Chapter Three
The Future: Around Seven Billion A.D.
THE SPACESHIP MATERIALIZED in the orbit of the dead planet. The once yellow sun around which the planet orbited had since begun expanding into a red giant. To the Chief Scientist of the Lonnan Nation who called himself Nolan Ninal, the word giant didn't do justice to the enormous red fireball reaching out to swallow up the brown planet Earth.
Instead, Nolan thought of a word in his own language represented by a single dark circle that, when roughly translated to the now-extinct language of English, meant, "as big as the universe."
Nolan had traveled from the year 7157 A.D into the very distant future for a singular purpose: word had reached him about a tablet in the English language, which the people of his nation could not yet understand that had been placed there by a time-traveler.
Some others had speculated that it had remained in place for billions of years, protected as much as possible from the elements so that the words upon it would not be worn away. Nolan thought this notion was nearly impossible.
As a member of a space-faring race, whom the humans of the seventy-second century called the Soonseen, Nolan existed partly as pure energy and partly as a corporeal being, still restrained within the confines of a three-dimensional plane. He floated in the middle of his ship's bridge, radiating a pure white color.
At times, he tried to hide his color, for the color he emitted gave away his emotional state of mind. After such a long period passing through the future, however, Nolan felt within his rights to let a little happiness show.
The bridge had been built as a sphere where workstations were found along its inner walls. Like the rest of the ship, it had no gravity. Nolan floated in the very center of that sphere while the other members of the Lonnan nation, themselves glowing pure white, hovered in front of their work stations.
When a crewman wanted to interact with a console, they had to let a string of themselves flow out to touch a panel with no buttons or display. The ship conveyed all the information directly to each crewman's consciousness, and in return, the crew could instruct the ship to do what they wanted.
Above, directly overhead, a circle at the apex of the sphere displayed a view of the planet outside the ship. Just looking at the slowly expanding sun, Chief Scientist Nolan felt his body growing warmer. He knew this was just a response his consciousness generated from the genetic memory of a time when his people had bodies that could feel heat.
Even if he were to order his spaceship to fly directly into the sun, he would not feel any heat, even while the ship burned. Yet, looking at the sun, he felt a twinge of warmth spread throughout his form. If he had a mouth, he would have smirked at this.
He lowered his body to the bottom of the sphere and let parts of himself interact with the ship. His thoughts spread out to every part of the ship where a console could be found. He said; Take the ship to the tomb. We have sixteen hours to find what we are looking for.
After the ship entered the atmosphere and landed outside a tomb dedicated to the human race, Nolan disembarked. As far as he understood the reports he read prior to his expedition, the tomb had once stood high enough to be seen from orbit. That had been before the entire structure collapsed one day after billions of years of biting, dry wind had eaten away at the structure's base.
It had lain where it had fallen. Miles of stone rubble in every direction, long since overgrown by plants, served as the last accomplishment of the human race before its destruction.
What once might have looked like a gigantic statue fallen to Earth had, with time, come to resemble a series of hills. The grass had since died as the red sun continued its blazing encroachment upon the skies. The ground, once green, had turned brown.
Red light from the gigantic star cast over everything. Though Chief Scientist Nolan had been told his visual sensory organs would remain undamaged by the presence of so much ultraviolet radiation, he had not looked at the evidence himself.
He mistrusted that conclusion, for the sun took up so much of the sky that he had to focus on dark objects, lest bright colorful spots dance before his eyes. He focused on his destination-a plain stone portal in the ground just before him. It was beneath his feet. Nolan kicked away grainy, dry dirt from the portal.
An inscription had once been written on the portal, perhaps in the language the humans constantly used for their verbal communication rituals. While the words had not survived the years, Nolan saw the faintest ridges on the portal that, under other circumstances, might have just been the effects of weather. However, he knew it was not.
He let the parts of himself that might have once been called feet bleed through the heavily-packed atoms of the stone. A faint blue slip of himself lit the space beneath the portal, and he pulled. using all the force he had at his disposal.
With his body stuck into the round stone, the portal yanked free. It thudded to the ground, turning upside down. The humans had been clever enough to leave an inscription on the bottom of the portal as well as the top. He did not know what the characters signified.
Nolan gradually pulled his body free from the stone. A chunk of the portal tore loose, still attached to a wispy appendage. He waited while the gray stone slid down, the atoms of his body reasserting the connections with each other, though in different ways.
He had developed a hypothesis that the nearby burgeoning red giant would not affect his ability to maintain his own corporeal state. The hypothesis had been proven true. That much would make for an interesting read in the Lonnan Nation after he gathered all the data taken from the spaceship's sensors.
The passage leading underground was dark, but Nolan's own body lit the way for him. By now, he had taken on a worried shade of light blue. He did not feel particularly worried, but his own essence never lied.
If he was blue, then he was worried, no matter what protestations he might care to make. He wondered what was worrying about. Whatever it might be, he deduced that the concern lay in his subconscious, not yet fully actualized into thought.
If the various pictures on the wall were any judge, the human race had been a self-centered species. The pictures, carved into the stone, had themselves worn away by a process not evident to Nolan's senses.
He saw faint indents of animal shapes, human shapes, and shapes of spaceships. The shapes told a story of the evolution of intelligence, though if any specific event was meant to be portrayed, he did not see it. That much seemed to be an oversight to him. His research had proven that progressions in sentient beings always occurred as a result of some catalyst or another.
At the end of the passage, he saw a single tablet encased in several layers of glass, which made it hard to make out the characters. He saw just enough to determine that he had found the relic mentioned in the accounts of future history his own people had recorded.
This tablet had not been a part of the monument to the human race. Instead, there had once been a time capsule containing all the information which humans had deemed worthy of passing on to whatever being might happen upon it.
A being-one which the Lonnan Nation had not yet discovered-had come for the capsule. In its place, a tablet had been left. Nolan Ninal could not take the tablet back to his ship himself without damaging it in some way. A method of extraction would have to be devised.
Fortunately, he thought to himself, he had enough time.
Journey Through Time (A Time Travel Adventure Collection Part 1) Page 18