A Million Little Pieces Of My Mind

February 2027

Bradley Hunter stepped off his plane into the Cairo airport, with legs stiffened after the five-hour flight from Heathrow, and his cellphone aimed at his face. "Cairo at last!" he enthused. "Next stop, my hotel; and then, after a shower and a nap, the Great Pyramid. Let's see what the evidence actually says."

He continued recording as Cairo International sold him his visa at a bank window in the arrivals hall—a sticker, twenty-five dollars American, slid across the counter by a man who never once looked up—and Bradley carried it to the passport queue with the particular care of somebody who has read four separate advisories about the precise ways this transaction can go wrong. "So far, so good! I've got my visa now! So what could go wrong?" He always added such foreboding comments in his videos, just in case something did. He could always edit the forewarning out later.

The customs declaration asked whether he was carrying antiquities. He stared at the box for a moment, trying not to look suspicious.

Technically, no. What was in his carry-on, wrapped in a hiking sock and then in a fleece, was a small clay figure he had bought for eleven pounds off a dealer on Museum Street the day before, while laying over at Heathrow, where he had spent two nights as a way of recuperating after the even longer ten-hour flight from Phoenix. He had spent a whole day at the British Museum, and walking a half-mile radius around it in the shops that sold Roman coins in blister packs and Victorian door keys labeled as medieval. A dealer had kept it in a tray with three soapstone seals and a plastic Anubis, priced like the souvenir it almost certainly was. But, as a graduate with a Bachelor's in archaeology, he strongly suspected it was genuine. Still, he didn't know otherwise.

Phone still recording, he asked the customs officer, "I have a photo of my grandmother. Does that count?"

The officer made a face like, I never heard that one before, and shook his head. So Bradley ticked no, and went through, and nobody asked, and the entire potential dishonesty took nine seconds.

Then, in the arrivals hall, with the doors going and the hard white light coming up off the floor, he propped the phone on his bag, framed himself against the crowd, and did it in one take, because he always did it in one take.

"Okay. So." Grinning. Genuinely grinning—that part was never fake, which was exactly what made the rest of it work. "Cairo. Six months, one dissertation, and a whole lot of extremely confident people on the internet who are going to be so annoyed about the footnotes. Let's go see what the evidence actually says."

Forty seconds. He watched it back once, decided it was fine, and did not consciously register what he was looking at, because he had been looking at it for four years: the Bradley in the video was cheerful and certain and liked people. The Bradley holding the phone had just possibly lied on a government form about the object in his bag and was standing in an airport in a country where he knew, by name, nobody at all. Both of them were him. Only one of them had, not only a social media presence, but an actual Silver Play Button from YouTube for having a little over 100,000 subscribers. (110,027, as of his last inspection, one minute earlier.)

Outside it was seventy degrees and the color of weak tea, February in a city that, like Phoenix, did not particularly do winter. He recorded himself getting into a cab, and the driver asking in accented English what he did. Bradley used the opportunity to explain to both the driver and newcomers to his channel that he was a doctoral candidate in Egyptology, and that he was in Cairo to do fieldwork on the Great Pyramid, if he could get permission from the great Dr. Hawass to explore the newly-discovered section; his intention being to make a video that would be the definitive answer to the question of whether the Great Pyramid was built by aliens, Atlantis, or a vanished high-technology civilization. "Spoiler alert! it wasn't. But let's see what the evidence actually says!"

As they continued on to his hotel, he stopped recording, did a quick edit right in his phone, and uploaded it to his channel. That was his public persona letting his fans know he had arrived. His private persona had no need to tell anyone that he'd landed. His parents had been dead four years. It took a year before he stopped catching himself about to text them his arrivals, people whose numbers he hadn't yet had the strength to remove from his phone. He had also stopped going to the little Evangelical church they adored, stopped pretending he'd ever gone for any reason but theirs, and discovered that the guilt he had braced himself for never actually turned up—which was its own small unsettling piece of information about himself, filed with the rest of the things he had never once said aloud to anybody.

