Door #2: Misunderstood Satellites
    Behind today's door, we find a literary opportunity which I began years ago, but got no further than page 2. So I offer it to you all, as I do, to take and use as you see fit.
    I've read of the KEO satellite time capsule concept, which I adore. For more information, you can check out its Wikipedia page and read up. The idea is that a satellite containing many things, including a message from up to everyone on Earth, would be launched into an orbit such that it would fall back to Earth in 50,000 years and give its contents to whoever's alive then. Its launch date has consistently been moved up, making me skeptical about whether it'll ever happen, but I love the idea. Of particular interest was the diamond containing a drop of human blood, ostensibly for future analysis and potential treatment of diseases that may exist in 50 millennia.
    So the idea of the story is, 50,000 years from now the world has devolved into two factions: the Unity and the Mercans (yeah, I wasn't very subtle with my names). They've been constantly at war for centuries, with the Unity being the high-tech civilization we'd expect from the time period, and the Mercans being a more primitive, aggressive culture. Aggressive to the point of owning wildcats as pets and teaching their young children how to use weapons.
    The Mercan and Unity militaries learn that something has fallen from the sky, and they both know it must be a satellite. The Mercans believe it's a Unity satellite, and they want to get to it before the Unity troops can. The Unity realize it's a satellite launched many years ago, and they want to find out what it contains. The race is on to locate the precise crash site of the satellite.
    Ultimately, the Mercans get there first. Upon seeing the blood in the diamond, they take this as a symbol of skilled warfare. In their culture, the blood of the enemy is a souvenir of a battle victory, and they project this culture onto the diamond. They can't figure out how to read any of the digital information, though, having lost most of their non-weaponized technology to the Unity long ago. So they embark on a stealth mission to infiltrate and then rob a Unity museum for the technology they need to read the satellite's contents.
    Stuff happens--complications, etc....I never thought this part through--and eventually the Mercans do get their tech. They read the data on the satellite's disk, but it's in an ancient language they can't understand. While their archaeologists try and decipher the messages, the Unity is after them, using the theft and break-in as a catalyst to increase their aggression in the everlasting war. The Mercans finally decode the ancient text, at the last possible minute before the Unity destroys their largest bases, and are disappointed to find it's just a reference database and some meaningless messages from ancient peoples. They destroy the satellite, along with all its contents, to prevent the Unity from gaining it, knowing that the Unity's scientific knowledge could do terrible things to the Mercans with this information.
    In the end, the Unity win the war and assimilate the Mercans to create a very hesitant One World Union. The satellite is no more, except for the diamond-protected samples of blood, which decades from now sit in a One World Union museum, never to be tampered with again.