The Edicts

Harriet by this time had been treated as the leader of the team due to the fact that she was the one who discovered the alien vessel, thus granting Humanity its hope for future survival. Having discovered the alien legacy, the team had already decided to call in agents and men from the US government, since they had discovered the alien vessel within its land. Thus, the US legally had sole custody of the spacecraft. Harriet's team was instructed to properly organize, categorize and identify the resources and materials comprising the alien legacy as men from the government were on their way to handle the situation. The government had been convinced of the legitimacy of the news due to someone in the team having the foresight to record, in video form, their excavation and subsequently the message given by the alien in the hologram.

The organization of resources didn't take too much time for the most part - they put a pile of the written data in the form of loose-leaf materials in one area, and then designated another area for digital records consisting of devices similar to smartphones. However, Harriet soon discovered that there were several open mechanical pods that were distinctly more ornate in design compared to the more plain and nondescript pods. Within the more decorated pods contained tablets made of a strange rocky mineral. Written on these tablets were, shockingly, words in the various native tongues of nations all over the world. Harriet quickly called her team over and they quickly discovered that they all shared something in common - they were titled as "Edicts" in the language they were written in, and they took the name of either powerful historical figures or characters from myth and legends.

The Edicts didn't seem to say anything meaningful compared to the data and information they organized earlier. However, it seemed that they possessed a sort of alluring gravitas, one that would convince you that holding it could give you great strength. Despite this, nobody in the team could understand anything more than the literal things written on each tablet. Harriet's team happened to be rather diverse, so instead of handing all of the Edicts over to the government, each one decided to keep one of the tablets - depending on the languages they could read. Naturally, Harriet took the tablet written in traditional Chinese - the Edict of the Yellow Emperor.

Harriet's colleagues began to keep a tablet for themselves. Evgenia Sokolov took the Edict of Ivan the Terrible, written in Russia. Adrian Anastas took the Edict of Zeus, written in Greek. Eun-Kyung Jung took the Edict of Mireuk, written in Korean. Yukiko Yanase took the Edict of Amaterasu, written in Japanese. Two of the tablets were written in English. One of them was from Great Britain, Alan Grove, who kept the Edict of Victoria. The final tablet was the Edict of Washington, which everyone unanimously agreed they WOULD surrender to the US government, to avoid suspicion that there was more than one tablet, and to see if they could eventually get information on the meaning behind each of their tablets in the future.

Little would they know that it would only be many, many years into the future when their descendants would unlock the secret behind the Edicts...