The Alien Orb

by V Bertolaccini

  All the scientists there realized immediately that it was working and that it had achieved its mission – and that it could use the energy supply from itself in past!

  Bryson realized that they had actually found out from their questioning of it that it was partly programmed, but nothing like their computers, or from this universe, and that it mainly functioned carrying out what it had been created for and that it had been a form of time probe – which they had not been properly able to deduce – as vast amounts of information that it had could not be translated or understood, and had no equivalent.

  For a moment Bryson wondered if it could change history and do something like stop itself from entering the universe in 1620, when the fishermen at the fishing village had witnessed its materialization and bright light exploding out of the early morning mist over the sea, like a crazy shooting star.

  Suddenly William and the alien artifact vanished and Bryson realized the hideous reality of the situation and that they had let it loose on the universe and on the whole of time!

  In the first place it had been virtual mad when it had been split in half! It surely had been altered by William Randall and his men’s experiments – and them altering it to believe in tales of witchcraft, magic, demons, and hell – and the other transcendent haunting the other castle that it had mimicked – and there was no proper proof that it was undamaged by its entrance into the universe, and it crashing into the world!

  Though they all soon sensed that it had not and felt its power and intelligence, and how sane it was, and that it was far more than anything that he had ever thought existed!

  Light from it exploded everywhere all over the world showing them its new existence – and entities in the form of large bright globes appeared around them and slowly vanished.

  When it finished Bryson felt vaguely confused but knew that it had left the universe and that they had done everything that they could for it, and the world.

  He then wondered if William had told him the truth earlier that day when he had told him that William Randall had got his treasure from the entity, which had collected it from many sources, and that he had only removed part of the treasure to the other castle – which had been what Bryson had found at the other castle – and that the remains of the treasure had been buried away in a secret chamber under floor of the second tunnel.

  When Bryson investigated it he was staggered to find Pendleton there already, digging up the ground under the second tunnel and that he had just uncovered the secret chamber, and both of them climbed into it and found an entire room full of treasure.

  Epilogue

  The Transcendent Voyager

  For billions of years the transcendent voyager had existed never wholly knowing what had created it or where it had originated, carrying out its mission of searching through time and space in its universe for abnormalities, unknown civilizations and species, and transcendent entities with colossal powers and capabilities and to destroy them if they were dangerous to reality and what its programming considered dangerous.

  It had been designed and given technology beyond anything else that it had encountered and had the abilities to search its universe in a degree and with abilities that would not have been believed to exist by the most advanced transcendences and civilizations, and would have been thought of as magical powers, and it had the ability to search its universe throughout time.

  Its form had been an invisible complex mass of energy, stored in many dimensions, that had been built to last forever, and it directly entered stars to energize itself and store its vast powers for extensive amounts of time.

  Its stores of information had been vast and it had the ability to collect as much information on what it had been programmed for eternally and improve its defenses and other abilities, and it had become the ultimate weapon of destruction against the destruction of its universe.

  It had stored the technology and abilities of zillions of species and had the ability to recognize and handle what it had been searching for within a range of its universe.

  At one point it had unintentionally left the universe and had entered an outer universe that it had not known the existence of, where colossal amounts of universes had existed, and on its entrance there its programming had accepted it as the real universe and that it had to accept it as the universe that it had to carry out its mission in.

  At first it had been unable to enter the universes and properly detect anything in them and it used all its information and studied how it had entered the outer universe and found a way to enter them and locate particular things in them, but infinite amounts of things of unknown origins existed in them.

  In supernatural universes it had learned to open and use gateways that shifted it accurately to destinations. It discovered far more than it had ever realized could exist and it gave itself colossal magical abilities and energies and it had analyzed everything in a greater degree.

  On its first entrances to the universes it had been left staggered when it had encountered something of unknown origins that had drained its energy from it!

  Something had virtually absorbed all its power instantly on its entrance of the Earth’s atmosphere, only leaving it with some of its energy in other dimensions, which it had not considered possible as it had not been possible in its own universe, and it could not get proper amounts of power in other dimensions and had to fight to survive and had continuously tried to alter and adapt to something that it could survive as, and it had to create dormant states and ways of collecting energy from small sources and storing it until it had enough to reactivate itself, and work on finding a source powerful enough for it to use to leave there.

  Even though it had not done much in its damaged condition, with its vast abilities virtually unusable, it had been able to explore things through supernatural gateways into universes, going out into the strangest places, and it had even considered if there had been others such as it in the endless universes and if they had created it, and if it could contact them to help it, and it had gained abilities to explore inconceivable dimensions and powers in the universes, far beyond its original knowledge and powers.

