by Nick Thacker
Her father had taken over the project in its original form from his grandfather, and it had passed through the family until Rachel was of age and had proven to have enough education, political success, and desire to see it through.
The project had been something Rachel had grown up with. As a young girl, she would often find her father discussing things with members of the team from around the world, speaking softly into the telephone’s receiver that sat between his cheek and his shoulder. He would furiously scribble notes, scratch them out, all the while discussing ideas and complex mathematical formulas. She didn’t understand the type of work her father was doing in that home office until much later.
When he felt the time was right, immediately after her 30th birthday, her father bequeathed the project to his only child. Rachel was enthused and humbled, but still a bit hesitant. She had spent the time earning her undergraduate and advanced degrees studying history and politics, hoping to break into the political scene somewhere in Europe, as that was where her family was from, and where she’d spent the majority of her studies.
She had just accepted a job working for the Egyptian government, hoping to open the country’s research programs to the rest of the world. Her father was supportive of the position, but warned her to not get too involved anywhere before she fully understood the project, and what it meant for her family.
She’d promised to give it some thought. She had also promised to look into it a bit, thinking she could simply shake it off and move on, and her father would forget about his addiction to late-night phone calls and cryptic note-taking.
But when she began to read over her father’s and great-grandfather’s notes and their conclusions about the project and what it meant, she changed her mind. She accepted the position with the government, but immediately began working on a plan to devote more of her time and resources — both personally and professionally — into furthering the family’s research.
The project grew with Rachel’s political career. Every step up the totem pole brought her more money, more resources, and more ability to decode the mysterious clues hidden in her past. She cloaked the project behind a curtain of believability, even maneuvering herself into a position with the Ministry of Antiquities’ Prehistory Division so that she could continue the research with the full — albeit unknowing — support and resources of the Egyptian government.
And building a team was even easier. After all, the project her family had been working on for decades was one that had unique ties to Egypt’s past. It would shake the knowledge of Egypt’s history to the core, if only it could be proven. Her recruiting efforts were only slowed by her requirement that each and every one of her employees who worked in direct contact with the project were ‘pure.’
She had no need to test herself, of course, as her family line was pure. Besides a single misstep one generation ago, no one had married outside of the great and ancient familial heritage. So many tests had proven the purity of the line.
And that was what brought her here today. The final test.
Room 23 sat at the edge of the hallway, its metallic door contrasted against the old, weathered stones into which it had been hung. It was unassuming, but to Rachel the room was everything. It was the project’s final proving ground; it was the last step before purity was confirmed and a new member of their growing faction joined their ranks. It was the symbol of everything her family, her employees, and her ancestors had been working on. It was a symbol of what they had been working toward for millennia.
But today, Room 23 was more than just symbolic. Today the room would administer the final test and provide the final outcome for one more member of their faction. The test would consume the remainder of their original compound, the heavy powder they’d found hidden down here in the crypt years ago. This test would be the last one possible without more of the compound, but it was critical to their success.
They were close to having a proper copy of the compound, a synthetic alternative they could create on demand, but they weren’t there yet. Her great-grandfather’s team had almost finished the compound, but they were sorely misled about a few key components, and therefore those tests and trials had only led them to utter failure and generations of disgrace.
Not today, Rachel thought as she reached for the door. Not anymore. We’re so close. We’re ready.
She looked up, staring at the single bulb hanging from the ceiling. She wasn’t religious, as she couldn’t effectively place her beliefs into any of the popular segmentations. Still, she knew there was a greater power up there. ‘It,’ or whatever it was, had given her ancestors the clues, the building blocks, to what her project was now uncovering. It had given her the drive and the determination to prove her family’s worth, once and for all, and it had started everything she’d ever known and would ever come to know — for a very specific reason. She didn’t believe it was all for naught. She didn’t believe there was no purpose to her life, or anyone else’s. She didn’t believe this life was simply the product of advanced evolutionary tactics.
She pushed the door open, took a breath, then stepped inside.
The man lay on the hospital gurney, just as Jennifer Polanski had before when she’d been tested. Polanski, unfortunately, hadn’t made it through the final test. The compound and the bell had found her wanting, discarding her as impure and therefore unworthy of the association to and inclusion in their faction.
Rachel had felt responsible for the woman’s life, but she knew it was for the greater good. She hadn’t shed a tear or lost any sleep over the outcome, as she hadn’t done that for any of the failed tests.
But today’s test was different.
She thought she could talk herself down, explain to her irrational brain that the test was crucial — it was — and that there was no other way to test this man’s purity — there wasn’t.
