Victor and his colleagues around the world watched and studied the video footage night and day looking for any more clues. As New Horizons reached it's closest approach, there were a great many more discoveries to be had. Along with the chimney were a huge number of barely
recognizable rectangles dotted all over the surface. These were much smaller then the chimney and seemed to follow irregular lines in random patterns. Based on the shadow angle it was believed that they were no more then 15cm tall. But with so little to work with, it was mainly conjecture. On the opposite side of the planet from the 'chimney' was a small mountain range with a clearly defined gash carved entirely across it. Even some credible scientists agreed that this could have been a road of some sort. One thing that everyone agreed on though, whoever had created all of this had vanished long before the rise of humanity. Like everything else in astronomy, every question that was answered brought new and more complex puzzles. The biggest one, aside from the builders themselves, was what the enormous chimney was built of to have survived so long, and what could have been it's purpose. There'd been so much political wrangling and budget cuts when the probe was being built, that there wasn't much instrumentation for this. After all, who could've expected to find something artificial at the outer edge of the solar system? As such, the community had to be satisfied with the chimney images and maps of the various surface features.