  The humans had helped it and it had used its powers to help them and it had created things for them, including defenses and entities to protect them, and it had created things to hide itself away, even though it had almost damaged itself by splitting itself into two halves.

  The humans had become far more advanced and it had been surprised that they had actually found a way for it to restore itself!

  On entering the outer universes it had repaired itself and immediately made sure nothing could drain it of energy again and gave itself abilities to create energy in new ways anywhere, and it altered most of its programming to adapt.

  It created colossal supernatural powers, going beyond anything known, and used its magical powers to transform it into something beyond anything that it had ever encountered and it gained powers to build universes, and others, and found far more than it had ever realized could exist and another universe beyond there.

  Part II

  The Alien Sphere

  Prologue

  The Alien Sphere

  Chief Science Officer James Dexter struggled to focus on a distorted form of the sun, seemingly magnified, shimmering around, as his spacesuit adjusted its polarized faceplate to compensate for the extra light.

  He expected to see the Martian Space Station in the faint sky – in a vague form of a satellite with networks of translucent tunnels, with large round and square non-transparent bulges.

  Members of the crew analyzed soil samples nearby, while others inspected the shuttle, mainly for structural damage.

  “Well, Mars may be good for mining ...!” Burrell conclusively muttered, through his communicator, gazing about him.

  “The moon may even be better ...!” Dexter replied.

  “Yet why are there no proper meteor craters ...?”

  “The atmosphere is indicated at ninety-five perc
ent carbon dioxide, three percent nitrogen, and the rest in traces ...” he replied, pointing to a monitor on his spacesuit. “Well, for one thing – though it’s surely thin air – winds here are thought to reach the forces of hurricanes ...!”

  Suddenly, everyone began following Commander Strachan as he led the crew away, in a specific direction.

  They half-heartedly followed – observing the soil and rocks – while looking out for traces of fossils and life forms within the layers of ground.

  Then Dr Selina Jackson, a zoologist/biochemist, yelled, making Dexter think that they had found the large specimens of the white worms found there.

  He left some puzzling smashed rocks, and with wonder followed her eyes to a shape shining brightly at a mound.

  Deputy Commander Basinger, who was mainly an astrophysicist/planetary geologist, like Dexter, went to it first.

  “They must’ve visited here?” Basinger asked, curiously.

  Selina suspiciously examined Commander Strachan, as he was desperately trying not to respond, and was hiding something.

  “Impossible!” Commander Strachan announced firmly. “We’d know of it! This entire section is the least checked region on Mars. We’re here to put up a flag and open the region to future explorations. It’s considered to have rare minerals – desperately needed ...”

  “We must have found one of their first space probes that they sent here, in the late twentieth century –”

  “Or even the remains of one of their rockets ...”

  “Yet why is it a metal sphere? And how did it become embedded like that?”

  “It could have fallen down – from up in orbit!”

  “It seems to be intact!”

  All the astronauts formed a circle around it, and studied it.

  “Even if there were a proper atmosphere, and it crashed at high speed, it shouldn’t be implanted in this rock like this!” Burrell stated firmly.

  Dexter shifted in close, and Basinger touched its surface.

  “This rock encrusting its surface must be at least thousands of years old!” Basinger declared, gasping.

  Dexter copied him and brushed his glove over the rock encrusting its surface and felt a pulsating vibration from something deep in its interior, as if it were alive.

  Chapter 1

  The Black Hole Experiments

  In the outer fringes of the black hole, shifting wildly about itself, within the opened up alien sphere, a metallic gleam of light was magically suspended, motionlessly in mid-air, from the surface of an electronic clock, by the scientists.

  The clock held at the end of an almost invisible cable, of translucent material, had its precision digital numbers frozen in fuzzy multidimensional forms (in a suspended cluster of partially transparent layers).

  Professor Bergman, the leading scientist, had it released further, edging it into the black hole, creating more spectacular optical effects from the clock, making it distort in twisted forms (shaping beams of light with matter like a form of glass sculpture).

  Its numbers shifted fast forward, until they froze again, and the clock almost vanished, and they stopped its progression.

  A loud cheer erupted from all of the scientists and technicians crowded into the laboratory, applauding.

  Dexter realized that it was more than a rupture in space. It had properties of suspending time! It was a hole in the fabric of space and time, and a gateway into the depths of time.

  He had staggered when he had first observed the pulsating alien sphere, when he had entered the laboratory of the UN Space Agency – where leading scientists were carrying out a series of basic experiments on it.

  They had not been able to determine its origins, so they had brought it back to the Earth, to allow leading scientists to investigate it.

