by A D Davies
“Good analogy,” Bridget said. “It’s more subtle, though. Here.” She indicated one of the power runes Toby had pointed out. “This is different from the ones we followed to Montrose in Scotland.”
“I noticed that, too.” Prihya moved closer to the symbol. She was smiling, Charlie’s accusation seemingly forgotten. “It’s possible each station with an orb has a modified version of this, denoting either a unique function or simply an identifier.”
“There’s a history lesson, too.” Bridget pointed to the base of the left side of the arch. “Those parts that don’t have a translation.”
“I could see they were more conversational,” Prihya said, crouching. “They strike me as something like a welcome. Then up over the arch itself, these largely refer to the machine itself—”
“Like an instruction manual,” Toby said.
Prihya’s brow pinched together briefly at being interrupted, but she shook it off. “Then farther down here…” She referred to those on the straight, vertical section of the right-hand side, of which only two were translated to English. “Basically, it’s a warning. To only use it for noble purposes. And then saying…” She twirled a finger around a glyph two places down—what looked like a cross between a Celtic symbol and the Japanese writing for peace. “I can’t tell if this means death or rest.”
“It means both,” Bridget said. “It’s not just the angles and size that combine to give meaning. It’s the symbols around it. The one above… it’s denoting a choice. If you use it well, you rest easy. Use it badly, or use it wrong, you die.”
“Heavy stuff.”
“I can’t believe this.” Sally paced away from the confab. “You’re all behaving like best friends.”
Bridget faced her and stood tall, and Prihya got back to her feet. Toby approached but halted as Sally hunched her shoulders. Even Charlie looked up from her work.
Sally said, “I should have guessed where I knew her from. She was working with Valerio Conchin, but I forgot why I was so worried about that man. You know many people approached me about my research?”
“Yes,” Toby said. “It’s what drew us to you. And why Tane Wiremu was sent to watch over you. Many people were—”
“Well, that man was one of them. He was one of the first to offer me a huge sum of money to come work for him. And here’s what’s weird: If he’d suggested less, I might have been tempted. But that much? It sounded like a scam.”
“Please,” Prihya said. “I knew nothing about it. I was only there as an advisor, to help brainstorm and dig deep into this history. I was not a part of—”
“You’re part of a system that says money is power. Money can buy anything. I know that better than anyone, because I can’t get my tenure if the university’s funding is threatened.” She was on the verge of tears. Took off her glasses to get to her eyes where she stemmed any outward sign of weakness. “They have to disassociate from me. It makes me look crazy when all I was doing was exploring all possibilities. And even though I was right, because of money—which your boss, or former boss worships—I can’t resume my work there. I have to start over. And why?”
“Sally…” Toby moved toward her.
Bridget stepped forward, too. Ready to offer words of comfort, but none came.
Sally halted them with a harsh, “No.” She put her glasses back on. “And you won’t let me prove to them that I’m right. Because you’re scared of sharing. Scared of letting the world see what I’ve found. What you found. And used me to distract others from finding. It’s not fair. But while I’m here, I demand to be included in your research. I demand to be a part of this.”
Prihya said, “You are a part of this, Sally.”
“It’s Professor Garcia, actually. And why? Why am I even here? Tane thought my knowledge was useful, but you found that shield in Alabama. I have clues to other giants’ sites and places I can prove they existed, but for now? Here? I’m no use to anyone.”
“That’s not true,” Toby said. “You can be. You have so much to impart. We just have to figure this out first.”
“Am I being manipulated the way she was?” Sally lifted a hand toward Prihya.
“No, of course not…” Toby began, only pausing as Prihya shifted closer.
“In a way, yes,” Prihya said. “It’s true, you will be able to help in the future. But for now, Tane is keeping you close for another reason: to make Ah Dae-Sung and his bosses think you are needed.”
“Bait?” Sally said in a small voice.
“No, not bait. But it draws attention from the real objective. If they think we’re still chasing clues, it means they keep chasing clues.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Toby said. “The professor knows more about the legends, and separating myth from history, than anyone. No one here really knows about the giants who live down there. It’s all an experiment. A massive petri dish. Sally knows the true origins, and if we need it, it can help the interpretation of—”
“Yes.” Bridget now paced, her feet needing to move, pressure building in her stomach and zapping around her body. “I do need help. Check this.”
Sally glanced around everyone in turn.
“Doubt it’s a trick,” Charlie said. “Bridget wouldn’t know how. Trust her.”
Bridget was mildly insulted at the assumption she couldn’t manipulate someone for ulterior motives, but that was a conversation for another time. “I understand the power of men influencing women, so let’s be more trusting here. Prihya, this one…”
A symbol that looked like a hashtag with a circle in the middle and triangles in the boxes above and below had been decoded to say, “the chosen one.” Other translated glyphs surrounded it, almost forming its own paragraph.
Bridget read the English. “When entering the god chamber, the chosen one controls the throne. The globe turns to his will.”
“His,” Charlie scoffed.
“Feminism aside,” Prihya said, “it makes sense.”
“In our narrow understanding of linear narrative,” Bridget said. She pointed to the bottom left symbols. “You haven’t translated these.”
