‘Contained light energy,’ Hellerman gasped. ‘I’ve heard people report the phenomena in UFO sightings but I’ve never seen it actually realized before. If the Egyptians witnessed something like this, without a doubt they would have believed it to have been the work of their gods.’
As Ethan watched so the lights began to join together, blending in a graceful ballet of light in three dimensions, and all at once he saw images. He heard the gasps around him, heard his own as he saw vivid, brief flashes of lucidity amid the glowing sphere of expanding light. He saw the pyramids flicker into view, their three gigantic forms in the desert coated in brilliant white stone so bright he could barely look at it, and their tops capped with smaller pyramids of solid gold that shone like brilliant beacons on the daylight.
Further images appeared; pyramids in Peru, in Mexico, in India and in Europe, and as they appeared so he saw what appeared to be schematics overlaying them, complex geometric designs that looked surprisingly like blueprints that traced the outlines of countless megastructures around the world.
‘Oh my God,’ Lucy exclaimed over the silent display, ‘now we know what the Ark really was: knowledge.’
Ethan saw immensely complicated diagrams that flickered in and out of view, of buildings and temples all built with the knowledge delivered to ancient peoples across the world and with which they had grown to become the world’s first superpowers.
And then the images transformed grotesquely, the glory of massive megastructures collapsing into vivid, grim images of wars and battles, of clashing swords and colliding armies, of rivers running red with the blood of the fallen and of people starving in besieged cities.
Ethan saw the carnage that the information contained within the Ark had wrought by those who had wielded the knowledge that it contained, the destruction of weaker societies, the genocide of entire peoples across hundreds of years. And then he saw something that nobody had expected. Over the death and destruction loomed a vast deluge that crashed across entire regions, smashing them aside and burying them one by one. He saw cities swallowed, entire races swept from the face of the earth, and then an image that appeared with startling clarity before them all.
A vast city, built from concentric rings in a broad bay, the metropolis bigger than anything he had witnessed before and yet technologically advanced. To his amazement, the startling city was shaped precisely like the Eye of Horus, its great walls forming the eye itself on a scale so vast that it seemed as though it would be visible from space. As he watched, so even that sparkling jewel of society was crushed beneath the waves and vanished into the deep.
The sparkling, dazzling array of images collapsed before them into a glowing holographic image of a man and a woman, behind them the Eye of Horus, the All Seeing Eye, watching them. Inside their brains he saw the eye appear again, this time as part of the human brain and as old as evolution itself. The eye suddenly shone with a brilliant light, causing Ethan to throw his hands up to shield his eyes, and then the entire display vanished and the room was plunged into darkness as the Eye of Horus icon hovering in the center of the room dropped down and clattered onto the glass table.
For a long time nobody moved, and then Garrett opened the blinds and sunlight shone into the room. Ethan looked around at his companions; Lopez, Mitchell, Jarvis, Hellerman, Lillian, Amy, Lucy, Garrett and the oracles, and then he realized that Elena was shielding her eyes from the bright sunlight, crouching slightly against the glare.
‘You can see,’ he said.
Elena, Aisha and the others looked around them in wonder as their new–found vision slowly adjusted to the brightness around them.
‘What was that?’ Lopez asked as she pointed at the icon now lying on the glass table.
‘That was knowledge,’ Lucy said as she moved across to the icon and picked it up. ‘That was a memory, of how we came to be who and what we are. It’s an instruction manual to build a civilization, and a record of who sent that information. This is what Majestic Twelve was searching for.’
Ethan recalled the vast city at the end of the images.
‘And how to destroy one,’ he said. ‘There was a city, and a great flood that destroyed everything. What the hell have we walked into here?’
Jarvis replied as he watched Lucy examining the Eye of Horus.
‘The origin of our species, of all species. That city was destroyed by a flood, and it’s a flood recorded in every legend in every society on earth. The Eye of Horus is the Egyptian All Seeing Eye, and it just revealed to us what I think was not our emergence as a species, but our decline.’
‘Our what?’ Lopez asked.
‘Our decline,’ Lucy said in agreement with her grandfather as she continued to study the icon. ‘We saw what we were supposed to be, what we once were. Everything that has come afterward is what we’ve managed on our own. I think that this record shows that we were once assisted by another species, a technologically advanced species, and that they abandoned us.’
Mitchell stepped forward. ‘You’re saying that our past was better than our present?’
Lucy nodded.
‘I think that what we read in Tjaneni's tattoos revealed the origin of The Watchers on earth, and that the city we saw in those images was what we now refer to as Atlantis,’ she said finally. ‘Majestic Twelve were searching for it, and now we are too.’
***
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dean Crawford is the author of twenty novels, including the internationally published series of thrillers featuring Ethan Warner, a former United States Marine now employed by a government agency tasked with investigating unusual scientific phenomena. The novels have been Sunday Times paperback best–sellers and have gained the interest of major Hollywood production studios. He is also the enthusiastic author of many independently published Science Fiction novels.
The Genesis Cypher (Warner & Lopez Book 6) Page 34