November 5, 2555: We've left lunar orbit. The moon was full tonight, a spectacular send off.

November 8, 2555: We're half way between the moon and the planet. We'll begin our descent in a few hours. The Alexandria wasn't built to turn on a dime. She was built for speed but it takes a long time to build up a full head of steam. Mike has kept himself busy studying the alien devices. The polymers and white fibers are electrically non-conductive, non-magnetic and unresponsive to heat and light. Marie is cataloging the animal species depicted in the murals and examining the genome of the mold found in the polymers.

November 10, 2555: We've arrived in orbit around the planet. Marie has completed tests on the wood found at the lunar sites. As expected, they were too old for reliable carbon dating. Rubidium-strontium dating revealed the lunar soil was over six billion years old.

November 11, 2555: We are mapping the planet's surface. This place is pretty grim, unlike the murals in the 'Nursery'. It's in the middle of an ice age. Only a narrow band of land along the equator is temperate or desert. I wonder what it looked like when the aliens lived here.

November 12, 2555: We are preparing a dropship to make a landing in a small region of dense forest on the largest continent. Mike, Marie and I will go first.

November 13, 2555: We've seen many wild animals and exotic plants but none of them resembled the murals. The dropship's scanners detected dense, rectangular anomalies deep beneath the soil, so we set down in a nearby clearing. After four months of recycled oxygen, the air here smells terrific! Rain fell shortly after we landed. It felt good to get completely drenched!

November 21, 2555: We've returned to the ship. Robots are clearing the vegetation and soil from the anomalies. Ken and Amrit are taking the other dropship to explore more of the planet's surface. Marie is cataloging and sequencing the alien samples we brought back with us. We killed a medium-sized mammal and brought the carcass back with us. If Marie gives it the go ahead, we'll be eating fresh meat! Otherwise, we'll decompile it for carbon.

November 24, 2555: Mike is completely stumped by the alien devices. He's asked for help. The crew roster shows we have a cyber-geneticist frozen on board by the name of John Galt. He's thawing now. Marie OK-ed the meat we have on board. We cooked it tonight and ate it with a bottle of wine I'd been saving for a special occasion. It was delicious, a bit like chicken.

November 25, 2555: John is awake. He's a remarkable man. When I gave him the news from Earth, he barely acknowledged it. He acted as if he had already known. Instead of asking for details, he simply asked what his orders were. I showed him the artifacts we found at the lunar ruins and asked him to find out what they were. He's working with Mike now.

December 3, 2555: John is continuing his work with Mike. Amrit, Marie and I are planetside. We've explored a mountain range surrounded by desert. Even in this hard scrabble terrain there are many new life forms to be found. We've just received word from the robots at the excavation. They've exposed the anomalies.

December 4, 2555: We've returned and surveyed the site. The robots exposed large slabs of basalt, but mindlessly destroyed an intricate carving in the process of removing the topsoil. At least they stopped when they did. We need better programming for fine detail work. I've activated our Veribot, THX-1492, and loaded it with archeological excavation software. It's reprogramming our general purpose robots now.