“No. Can you?”
“Sally, look at this.” Bridget turned her head sideways. “These two symbols together… ‘A king of men’… ‘must be the savior’…”
“It’s…” Prihya adopted the same angle. “I still don’t see it.”
“No, but I’ve worked on this language for longer. I’ve seen this phrase before, in a different language. ‘King of men’ doesn’t indicate royalty.”
Sally rushed forward and kneeled at the appropriate spot. “I know the phrase. ‘King of men’ was used to talk about giants. Like… like Rex—in the way we talked about a tyrannosaurus rex. He isn’t a literal king, he’s—”
“The biggest predator,” Toby said. “But if this writing is sideways, going left to right around the perimeter…”
“We got a lot of the meaning wrong,” Prihya said. “Because I didn’t recognize those first words, I had nothing to work on. I used what I knew. Now…” She angled her head the other way to read the previous glyphs at a new angle.
Toby plainly understood what they were doing. “What if the first assumption is wrong?”
“From an engineering perspective,” Charlie said, “one bad component can have a knock-on effect. Makes it all fall down. If I understand your idea of translating this language, it holds true here. If one factor affects another, but that first one is faulty…”
Bridget turned her head the same way as Prihya, which flipped the hashtag-like figure, so the triangles were top and bottom instead of left and right. She read the English again: “Version one: ‘When entering the god chamber, the chosen one controls the throne’.” She forced herself to concentrate on the new formation, the writing left to right, not top to bottom. “Alternatively: ‘To enter the god chamber, a man must choose to control the throne’.”
“Man again,” Charlie said. “Looks like Toby is up.”
Prihya
stepped back, obviously troubled. “They used the word ‘man’ the way we use ‘mankind’. It’s genderless.”
“So it could also mean a human,” Sally said. “Any human?”
Bridget strode across the room and opened Jules’s backpack. “But only one of the kings of men—the giants—can do so without help.” She took out the two bangles. “I wonder if you need special genes to use these in there.” She pointed them toward the activation suite—what they had called the god chamber. “I can try.”
“There’s still some fierce energy flowing through there,” Charlie said. “Near as I can tell, it’s insulated, but there’s no telling how it’ll react to new variables.”
“We do not know either,” Prihya added. “We persuade Gilim into the reverse-engineered unit on the forest floor once a week. That powers up the machine for several days. He acts… peacefully when he’s in there. Like he’s… I don’t know, like he’s…”
“High,” Bridget said, running her eyes and brain over some of the final symbols. “There are signs there of knowledge and pleasure. For a ‘king of men’ it might be quite a fun experience.”
“High,” Prihya echoed. “Could be. We’ll have to measure his endorphins the next time he goes— Wait, where are you going?”
Before anyone could stop her, Bridget dashed over to the activation suite.
“No, wait,” Toby said. “You don’t know what—”
“We need more.” Bridget stuffed her hands into the bangles and pulled them close, so the opposite-cut ends clamped together with strong magnetic force. “That archway essay says we get knowledge from the machine. Since Jules isn’t here, there’s no one better qualified to interpret what it gives us. Anyone want to argue?”
“Only from a stupidity perspective,” Charlie said. “It could kill you.”
“So could a nuclear-powered world erupting into war.” Bridget stood at the threshold, watching her friends, her colleagues, new and old. “Safe word is ‘Indus.’ Pull me out if I start to smolder.”
Unsure where the glibness came from—probably nerves, since her heart was racing at least double speed—she backed into the stone chamber, like an upright sarcophagus, and raised the linked bangles over her head. They clunked against the wall, as they had to each other, and…
Nothing. No flash of light, no searing pain, no images forcing their way into her brain.
“Guys? I might need a hand getting out.”
But what she was seeing outside wasn’t what she’d left behind. It was a rocky vista.
Her heart leaped, breath catching in her throat as she calmed almost right away. She was fascinated more than afraid.
The rocky vista was not simply boulders and rubble strewn around, but buildings carved from rocks, from the landscape. People roamed, tall ones, but not giants. All over six feet, some approaching seven, if the perspective was correct. She wasn’t sure where she got that perspective from, but it could also have been their manner, their tall, skinny frames.
She seemed to be floating.
Then, flying.
Over the top of a mountain, she shot into the sky, trying to remember why she was here. All she knew was the floaty, tingling sensation engulfing her. The view outside the chamber encroached inside, surrounding her.
Even though she could not move, she didn’t care, didn’t want to move. She was smiling so hard, her face ached.
She plunged down, into the earth, hurtling headfirst, yet she wasn’t scared. She phased through this and into a cavern where more of those tall men and women surrounded a metal orb floating over a stone cradle, dull and lifeless, until a giant stepped out of the shadows.
Where did he come from?
Didn’t matter. Two tall people escorted him, but he towered over them by his head and shoulders and was at least four times as wide. Much like Gilim but clean-shaven, he showed none of the innocent wonder Gilim had upon meeting Bridget at the others. This hulking colossus knew what he was doing and spoke words Bridget could not hear.