But that didn’t change how she felt. She sidled up to the gurney, noticing the bell in the center of the room, watching the scientist she’d hired three years ago mix liquid chlorine into the powdery compound — the last of their stock — and place it into the bell’s open top. He poured carefully from the last of the rounded ceramic containers left to them by the Ancients, ensuring that not a drop was spilled unless it was into the bell’s hollow chamber, then he placed the round stone container back onto his cart.
She watched as the man then plugged the bell into a battery sitting on the cart. The auxiliary power cable was one of the few liberties they’d taken upon designing and building these miniature copies. The Ancients had somehow found a way to power these objects without electricity, but Rachel wasn’t interested in recreating prehistory for fun. She’d wanted results, and she’d wanted them fast.
When the scientist finished, he gave her a nod and left the room.
Rachel turned, finally, to the man laying on the gurney. He, too, had survived the blast at the museum, one of only two people to come into direct contact with the bell’s effects. She had lied to Jennifer Polanski, but it didn’t matter. The woman was dead, and Rachel had hardly thought it prudent to be truthful with a woman about to meet her death.
The man was scarred, the burn marks covering his exposed flesh. He had some wounds on his cheek that seemed to be leaking some sort of puss. It was hard to look at, but Rachel forced her eyes to remain riveted on the man’s face. She forced herself to not look away.
It was clear the man couldn’t talk, though she imagined he wanted to. It seemed as though his eyes were widened in surprise, but she couldn’t be sure. He could have simply been in pain, unable to control his normally voluntary reactions.
She sniffed. Hold it together.
The man stared up at her, wide-eyed. His forehead had deep creases in them, but they were stretched tight against his skull now. He was breathing heavily, the breaths stuttered as they entered and exited his lungs.
She sniffed again, and then felt a tear beginning to stream down her cheek. Stop it, she willed herself. We don’t know how the test will go.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But I have to know. I must know for sure. I… had my doubts, but I couldn’t bring myself…”
She stopped, composed herself. “I should have done this a long time ago, but… you understand. You told me a year ago that this world was too far gone, that trying to save it would only destroy it.”
The man didn’t say anything, didn’t move.
“But it will be over soon. I promise.”
She turned to leave, then stopped herself. She took a final, deep breath, then knelt and kissed the man’s forehead.
“I’m so sorry, Daddy.”
21
Rachel
I’M SO SORRY, DADDY.
The words rang in her mind over and over again.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d just crossed a line she could never step back over. But there was peace — within minutes she would know the answer to a question she’d long wanted to answer.
There was also pain. The man on the bed in Room 23 was her father, and she loved him.
But he had instilled in her the set of values she now used to justify her actions.
‘Never let your emotions get in the way of your truth,’ he would say. She hadn’t always understood the phrase, but it had been ingrained into her thinking by the time she was a teenager.
Now, she understood. Her emotions were telling her one thing: ‘don’t worry about it; let your father live.’ But her rational, reasonable mind was telling her the exact opposite thing: ‘he wanted this more than anything. He wanted the answer, but he never had the opportunity.’
She wanted to finish what he — and his father and his father’s father before him — had started.
The Rascher name was one that extended back generations, before Germany was called Germany and even before Europe was considered a continent. The name had meaning to Rachel, but more than that she believed in what the name represented: the lineage of people who had conquered, settled, and expanded the ancient civilizations. Her namesake was one of a handful of names — many of them lost to the generations — that represented exactly what the project her great-grandfather had started so long ago, which itself was just a continuation of the original Ancients’ project from thousands of years before.
But the project, when entrusted to Rachel, had taken a slight turn. The truth she had come to accept as a young woman— that she and the rest of her family was of the pure, Aryan race — had been immediately challenged upon the discovery of a pure, original compound. The compound, left in the crypt by the original builders, was a powder that resisted degradation, heavy enough to remain in place inside each of the roundish cylinders of stone. It, coupled with the technology found in one of the crypt’s rooms, allowed the team in Egypt to test the purity of any human subject.
The compound, when rehydrated with water and bleach, then heated into a vaporous gas in one of the bells, would render its subject inert, completely paralyzed as it ran its tests inside the host’s body. Rachel’s scientists believed the compound was made of something akin to mercury, but its exact properties defied their analyses and laboratory testing. The powdery substance was an enigma, a liquid metal that seemed to be something altogether otherworldly. Rachel knew it wasn’t — she knew that the compound was simply an element the modern world hadn’t yet discovered. Something the Ancients knew of, in the vastly different world they’d lived in with its different atmospheric and chemical compositions.
Time and effort would give them the solution, but time was running out. Their next event was planned already, and they had already run out of the compound, save for what was inside the bell in Room 23. Her father’s was the final test. His father — Rachel’s grandfather — had been born into the pure lineage, but in a moment of weakness he had married outside of that line. Their child, Rache’s father, corrected that mistake by remarrying into the lineage, allowing Rachel to enjoy the purity of the master race.
