GELWIN, Praetonuria, Aug. 16 — Police have tentatively identified remains recovered from a mass grave found Thursday by deepwater mining robots two miles beneath the Sierra Nevada Archipelago.
Bodies of 35 mammalian individuals — 14 proto-human adults, 11 children, six canines, and three presumed felines – as well as two long-extinct forms of parrot and a tortoise were perfectly preserved in lead-lined canisters equipped with multiple valves of uncertain function. “They’re in perfect shape, nothing wrong except they’re all dead,” said Inspector-Professor Jules Dacques of the Island Constabulary.
Marcella G. Bender of the Lobachevsky Foundation was effusive after a preliminary examination established that the remains were of a primitive proto-human genus in which the sexes were distinctly separate. “These are the best-preserved bodies from this genus we’ve ever seen,” Dr. Bender exclaimed, using diagrams and primitive visual materials found at the site to explain the function of what appeared to be add-on protuberances.
Documents and other evidence retrieved from the deep-sea operation identify the site as the wreckage of a cryogenic facility similar to other archeological relics of the notorious Age of Denial (roughly corresponding to the great fossil fuel folly of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries BCE).
“These are poignant relics of an era of mass delusion,” said Dr. Kroitzer Szcizcewicz of the Pangaeia Institute in Faux Warsaw, “in particular its final century when mass marketing techniques convinced global societies to invest heavily in their own destruction.” Dr. Szcizcewicz’s popular monograph on this era detailed how cryogenic entrepreneurs exploited the resulting doctrines of fear, offering guaranteed preservation and revival after impending global annihilation.
“Only the wealthy could afford cryo-preservation, of course,” said Dr. Szcizcewicz, “and the irony here is that these insanely expensive hedges against mortality were as fraudulent as stock in god particles.”