The tall men at his side departed, and the giant advanced upon the floating metallic ball. He urged the Witnesses…
Oh my god, are these the Witnesses? The Elder Race?
The giant urged the people surrounding the orb back. When they were at a safe distance, he grabbed it with both hands. It flashed briefly, then swam with black, like oil, only made of light.
How can light be black?
And why am I even here?
The crackle of cerulean blue lightning made everyone, including Bridget, jump, and back away. Only, Bridget wasn’t really there. No one paid her any mind, nor even glanced her way. Like she was a ghost or…
A witness.
She giggled to herself.
The electrical tendrils spread, flashing and crackling throughout the cavern, but the giant appeared unfazed. He knew exactly what he was doing.
But what is that?
Bridget laughed at her confusion. She didn’t know what she was doing here, watching a giant play with a massive black metal ball that shot lightning all over, and—
She flew away. Up, out of the ground, into the sky, soaring high over landmasses she recognized as tectonic plates, the divisions glowing—not literally, but in her eyes—as she passed over them. For several minutes, she dotted the land with coordinates, marking special mountains, weak spots where pressure from below granted the earth breathing room, the planet’s lungs exhaling in relief at—
That’s how these people think of volcanos. The planet breathing. Sucking in our lives and exhaling the spirits to live again. To live on.
And she recognized these places. Knew where they were. But the coordinates were not delivered to her in modern terms, no east-west, no longitude or latitude. This was implanted as she flew, glowing gems in the map below.
Until she saw the effects of the giant in the cavern she’d watched.
When did I get so high?
She could see almost all of this side of the planet. The continents, closer together than on today’s globes, either from a time before continental drift had reached its current epoch or a visualization as imagined by a people who had not yet mastered flight and hadn’t mapped the world in its precise dimensions yet. Lines of energy branched out from that one spot, a circuit board more than a spider’s web, zipping not in straight lines to wrap the Earth in a protective net, but along the fault lines, the plates on which continents were based. Then, they sliced across, meeting up with the gemstone co-ordinates, the other orbs, hidden in the lungs of the planet.
A hand appeared before her. Then another.
“Hi,” she said.
As they advanced at a snail’s pace toward her, she paid them little mind, rearing up to observe more of the world, holding there, in place. Happy. Content.
She found the disembodied hands cute more than threatening. Floating toward her. She watched them, fascinated. She couldn’t move her own hands from over her head, otherwise she’d have touched them. Poked them. Tickled them.
Are they going to tickle me?
They moved so slowly, though. Bridget remained where she was, enjoying the view, observing as the trails of energy met, zoning in on one focal point, a destination that glowed more intensely than anywhere else—around the Asian/Australasian plates, where a smoking mountain thumped and thrummed.
She was there an hour, amused, intrigued, even inspired by what she saw. But it was then, once she understood she was witnessing the Toba event, a catastrophic eruption that blanketed the globe and all but wiped out the early humans, that the hands reached her. They grasped her by the waist and pulled.
Then she was in a strange place with strange people all around.
“Bridget, are you okay?” the bespectacled man said.
“Talk to me, Bridge,” said a woman with long dark hair.
A younger woman with brown skin and a pleasant face pulled Bridget’s eye open and shone a light into it. “She’s high. Like Gilim.”
“How?” the man said. “She w
as only in there for a few seconds.”
Bridget blinked, pulled away, and it all flooded back to her. The reason she was here. Toby. Charlie. Prihya.
Jules.
Dan, Harpal, Tane.
Professor Garcia.
She lurched up and leaped to her feet, startling those around her. “It’s fading. It’s leaving me so fast. Get me some paper. Quick. I need to write it all down.”
Sally offered a legal pad and a pencil, and Bridget wrote furiously, as fast as she could whilst keeping it legible. “It’s a visual trip straight into the brain. Not someone talking to me, or a direct info feed, but like an observation deck, manufactured memories, like… a dream.”
“You were in there less than five seconds,” Prihya said. “What could you see?”
“Plenty.” She scribbled and scribbled, pouring all she could onto the page. Not in order, just at the snippets and CCTV through the ages… “Whoever built this. That’s why the Elder Race was so limited. Intelligent, yes, but not inventive. It was only when the tech was removed that humans were forced to build again. How did they learn how it worked?” She was babbling and she knew it but couldn’t pull it together.
Concentrate on what’s important. On what we can achieve here, in this room.
Did she say that or did someone else? Toby, maybe.
But it was the only thing to do.
She ran out of memories, sat back, and tried to interpret her scribbles. Her account of all she saw.
“Bridget…” Prihya took the paper from her. “You wrote this.”
“Yes.” Bridget sensed a headache coming on. She was out of breath, needed water. Maybe a burger. Yes, she was hungry. She’d been flying for hours.
“Do you know what it says?” Toby asked.
“Of course…” But Bridget heard the slurring of her words. Like she was drunk. “Can I get a glass of water?”
“Do you know what we have to do?” Charlie said. “With this thing?”
“I think so.” Bridget accepted a plastic bottle from Prihya. “We need to tell the others. This place isn’t connected directly to the network. We can’t stop the one at the Dragon’s Pit going online from here.”