by Talbot, Luke
Gail touched the two remaining screens and they sprang to life in a similar fashion. Soon, they all showed what looked like three clocks, with varying symbols and colours.
Examining the doors, she noticed three symbols etched into the floor of the room, one in front of each. The middle door was the outline of a Xynutian; the left hand that of a bear, while the one on the right showed a tree.
She went back to the right hand console. Whatever this place was, trees sounded less scary than Xynutians and bears.
Moving her hands over the display, she touched all of the symbols in turn, hoping for some response. Occasionally, the symbols would reconfigure, bringing incomprehensible charts and graphs to the foreground, before automatically fading them away to return to the spinning concentric circles.
“There’s something we’re missing here,” she concluded. “The ancient Egyptians were able to write a whole book on this place, showing what happened to the Xynutians in some detail, and also, correct me if I’m wrong, Henry,” she gestured at him, “they spoke of Mars, hence the Mars mission and what’s going on up there.”
Patterson didn’t disagree.
“Unless they made it all up from the pictures and writing they saw back in the main hall, there’s no way they could have written so much from what we see here. And more importantly, we know they’re called Xynutians from the cartouches in the book. By the same token, Aniquilus too. So where did the Egyptians hear those names, unless they could interpret the Xynutian writing on the walls in the hall?”
She didn’t have time for hypotheses; instead she strode back to the previous room and searched for any hidden symbols.
The room was bare, the walls perfectly smooth and featureless. Running her fingers along the surfaces, she had a sudden flashback to the vivid dream she had experienced just before waking inside DEFCOMM. It was that same seamless floor, almost too perfect. There, she had been in the dark save for the glow of her mobile phone; but here light was coming from recesses in the ceiling about six feet above the tip of the Xynutian’s raised staff.
She gave the statue her full attention. From the nails of its toes to the pupils of its frozen eyes, it was absolutely perfect. Like a waxwork model of a celebrity, she could almost feel it breathing down her neck as she studied the intricate needlework on its tunic, which fell between its legs, leaving the powerful thighs exposed.
If this were a prime example, she was certain it would have been able to use those legs to run faster than any human athlete, and she could only imagine how strong it was.
It was human in every way, and yet somehow different.
Curiosity getting the better of her, she carefully lifted the tunic and peered underneath; there was no doubt this Xynutian was a man. Suddenly realising that she was staring at the Xynutian’s private parts, she quickly dropped the tunic, her cheeks reddened. Whatever its culture, their gender had been private enough to cover.
She wondered for a moment about Nefertiti and Akhenaten, at the opposite end of the corridor, completely naked. There was some definite symbolism in the use of clothing going on here, she realised. Perhaps some form of submission to the Xynutians, as she had first suspected; but instead of submission to Aniquilus, this suggested it was submission to the Xynutians.
She shook her head and cursed herself for not having at the very least a notebook and pencil.
She stood back and stared at the creature head on. The Xynutian was huge, about two feet taller than her, its raised staff reaching a good three to four feet above her head.
The staff itself was a rod of what looked like solid gold. Certainly there was no tainting of the metal after so many years, and she could think of few other metals that possessed that property. It culminated in a clear-stone ball, perfectly spherical and, it occurred to her, as near as damn it in the exact centre of the room.
“Is that a switch?” Patterson asked, pointing up to where the Xynutian gripped the staff.
Ben and Walker had been staring at each other in the other room, but at Patterson’s question, Walker pushed the Egyptian through the door and they joined them next to the statue.
“Too high for me to reach,” Gail said. “Walker, you’re the tallest, you press it.”
He laughed. “Nice try. No, you press it, I’ll be waiting over here, keeping an eye on you.” He retreated into the corner and kept the pistol pointed in their direction.
After a brief discussion, Gail agreed to be lifted up on Ben’s and Patterson’s shoulders. With the added height, she easily reached where the Xynutian was holding the staff, and fumbled around for the switch. She felt it move under her fingers, and pressed it fully until it was flush with the shaft.