As the possessor of a modestly succesful YouTube/TikTok outlet for his videos, he was pulling in a little over $1,000 a month from ad revenue, which was enough to pay for his modest hotel. And, knowing that trip videos always did better, he had high hopes for this series. The trick was to post little tantalizing shorts of 5 minutes or so daily (or hourly!), and then a longer, more detailed video once a week.

At his hotel at last, he gratefully took one look at the bathroom, tested the tap, set out his extra cameras in likely spots, and began to record. "So the bathroom here is pretty different from what I'm used to back in the States. The shower's basically just a tiled corner with a drain in the floor—no big enclosure—and the water pressure kind of does its own thing. The water's safe for washing, but I keep seeing people online warn don't shower with your mouth open because visitors sometimes get stomach issues from swallowing it, so yeah…I'm keeping my lips sealed like I'm guarding the Epstein files. There's also a handheld bidet hose next to the toilet, which is totally normal here, and honestly the whole setup works fine once you get used to the local style." He winked. "So I'm told!"

He then stipped, his back to the camera, and took a long shower, carefully keeping his mouth closed. His cameras were set up to record only from the waste up, so he didn't have to worry about nudity getting his channel demonetized. Why bother at all? Because so-called thirst traps sell a channel like no other; and both women and gay guys seemed to enjoy any glimpse they could get of his fit, hairy, ginger chest and beard. Besides, on more than one occasion, he'd been lucky enough to hook up with a couple of the guys. So, there was that.

Now it was time to get down to business. He unwrapped the antique, possibly smuggled, figure, and set it on the sill where the light off the wall could reach it. Then he opened his laptop and sent the email, written during his flight, to the Ministry of Antiquities, and the office of the man who was possibly the least reachable person in Egypt.

Then he recorded himself saying goodnight to his channel while jumping into bed; then getting up, turing off the cameras, plugging everything in for charging, turning off the lights, and, finally, going to sleep…while gazing at his possibly antique, possibly smuggled, figure on the sill.

April 2027

Dr. Hawass was not going to be easy to reach, given that last year's "great discovery" was probably taking up more of his time now that it had been announced than it had when he was actually making it. Bradley filled in the time with visits to everything in the area, recording it all. But now he had a tantalizing thread in the series: Would he get to meet Dr. Hawass at all?

By the third week Bradley had stopped emailing and started simply showing up. He even posted videos of himself doing it, hoping to catch the great man either coming or going, or even having him notice the videos on line and actually come out to meet him! It was like last years' videos of the missing (dead) Mitch McConnell house watch. Would McConnell come out or not? Would Hawass come out or not?

It never worked. It was, he understood intellectually, an insane way to try to meet a man—loitering outside a building in Zamalek with a laptop bag and a camera, hoping to be noticed by someone whose entire staff existed to make sure people like him didn't get through—but the emails had stopped generating even auto-replies, and Bradley had run out of better ideas.

He understood why, in the abstract. The corridor behind the Great Pyramid's north face—thirty meters of it, found with cosmic-ray imaging, announced the year before with rather more fanfare than an archaeological result normally gets in a decade—had turned out to be the beginning of the work rather than the end of it. What was on the far side of the door at the end of it was still being argued about, in public and at volume, by every person in Egyptology with a name worth printing or a channel worth following. Zahi Hawass had not had an uncommitted hour in eighteen months.

Bradley had read the releases, of course; so many times he could recite them in Hawass's own cadence. He was, on paper, exactly the person this news should have been good for—a doctoral candidate one year into a dissertation built entirely around explaining, patiently and with citations, why the Great Pyramid did not require aliens, Atlantis, or a vanished high-technology civilization to account for itself. In practice it meant nobody with the authority to give him ten minutes, had ten minutes.

His advisor at ASU called it, not unkindly, "the world's most oversubscribed rebuttal." Every few years some new author repackaged the same claims Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin had been making since Bradley's parents were young—the pyramids were too precise, too old, too aligned with something, to have been built by the people who were credited with them—and every few years a new crop of undergraduates showed up in office hours having just watched a documentary about it. Bradley's dissertation existed to be the boring, well-cited answer nobody wanted. He had come to Cairo to make it a good one. He had not expected the single most photogenic pharaoh in the field to go and get himself an actual mystery just as Bradley was starting his own fieldwork.

