Glen Kealey argued that human beings are a manufactured species. Not descended, built: engineered before the Ice Age by people who went into hiding under Antarctica in 24,000 BC and have been refining the stock ever since, breeding for the traits each job needed. What they were after, he said, was “slaves who do their own shopping.” What it was all for was a space program that could leave the solar system.

He said the record of it was never hidden, just unread: it sits in the roots of ordinary words, in place names, in the shapes of the letters themselves. Thirty years of working that out is what this archive holds. He got there after a cabinet minister asked him for five percent of a $160 million project, and he refused.

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