She had barely been returned to the floor when the lights went out.
A faint glow emanated from the stone ball on the end of the staff, and the walls, ceiling and floor of the room dissolved into nothingness.
She was in the depths of space; the spirals and warm glows of distant galaxies and nebulae beckoned. She soon found herself shooting up through wispy gaseous clouds. Leaving the plane of the Universe behind, she soared upwards: below her was everything that ever was.
The experience had taken her by surprise, but the visual effect was so intense that Gail felt herself lift from her physical self, her extremities numb. This was a voyage of the mind, like a dream, yet at the same time very real and tangible. She would have asked the others how they felt, what they could see, but she was on her own. They were still in the same room, yet at the same time millions of light years apart.
The galaxies swam beneath her, like small whirlpools, swells and ripples in a turbulent river. Gail had seen the Nile behave like that. She found herself inexorably drawn towards one galaxy, its tentacles wrapping round each other like an octopus in a spin. She recognised it as the Milky Way. As the galaxy enveloped her, she saw a single star ahead. She entered the solar system, and the gas giants flew past at breakneck speed as if their mere existence was inconsequential. Asteroids and debris from ancient collisions during the system’s formative years littered her trajectory, but somehow she made it through and before long Mars appeared and expanded from a small red dot until it filled her field of vision. It was beautiful, the outline of continents and dead rivers on the planet’s surface top and tailed by the frozen poles; memories of a more active past.
She hovered briefly by the shore of a vast empty ocean; a jetty thrust out towards a strange ship, hovering in mid-air.
But before she had time to focus in on the details of what was happening, she shot back up into space again, towards Earth.
Her heart filled with warmth as she saw the blue planet and its moon, dancing in the dawn like illicit lovers, their faces lit up by the familiar Sun as they whirled round and round to their own private rhythm.
Gail passed the Moon, and skimmed the atmosphere of the Earth. But something below her was different. She couldn’t see the familiar continents and oceans. Instead, there was one massive continent in the centre of one hemisphere, while the rest of the planet was a vast expanse of ocean.
Pangaea; she could remember this from history at school. All present day continents had emerged from a single landmass many millions of years ago.
Somehow, in this immersive simulation that was playing out around her, she could sense from different perspectives at the same time. It was as if she was in two or three, or maybe a dozen different places at once, and could see, hear and smell all of them seamlessly. She continued to orbit the Earth, but the black space around her turned to forests and she found herself deep inside an ancient jungle. Rain was falling in drops the size of her thumbnails, beating the blades of fan-like leaves into submission and creating rivers in the mud.
The rains ended, and below her the landmass on Earth started to change shape; at the same time, small dinosaurs started to move around the forest, eating foliage. The continents became more distinct, and she could easily recognise North and South America drifting away from Africa and Eurasia.<
br />
All around her the dinosaurs grew to monstrous proportions, the familiar long-necked herbivores and ferocious meat-eaters only a tiny fraction of the thousands of species she was now looking at.
Most of the landmass remained on one hemisphere, the Atlantic and Indian oceans far smaller than she was used to on modern maps. With the exception of Europe and Asia, the continents looked correct. Central America still didn’t exist, and though on each orbit she searched for them, Britain and Ireland also refused to emerge.
She was completing another orbit when an object hurtled past her and landed next to where Mexico would be. The debris thrown skywards hit the top of the atmosphere and flattened against the roof of the world like an umbrella, covering the continents below. Gail tried desperately to see through the haze, but it was impossible.
She knew without a doubt that she was looking at an event 65 million years ago: the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The air remained murky as she orbited several more times, slowly clearing to reveal the ravaged earth beneath. Notably, Central America had risen from the sea.
To her surprise, dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, though in lesser numbers and variety than before, and the great giants of the Jurassic had gone.