What he had, instead of access, was his channel. TheGingerArchaeologist had started in his second year as his answer to what all his freidns were doing: becoming influencers. Fifteen minutes a week, decent lighting, a whiteboard, Bradley taking apart one popular impossible claim per episode and showing his work all the way down. 110,027 subscribers, which was 110,027 more people than had read his prospectus. He had not stopped making them, and his Boomer instructors didn't even know they existed.

He was leaning against the Ministry's fence, not quite loitering, definitely loitering, when a man with a camera bag asked, in American-accented English, if he had a light.

"Don't smoke," Bradley said, and looked up, and reconsidered the man with the camera bag. Not press—he had that look, the credential-lanyard, three-body-bags-of-equipment look, but no lanyard. Older than Bradley by fifteen years or so, sunburned in the specific way of someone who worked outdoors for a living rather than went on vacation. "Sorry," he shrugged

"No trouble." The man put the cigarette back in his shirt pocket unlit. "Say, aren't you that Brad guy, the one who does the videos? TheGingerArchaeologist?"

Bradley immediately puffed up into his professional persona. "I am!" he said. "And you…"

"Tom Stevens," the man said, grinning. "I do photography for a living. I actually thought of starting a channel myself, but I don't have the patience for it. You do a good job, though." He paused, and nodded toward the Ministry. "You still haven't gotten in to see Hawass, huh?"

Bradley shook his head. "I'm about to give up," he admitted. "I can still go over the old stuff, of course, but this new discovery is what my viewers want to know about."

Stevens looked him over appraisingly. "Y'know…Hawass isn't the only person in Egypt who deals with new discoveries. There are actually individuals, wealthy guys, who fund their own digs, and they have to get the same permits as you do."

Bradley's jawed dropped. "There are?"

"In fact," Stevens said, "I happen to work for one. Fellow named Marquette. You ever heard of him?"

Bradley shook his head.

"You should meet. I've actually made a possibly interesting discovery of my own, from examining some satellite imagery, and Marquette's already putting together a team to go check it out. He doesn't have a real archaeologist on the team yet, and he needs one. You'd be perfect for it."

Bradley was so taken aback he forgot to start recording. "Really?"

"Tell you what, I'm supposed to meet him at the Café Riche at 5. It's 4:30, and that's only about a half-hour walk. Why don't you come along? You can meet him, and if you like what you see, you can join the team."

Bradley hesitated. This might be the one afternoon Hawass would show up! But no—there was no point in fooling himself. "You're on!" he said. "Lead the way. Do you mind if I record our walk?"

The man waiting in the historic café was not what Bradley had built in his head from Stevens' description. He'd expected someone who looked like money. Marquette looked like nothing so much as a man who had never once in his life had to consider what he looked like, which Bradley could see was a far more expensive quality than good tailoring…if one didn't care about one's appearance for one's own sake. Fortyish, maybe older, with a vaguely French accent Bradley couldn't place.

"Marquette," he said. "I understand you have a YouTube channel and a bachelor's degree, and are working on your dissertation."

Bradley put his cup down. "That's not really an introduction," he laughed. He couldn't record until he had permission, and besides he wanted to see what Marquette would say next. Because, how did he know? Tom Stevens had been with him since they met, and he hadn't made any phone calls or texts since then. But maybe Marquette, too, was a fan.

"I imagine Tom has told you about his discovery. A previously unknown pyramid, a duplicate of Giza's own Great Pyramid, in the middle of the desert. I have a team going to check it out, and I need an archaeologist to go with them, to give it legitimacy.

"Wouldn't you rather have someone who's already got their doctorate, and a reputation?"

"Of course!" Marquette said enthusiastically…so enthusiastically that Bradley wondered if he might not be a little autistic. "But they're all busy with Hawass' new discovery, or not on the continent, or not interested in going to Chad."

"Chad? Chad who?" Bradley asked in confusion. Marquette stared at him as if wondering if Bradley was the right man after all.

