"Do you ever stop?"
Ethan stepped through the canvas flap to the tent and slid a plate of food onto the table in front of Liora. She barely glanced up, continuing to scrutinize the pages of notes spread across the surface of the rickety card table and compare them to a book open on her lap even as she reached forward to rip off a chunk of the flat bread and fold it into her mouth.
After a few chews, she looked up at Ethan with an intense expression that belied the exhaustion behind her eyes. She swallowed the bite of bread and reached for her canteen.
"I can't," she replied, taking a long sip and setting the canteen aside again. "I am positive I'm onto something. I just have to figure out what it is."
"What you are onto is the beginning of delirium," Ethan said, trying to scoop the notes up into a stack but she stopped him by slamming her hand flat onto the papers.
"I know I'm right, Ethan. Just look. Look at these sketches I made of the new hieroglyphics we found in the pyramid," she held one of the pages of notes out to him, "Now look at the key from what we know about the language from the time that particular pyramid was built. There are at least six distinct hieroglyphs that aren't in the key and that haven't shown up anywhere else."
"That doesn't mean anything, Liora."
"Of course it does," she said, dropping the page back down to the table and turning back to the book in her lap.
Ethan sat down in the chair beside her, careful to tuck his gangly body sideways so that his knees didn't hit the side of the table and send all of her work onto the tarp beneath them. He reached up and moved the camping lantern she was using for light a bit further away from him and rested a hand on the table.
"Liora, you're an Egyptologist. You've been studying the culture for years. That means you know that we didn't just suddenly stumble on a completed key that was like 'Hey, this is our complete written language from the time'. It took extensive studying and investigation to piece together the language and we're still finding ways that it evolved. Just because you found a few hieroglyphs that don't fit into our current understanding of the language doesn't mean that it confirms your theories."
Liora sighed. She had heard all of this so many times before. Ever since she started deeply investigating the link between extraterrestrials and ancient Egyptian culture she had been subjected to a seemingly never-ending onslaught of conversations with colleagues that always balanced somewhere between artificially perky pep talk and condescending mockery. It didn't matter what any of them said, though. Her research was thorough and intensive, and what she found made far more sense to her than some of the explanations other researchers gave.
She picked up the sketches she had made again and stared at the series of markings. As always, her eyes were drawn immediately to two markings that appeared among a block of easily translated hieroglyphics in several places throughout the pyramid. The first of these markings featured interlocking circles, one beneath and to the diagonal of the first. The second looked like a crude pair of hands, wrists touching and fingers turned away from each other, cradling a tiny pyramid of slightly wider and deeper dimensions of the one they explored.
These two markings were the first anomalies Liora had noticed in her investigation of the writings within the recently-discovered pyramids, and the ones that excited her the most when she looked at them. They were nothing like any of the accepted and translated hieroglyphs, and they convinced her that she had discovered a secondary language not written by the human ancient Egyptians, but by extraterrestrial visitors who had come to Earth and shared their technology and culture with the people they encountered.
"It will be sunrise soon and you'll have to start a whole new day of your actual work," Ethan told her, "Don't you think you can at least get a little bit of sleep? I'm really worried about you."
Liora nodded and pushed back from the table, putting the heavy book on top of her notes in case a breeze stirred up. She took the plate of food Ethan had saved her from dinner and stepped out of the tent to breathe in some fresh air. The sky was massive and clear above her and she stared up at it as she finished eating.
"Don't you ever wonder, Ethan?"
"Wonder what?" Ethan asked, his voice sounding strained as he tried to speak through a yawn.
"Why there are so many planets and stars just in this galaxy alone if we are the only creatures in it? It just doesn't make any sense that there is this expansive universe around us and somehow this is the only planet that got any living creatures on it."
Ethan sighed and joined her gaze up at the sky.
"I don't know, Liora. I honestly never really stopped to think about it."
"You should. What if everything that we think we know about the history of the world and all of the cultures in it is wrong? There is so much technology and architecture and signs of cultural interactions that just cannot be explained by our current understandings of the world, but people just ignore it. If more people would choose to be open-minded and look beyond what is spoon-fed from generation to generation maybe we would discover that there is a whole bigger existence out there that is inextricably tied to our history and is the key to our future."
Liora felt Ethan rub her back and without another word he ducked into his tent and zipped the flap closed. She stayed outside a few minutes longer, pondering the stars above her and the shadow of the pyramid where her tent sat. Finally, she felt the ache in the back of her eyes and knew she needed to rest. She placed the plate on the table set in the center of the ring of tents and climbed back into hers, zipping the flap closed and falling back onto her sleeping bag without even bothering to remove her boots.