But my father cannot enjoy that luxury…
Rachel stepped out of the room and closed the solid metal door behind her. She would watch the test from her own office, from a place she felt safe from her employees in case her emotions began to run wild. She walked the empty hallway in silence, wondering if she’d be able to make it back to her private space before an employee or scientist caught up with her and noticed her emotional state.
Thankfully she made it, swinging into her open office on a heel, then quickly closing and locking the door. She strode to her computer and opened the monitoring program on the machine and began watching the feed.
The test was already underway.
She leaned over the computer chair and watched the screen. She tried to pull her eyes from it, clicking around the small window, but eventually gave up. Still, she felt she needed a distraction. She stood up from the chair and walked over to a plain, cheap side table someone had pushed along one wall of the room. There was a lamp on it, but it wasn’t plugged in — each of the offices only had one power line running into them from the large parallel generators they kept upstairs and outside. Her office had a power strip plugged into each of the outlets that broke off from the main line, and she’d filled each of the strip’s outlets with her computer, monitor, peripherals, phone charger, and lamp.
There was a television in the room as well, plugged in but mostly sitting dormant in the corner.
The small bureau held nothing besides the old lamp. Each of its drawers were empty, save for one. One drawer near the bottom was locked, and she kept the key on her possession at all times. It was this key she retrieved from her pocket as she reached the bureau. She knelt down, unlocked the door, and pulled out the thick, leather-bound journal from inside.
It was her great-grandfather’s journal, passed down to only members of her close family. When she’d expressed interest in her family’s history and legacy, it was shown to her.
When she graduated and began her career working toward the same things her father and grandfather had been working toward, it was given to her.
Now it was her most prized possession — a lineage of her family’s research, studies, and private accounts, as well as a textbook of scientific discovery and experimentation. It was every question, answer, and thought her great-grandfather — and his son and grandson after him — had found.
And it was the guidebook for the world she was trying to create.
But first, she needed to figure out how to unlock that world’s deepest secrets. She needed to find the source of her ancient ancestors’ power, the repository of all their knowledge and wisdom. She needed to know how to access it.
More specifically, she needed to know how to get in.
She was sitting down the hall from that great repository, the ancient Hall of Records. It was there, hidden beneath the earth, a multi-chambered library of dizzying corridors, rooms, and hallways. Each of those chambers would be filled with the knowledge and source of the Ancients’ power. Their secrets, tucked away in a singular, vast archive.
She started to read from the journal, feeling the chill as she remembered the first time she’d encountered her great-grandfather’s words in the journal. The hair on the back of her neck rose, goosebumps flooding over the skin on her arms.
It’s all real, she thought, the marvel of it still unbelievable, even though she had seen the GPR scans with her own eyes. Even though the Egyptian government had successfully concealed the Great Hall from the outside world, preventing even their own researchers from digging into it, Rachel knew it was there.
She’d had a map drawn up of the hollowed-out spaces under the earth, everything their ground-penetrating radar scans could decipher, including the antechambers their offices were now in. A team of Egyptian government contractors had excavated these first rooms, and she had promptly moved in and established private — and highly classified — offices for her and her closest staff.
She closed her eyes, remembering the rush she’d felt when first stepping down into this ancient antechamber.
The feeling of exhilaration, a strength to it she’d never experienced before. She could see her father’s and great-grandfather’s eyes, the excitement sprawled across each of their faces.
She opened her eyes again and saw the test still streaming on the screen in front of her. Then, with trembling hands, she held the journal up and began to read, her mind automatically translating the German into English.
22
Journal Entry
July 8, 1942
REPORTS HAVE REACHED ME FROM MY men in the field. They have reached the ancient site of the Egyptian structures and have informed me that they have, in fact, found at least one chamber beneath the Great Cat.
Are unsure yet as to the size of this chamber, or if there are others.
Initial excavation has commenced, though completion of the clearing is still a far-off goal.
My main concern at this point is that der Fuehrer will push this side-project into the annals of forgotten history, now that the war has heated. I will, however, do my best to continue to work toward the ultimate end for our race, no matter the outcome.
July 8, 1942
I have finished my translation of Plato’s Solon, working from the original manuscript my men found a decade ago. The tatters have been difficult to parse, though I believe my copy to be a fine rendition. My Attic Greek is strong, but the documents are horribly weathered, as their resting place has allowed them to become quite mangled and challenging.
It is my dearest hope that this last remaining copy of Plato’s work be hidden from sight for as long as time permits — at least until my family completes its journey. Shall it ever be found and examined beneath the light of unworthy scrutiny, it would spell disaster to our mission. My copy, thus, will be sealed and transported, kept merely as an insurance against loss of the original.
The most intriguing passage I have translated tonight, to end the words as written by Plato and told to him by Solon, is thus: