Imagine it’s the future.
Paleographers at Harvard III University (New Earth) today announced a major breakthrough in their ongoing attempt to decipher the so-called “Trump Stone,” an enigmatic series of seemingly unrelated messages inscribed on magnetic media.
The ancient container was discovered among other relics at an underwater site on Old Earth by a team of worker bots. The building at the excavation was previously thought to have served as a prison, due to the shoddiness of its construction and its indifference to aesthetics. However, recent scholarship posits that the structure was used as ordinary (rather than punitive) housing, and that the vulgar decor was in fact a distinguishing characteristic of the epoch. Most experts agree that the inhabitants were likely small-brained, morbidly obese early humans featuring bright orange skin sparsely decorated with straw-colored synthetic hair. As we know, this primitive warlike tribe has been termed “Trumps,” derived from “Trump Tower” found inscribed on a large plasticine stele close to the underwater site.
For years scholars have attempted, without success, to translate the obscure, seemingly often incoherent dialect found on the Trump Stone. Much like other relics from the period, such as the Rosetta Stone, the Trump Stone offers different versions of the same text, in this case one in standard binary and the other in a demotic language called “AI.” But there has been until now very little progress unlocking the translation. That changed with the unearthing at Temple X of what Old Earth scholars are calling the Musk Stone.
“We are pleased to announce today the preliminary results of our comparison of the Trump and Musk Stones,” said Professor Rock E. Raccoon at a press conference this morning. “These results, while incomplete and certainly not fully understood, nevertheless advance our understanding of post-Cheesecake Factory civilization on Old Earth far beyond what we have been able to deduce previously.”
Professor Raccoon went on to say that while his team was still struggling with some of the religious and culinary jargon contained on both stones, his confidence in the partial translations (example below) is “very strong.”
A side-by-side comparison of a sample translation on the Trump and Musk Stones:
Trump Stone: “Open the fuckin strait you crazy bastards.”
Musk Stone: “Poop emoji, crying laughing emoji.”
Brief yet compelling, these messages retain a sense of urgency that calls to us over the chasm of space/time. Although it’s now impossible at this great remove—two million years after the premature end of the Trumps—accurately to date the stones, we are looking at a primitive culture. We are unsure whether they would have properly venerated the Who as the prophets of rock society, or adopted the Beatle nomenclature system. Unlike our present day New Earth civilization, where daily life is guided by the collected sayings of Lennon and McCartney and we have long realized that love is all you need and silly love songs are the highest form of art, it seems that the Trumps were a bunch of real nowhere men. And possibly women, although the exact number of genders among the Trumps is still a matter of debate.
We cannot judge an ancient society by present-day standards, however, as we all know that everybody’s got something to hide except for me and my monkey.
Though we may never understand exactly what “crying laughing emoji” means, the author of the Musk Stone seemed to be expressing deep grief at the death of someone or something very close to it, possibly a trained mammal not unlike a walrus, which were commonly kept as pets in even less-affluent households under the Apple oligarchs. Similarly, the Trump Stone author’s reference to a “strait” that is not “open” and subsequently calling for the aid of “crazy bastards” puts one in mind of the Idiots of Grunge, who had a habit of anthropomorphizing guitar pedals.
If nothing else, we hope that further study will reveal an explanation of what the term “poop” might mean. Best guess, for now, according to the experts, is a kind of shellfish. Probably delicious.