Memory in stone. A book the mountain keeps.

3 September 1984, nineteen days before the extraction. A polished disc of synthetic quartz, 100 millimetres by 10, placed on the cell floor. 14-Alpha sat palms-down. For four minutes the thoracic emission shifted to a narrow band at 2.3 megahertz — the resonator frequency — pulsed at about 47,000 times a second, transmitted only through the disc. Then the subject stood and went back to concrete. Three months of X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy: the lattice was not damaged. It was written. Silicon and oxygen atoms displaced 0.02 to 0.15 angstroms from equilibrium, in a three-dimensional array the Soviet crystallographer called periodic and non-random.

YMA-008 is the same phenomenon at artefact scale: 15 by 10 by 2 centimetres of optical-grade quartz, recovered 40 metres from the collapse, not from the body. Data written before the Soviet disc. Theoretical density: planetary biological history. Contents inaccessible. The compiler cannot read it. The compiler knows it is a book.