  He had shuddered as he had studied its cleaned surface and perfect sphere shape, with no blemishes or openings.

  The abnormal antics of the laboratory scientists had captivated him – mystifying him with the depth of their nervousness, and fear of something! Some still repetitively studied the controls of an immense laboratory laser, with alarm – preparing themselves!

  What were they going to do? Had something gone wrong in their earlier experiments?

  A swift flash of light had exploded out, and the laser’s flickering beam had blasted into the sphere – silencing all the scientists.

  It had triggered it to unlock, open (with a deafening bang), and reveal its inner chamber, where it was – by the manipulation of gravitational forces – suspending a black hole.

  Professor Bergman calmly raised his hand, quickly giving a signal to a technician.

  “As you see,” he announced, “it manipulates perceptions of space and time – within its outer radius! It suspends, accelerates, and suspends it. And if you’ll look – to the clock – suspended at its outer radius – it decelerates it too.”

  The cable emerged outwards, pulling the clock back, with its numbers going swiftly backwards, until its numbers once again became motionless.

  “And if you examined that clock, you would see that the numbers don’t move backwards!”

  Dexter copied Basinger, Burrell, Selina, and the others, and clapped wildly.

  He briefly wondered if it could be a form of time machine.

  “Professor Bergman!” a scientist, next to him, called out. “If something fell in there, would it go on a quantum leap? Would you say that it would appear at some stage after its collapse?”

  “I personally believe that it would travel into the future. But where it ends up is not in my field of knowledge!”

  Dexter wondered if in reality the black hole was different from what they perceived. But he dismissed the idea. He did accept their philosophy!

  “What are your intentions?” another scientist called out, from behind the group. “Are you going to send something in there?”

  “We have investigated it little, so far, and if we do, I can assure you that I shall have you all informed about it!”

  “What uses to industry do you think it may have?” the scientist continued. “Could science not use it? It has the power to stop time in its outer radius!”

  “We do not know at present how safe it is! We shall test it much further, and we may find a use for it – as you mentioned.

  “If you will take an observation of its shifting movements, which we have been studying closely over the past few days – which some of you may have observed – as its constrained pattern of movements has dramatically altered.”

  Dexter examined its lethal appearance. It resembled a large black bubble of pure energy – buzzing wildly and dangerously about – ready to discharge somewhere.

  “Do you believe that space is full of black holes like this?” another scientist asked. “Is space full of them from events such as the big bang? And how long do you think it will last?”

  “There may be many, scattered throughout the universe, and a danger to any explorations of space! Thus we can study this one, and learn to detect them.

  “The length of time that they exist may depend on their size and the conditions that they exist in. We just don’t know how long they last! However, I can give you other details about this one. Our fact sheets have all our findings, from our experiments, which may interest you.”

  A technician entered, nervously listening to everything, and began handing the documents to the scientists at the doorway, and they queued up to the back of the laboratory.

  While Dexter stood waiting for them to finish, he sensed something peculiar, but he kept his sight on the queue, where the scientists were captivating.

  As he listened more, a gentle draught appeared, and he discontentedly tried to detect where it was coming from.

  But it increased and he realized that it was not a draught – the air was being sucked away – and he glimpsed a hideous black shadow over the floor, with a horrific emerging shape, and he stood frigid, watching the black hole crawl through the laboratory’s protective screen m
aterial.

  In an instant it vanished and reappeared across his path, and he could not escape its powerful pull, and the whole laboratory erupted into a frenzy of activity as he plunged into it – hurtling into blackness – with existence rapidly vanishing.

  Chapter 2

  The Fringes of Eternity

  In a blur, he was floating over all the stars of the universe, and tumbling through the depths of eternity – far from the nearest stars – out beyond reality.

  Obscure illuminations endlessly shifted, as he wildly spun around, with no real awareness of anything.

  A tranquil abyss flowed surreally against him.

  A shape gradually emerged, of a stretch of shininess.

  He came to, from his state of disarray, studying it.

  How had he managed to end up in such a far-out place? Where was he? How could he survive?

  He felt as though he had been falling through something, and he tried to grasp the concept, and where he had been.

  There was no longer any light of the outer universe!

  Large stars magically appeared about him, with incredible dimensions, and shone with blinding rays.

  Howling air suddenly blasted at him, and around him, and he plunged down, and he saw the night sky, swirling about him.

  He was over water, and falling out of the sky.

  He realized he could survive, and prepared himself.

  A roaring and blinding surge of water hit him, and he dived through it, swiftly sinking downwards. And he automatically put out his arms, pushing away water, stroking and tugging, pulling himself from the endless depths of water.

  Chapter 3