a few days here. As the chuck wagon cook was preparing the evening meal I took a walk-about around the cleared out area. For some reason I was getting claustrophobic.

     It was then that I learned our 40 meter square had shrunk by about a 1/2 meter on each side. The new growth on the kudzu vines actually appeared to be snaking its way across the ground in the dusk of the evening. I alerted the rest of the TG and we cut back another 5 meters around the perimeter. Yep, the CCC & OT home office has another problem to deal with now. I think there's suppose to be an outpost in the Southwest that specializes in out-of-control vegetation.

     Over the next few days we explored the underground building and its contents. The depth beneath the surface suggests it's been buried some 200 years, though I'm not sure how to factor in the continuing overgrowth by the kudzu. Maybe it's been only 75 years. But there's a contradiction with it's interior design, which suggests a nineteenth century period. Again I'll just skip over the details, this site will have to be done in detail by a permanent ArchExp Task Group. We have an underground city here that just has to be dug up.

     On the lowest level of the building, down in the sub-basement, we found a small room, someone's office space in a forgotten corner of the huge stucture. It was fairly plain, a desk, chair, computer, printer and other related items. Oh yeah, the place was at least used during the later 23rd century according to the vintage of the hardware. At the back of the room was a set of double doors, these lead us into a medium size storage area. It's here that we found the file cabinets, antiquated, filing cabinets full of papers, lots of them.

     I randomly picked through some of the files. The paper, if you wanted to call it that, is amazingly fresh and new to the feel for it to be so old. They, whoever they were, wanted permenance with what they wrote. I eventually figured out the filing system and then chose a sampling from a few of the cabinets. These I took back to the old desk and chair to read. Sitting there in that darkened room, deep underground, with only the helmet lamp to see by felt down right erie.

     Here are some exerpts from the sampling.

     "January 2099. It's all too much like the past again too in other areas. The popular talk is about when the change in centuries actually happens, first of next year or the year after. There's the ever present media hype about computer date gliches. There were three rollovers from previous fixes this century, the fourth happens at the end of this year. There's the usual end of the century review talk too, all the major events being replayed, over and over and over again. The oil reserves peeked out about 2065, the consumption rate hasn't let up though and they're expected to go dead dry next. The world population reached 12 billion about the same time too, it's pretty much leveled off though. The anti-genetic modification groups bought up all the gene patents are still holding them hostage. There'll be no new foodstuffs from that area. Oh by the way, it's that flag thing again too, started up 5 year ago. It's been 100 years since the seige began. The boycotting and counter boycotting has spread to other states. It's not only about the flag thing either, other special interest groups have followed the trend. Neither side has budged off the line either. The pro flag group installed the titantum flag in 2062, some sort of 200 year anniversay of it's creation. The con flag group countered with boycott of the metalworkers union since they were the ones who did the work. The estimated loss in tourism to the state was pretty much balanced by the increase in metallurgical research industry that moved in to develop the process involved in making the flag. There's a few reports of a few dozen politicians and newspaper executives made enough off the deal to retire to the South Pacific islands."

     "July 2135. Three more spent fuel, temporary storage facilities failed this year; one was the abandoned Keowee station. I found the news article for when it was closed in 2050. The application for its second license renewal was rejected then and the site was left as is pending federal plans for proper shut down processes. They never materialized due to the contracted linguists' inabilty to predict what language signs would be properly interpertted 20,000 years into the future. From some reports discovered in the basement of the archives over on the Relics Building this debate was continued into the early part of this century, circa 2105. There were some suggestions of surrounding the site with that flag symbol since most everyone tends to shy away from being anywhere near it these past few years. But the anti-flag group rejected that idea on the grounds such a display would promote the site as a tourist attraction. I'm not sure the flag thing would have worked out anyway. The States Rights versus Federal Rights continuum, SRFR theory, appears to go back to the later part of the 18th century. It would have been a battle on into the 200th century over who had the right to shutdown the site."

     "December 2222. There was some kind of 2's compliment strategy worked out for the date rollover problem about 100 years ago. Well, that plays out at the end of the month and now it's pandemonium spreading around the world. This really makes no sense at all since the interconnectivity of the world's computers failed ten years ago. It went down like this. I found the January 2099 entry of one of my predecesors who made note of metallurgical research done in the middle part of that century. I finally traced the records of that research to an underground vault beneath the spent fuel facility at the OK nuke station. Retrieving those records wasn't easy at all. The StatRigters have had the perimeter of the old site guarded by two of the State's armies. Some sort of States' security issue. The FedRighters have the aforementioned armies surrounded claiming it was a Federal Regulated site and is really their property. The residual radiation from the 2135 storage failure is still high and I'll be dead in a couple of weeks. Just mark it up as dedication to The Cause and another statistic of the Savannah River Basin Disaster. Anyway. The process in developing the titantium colors consummed a substantial proportion of the world's reserve of the same element used in the process to manufacture the gold-platinium-copper wire alloy. It was discovered this GPC alloy was critically required in order to make the ultra high broadband, bandwidth interconnectivity work. No element, no GPC, no UHBBs, no world wide computer interconnectivity. So what's the date rollover problem? It's in the H-O fuel cell converters, the replacement energy source for all the defunct nuclear stations and fossil fuel burners. The timing chips used in the fuel cells came out shortly after the 2's compliment strategy. The theory then was there'll be some new alternative engergy source before the bug bit.

     "April 2265. It's that flag thing again. There have been rumors floating around for a couple of years that a deal had been made. It basically reduced down to the flag stays, it and all other symbols get buried. The melting of the ice caps has taken care of all the coastal areas anyway. Port Charles went under 125 years ago, the tide line is about 25 klics from New Sumter now. The Fed-District, Richmond, Orleans, Mobile, Savannah all went during the same period as well. Most all the other deserted cities still above the tide line are to be buried, Richmond, Columbia, Athens, Montgomery and Atlanta with all their flags in place. There's a special piece of Fed-Legislation to be passed which will all one sample of geniticaly modified material into the country. It's a growth accellerator that's been used in EuroAsia for 200 years to grow foodstuffs for the population there. Here it's just for the kudzu vine only, what does and doesn't get buried by water or earth gets grown over. It appears all traces of the past 400 years are to be erased from memory. Some sort of no symbols equates to no debates theory. Still I'm not convinced the powers that still exist haven't discovered the break-in at OK nuke in 2222. Perhaps they have found us out, along with all the other links we've developed between that flag issue and the world's current state of disorder. Since it's impossible to remove these records without arousing additional suspicion, the home office has decided to leave everything. It'll just be another state office space buried along with all the others."

     I read the last words again and again then looked up at the half opened door. I walked over to it and studied carefully the lettering on the glass. With my helmet lamp I could make out the faded words.

     "SC Office of Studies in Catastrophic Civilization Collaspe and Origins Thereof"