"Chad—the country next door to Egypt. Used to be part of Egypt, back in the day."

Bradley slapped his forehead with his palm. "Oh…that Chad!"

"There is a caldera in northern Chad," Marquette continued, and opened his laptop, which had been sitting, closed, in front of him. The screen lit and showed an image. Not a photograph, but a public satellite image of a caldera, a crater in the desert. The image was in false color, and the crater floor was marked. Two shapes on the crater floor were picked out in thin machine-drawn red. "Stevens found this. He gets hold of the satellite data, and he runs it through an AI model that looks for anomalies. Exciting stuff!"

Bradley looked at the sheet for a good deal longer than he meant to.

"I am not an archaeologist," Marquette said. "I have no interest in becoming one. But I'm not stupid. I have learned that when a man like me announces a discovery it is a curiosity. A rich man's story. It runs in the section of the paper with the horoscopes, and doesn't enrich anyone." He let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. "When a man with a university behind him announces it, it is a discovery. That is the whole of what I am buying, Mr. Hunter. Not your labor. Not even your expertise, particularly, though I expect it to be useful. Your name underneath it, and your face saying the words. And, by all means, your viewers!"

"But…then, what do you get out of it?"

Marquette sat back with a satisfied grin. "Currently, the Trou au Natron caldera belongs to the government of Chad, with special considerations given to the Toubou people, its traditional innhabitants. But, if this pyramid turns out to actually exist and not just be an AI fantasy, that will change! People from all over the world will want to see it; and that will mean hotels, restaurants, tours, developments! None of that is allowed now, but the discovery will force the government to adapt!

"And what becomes of the Toubou?"

"It'll be great for them! It will mean jobs! Hotels need maids, you know. Restaurants need cooks and wait staff."

"What do they do now?" Bradley asked.

"Oh, herding some kind of animals, I imagine. Probably goats, they have a lot of goats in Africa. I don't know why. Nasty animals."

Bradley forced an unshocked laugh. "And if this pyramid turns out to be nothing?"

"Then you've spent three weeks in Chad instead of Cairo, and you can go back to disproving Sitchin with a better travel story." Marquette stood, which Bradley understood only later was the entire negotiation ending on Marquette's terms, not his. "But it isn't nothing, Mr. Hunter. And would you rather be the man who found something than the man who spent his whole career explaining, very correctly, why nobody else had?"

Bradley had to agree with that. "When are you planning to leave? And what would you need of me?"

"Soon," Marquette replied. "Actually, now that we have our archaeologist, we could leave in two days. Tom has already arranged for the equipment, and has contacts with Toubou porters. Without goats. And all we need from you is you, and your recording equipment and talent and audience, and your degree. Your expenses will all be covered. And if the pyramid works out, your doctorate will be handed to you on a silver—no, a platinum platter!"

An older person might have hesitated. Might have looked this gift horse in the mouth. Might have wondered if there wasn't some kind of ulterior motive.

But Bradley was, proudly, Gen-Z. Open hearted, open minded, open to adventure and open to unexpected offerings thrown at him by the Universe.

Plus, it would make for compelling video. The Gold Play Button for 1 million subscribers would be his! —Even better than the doctorate!

Marquette closed his laptop, leaned back, and folded his hands in his lap. "Now let me tell you about this trip we're about to make, because this isn't just travel—this is the kind of journey people brag about for the rest of their lives. We start in Cairo, easy enough, hop a flight down to N'Djamena in Chad. From there, things get interesting. We charter a small plane up to Faya-Largeau—that's the gateway to the deep Sahara—and then we take rugged 4x4s straight into the Tibesti Mountains. I'm talking black volcanic ridges, ancient wadis, landscapes that look like Mars. We roll into Bardai, meet our Toubou guides—absolute masters of the desert, I'm told—and then push on toward Trou au Natron itself. The final stretch is on foot or camel, crossing sharp volcanic rock until suddenly you're standing on the rim of this massive white crater, looking down at that natron floor that glows in the sun. It's remote, it's wild, and it's exactly the kind of place where someone like you can make a real impact. If you're up for it, this will be the adventure of a lifetime!"