Okay, now for a short explanation of what in the Sam Hill was going on in 2001. <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" /><br /><br />BEGINNING:<br /><br />An ape named Moonwatcher leads a tribe of apes that is not doing well. They're being outcompeted by a stronger group and not getting enough water or food. Then a monolith shows up. They are all astonished and go to check it out, but Moonwatcher is the boldest. He actually touches it. It does things to their brains that they can't understand. Then they all go to sleep. When they wake, none of them remembers seeing the monolith. (Unbeknownst to them, it has gone to the Moon, or signalled an identical monolith sitting on the Moon near what will one day be known as Tycho Crater. I don't quite recall which.) But after some of the usual scrabbling, Moonwatcher starts looking at some bones a little differently. He suddenly gets an inspiration: it can be used as a weapon. They take bones and use them as weapons to bring down prey. They now have full bellies. The next step is water. When they reach the water hole, the stronger tribe is already there and warns them off. But Moonwatcher's group is working differently now, and kills some of the others. The rest flee in terror. They have become tool users; evolution has been pushed down a different path.<br /><br />Meanwhile, the monolith on the moon begins a long wait. It buries itself, or is buried by its creators, and waits to be discovered.....<br /><br />MOON, 3 MILLION YEARS LATER:<br /><br />Dr Floyd has been sent to the Moon on a top-secret mission. The cover story is that there's a quarantine on Clavius Base, but not everybody is buying the story; at the space station, a group of Russian scientists try to tease the truth out of him. When he arrives, he briefs a team on the real story: an alien artifact has been found. They're calling it Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One, or TMA-1. A survey team found an inexplicably strong magnetic field and started digging to see wha <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em> -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>