Our story begins with our urban archaeologist in the field, in the middle of research for his new project "Recovering the early Anthropocene." He’s puzzling over two images. The images are of two sites located near to one another, in an area that was once the western coast of India. Until recently, the area had been lost to the sea, but the sea has now retreated and archaeological digs have uncovered these two finds.

Little is known of this period in Earth history, as all records were righteously purged from the CORE in the 6th Quamar of the Dark Lords of the Twin Moon (commonly known as the 6th Cosmic Revolution). Heretical archivists in the galactic rim worlds do however retain some fragmentary data from these pre-purge times. Through our subsidiaries we have collated some of these non-sanctioned records—of dubious provenance no doubt—for contextual reasons.

As a team of specialized Earth-readers, we focus on tracing less-than-obvious explanations sealed within the fossil record, with particular attention to the intricate networks of relation between seemingly anomalous occurrences.

The provocative call to imagine a kind of "social science fiction" for the "Return to Earth" expedition asks us to fold the future into the present: to imagine what of our everyday will remain as an artifact thousands of years to come. What imaginaries guide exploration of the future horizon of time on Earth? It’s worth pausing to consider first this exploratory impulse. Rather than diagnosing the present, or unearthing the past, this exercise calls us to speculate on the future.

A politics of sealing off seems common sense in the Ebola epidemic. After all, the body bags separate us from deadly contagion at the moment when the virus is most infectious.

This is the scene, a computer travels back in time. A dolphin falls in love with a computer. A computer falls in love with a dolphin. A computer falls in love with a computer. Two Earth dolphins are launched as Cosmodolphins in the cyberspace or dream-machine of the computer [1] and wake up in the future as a feminist geographer, engaging us in a felt sense of causality.

Professor Nadine Cullen smiled to signify an air of satisfaction, gesturing theatrically for the camera. The sweep of her arm arced around a compact area of earthworks, its surface subdivided by walkways, the plots pitted with hillocks, hollows and holes. But her enforced casualness, and language of enthusiasm, stuck in the craw.

The fossil was found in a human skeleton and is one of the few specimens ever found in the region. From what we can deduce from etchings on its titanium skin, we believe this singular cyber-physical assemblage is called a "pacemaker" and that it belongs to a group of technologies known as Implantable Electronic Medical Devices (IEMDs).

The promise of cargotectures lay in their modular design and resultant spatiotemporal flexibility. At a time of global recession containers could be swiftly deployed to make use of "wasted" urban spaces where investment was absent or delayed. However, they could also be easily moved on again if circumstances changed, for example once a more profitable investment in a site was found.

Atomic Age Rodents, then, were not just participants, but were sources of valuable information which national policy and military strategy would be based on. Their bodies—fragile though they are—tell their story hidden in plain sight, unanticipated traces of an unfolding political and ecological crisis throughout the mid to late 20th Century.

Our team has uncovered the foundations of a modest city-like complex, around 20 km squared, in the southern tip of the continental South Asia region. The remains date back to the Anthropocene period, and we can confirm that we have found the lost settlement of "Auroville," which we understand to be an experimental, utopian city built in a rural part of what was Tamil Nadu, in the country India, circa. AD 1968-2050.