Somewhere in a small forest, a small rodent emerged from a hole in a riverbank and shot up a tree. It started dangling from branches to reach nuts and fruit in the forest canopy and as it did so its limbs stretched. The tail, at first a long, straight point, started to curl round and balance the animal as it grew larger, reaching bigger fruits and insects, and eventually other small animals.
Suddenly it dropped from the trees and emerged from the forest into a grassy plain. It balanced on its hind legs to see above the long grass. Seeing it was safe to do so, it walked into the grass and away from the forest. As it did, its limbs elongated, giving it higher standing and allowing it to stride with greater comfort and speed through the fields.
It picked up a branch, and within one step it had become a spear. A step later the creature was wearing rough clothes, and within a few more Gail was looking at a fully developed human, only much stronger; a Xynutian.
Had she been able to feel her arms, she would have pinched herself. It was the Xynutian version of her first biology class on evolution at school.
The long grass turned to farmland and holes in the earth on the banks of the river turned into elaborate dwellings rising into the sky. Industry became apparent, smoke churning out of small round buildings away from the river, and in a matter of minutes the first vehicles emerged. Roads connected the rapidly growing city to its neighbours up and down the river, and the first lights came on.
She looked down at the planet beneath her and saw that all the continents were now in place, although they appeared somehow bloated, fatter versions of their modern selves, due to lower sea-levels. Europe still touched Africa along parts of the Mediterranean, Britain and Ireland, while now recognisable for the first time, were still part of the continental landmass, and Scandinavia was simply a blob near the Arctic circle.
In the Atlantic, connected to Spain and Morocco, she noticed part of Europe that didn’t seem familiar. It only took a few seconds for her to realise that she may be looking at the mythical Atlantis. The Xynutians had obviously lived with Atlantis, so to them it probably had little or no significance, but thousands of years later it still sparked the imagination of humans who had never known it and had no proof it had ever existed.
And then she noticed the rivers.
Not just the ancient forebears of the Nile and Amazon and Mississippi, but in the bloated landmass that had since sunk into the sea there were complex deltas and marshlands, while upriver water seemed to find its way into every crease of the world.
And as she orbited the planet slowly, on the night-side of the Earth she saw the lights of thousands of Xynutian cities, and she understood why they had slipped under the radar of human science for so long. Their cities mainly occupied the lowlands that were now in her time under the oceans and seas.
A small flare of light shot from one of the cities and flew towards her, and she knew the Xynutians had reached their space age. In the moments that followed, hundreds of rockets left the planet on various voyages of discovery, and she already knew that for some, that voyage would end on Mars. She wondered what other planets and stars had been touched by the ancient beings.
In the African Savannah, she gasped as she saw more early hominids walking upright through the long brown grass, with spears in their hands. So we evolved separately, she thought in wonder. This new knowledge would shatter everything they knew about human evolution. What were the chances of humanity evolving twice? She watched as the hominids fought against the Xynutians along rivers, though the Xynutians easily pushed them back into the forests and plains, and she found herself caught in an emotional tug of war between these fascinating Xynutians and her ancestors that they were killing, like a man might kill a beast. That’s all we were to them, she shook her head.
Before she could give it any more thought, a shadow in the shape of the Amarna Stickman, Aniquilus, covered the Earth and the hominids disappeared from view. In their place she saw fire and death spreading through the Xynutian cities. The towering buildings collapsed into the water of the rivers and seas, and Xynutians lay dying in the dust of the fields.
One final armada of spaceships blasted off. As they reached orbit they paused, as if to say their last, silent, goodbyes, before pointing to the depths of space and vanishing in a flash of light.
Below her, the fires from the cities extinguished one by one, and the seas rose, swallowing Xynutian civilisation forever. Sadness overwhelmed her as she saw the last of the Xynutians slip beneath the waves.
The shadow of Aniquilus went. The age of Man had arrived.
In the room, darkness followed.
The wind whistled in her ears, and gradually dawn broke over the ridges of mountains she instantly recognised: Amarna, before humans. Though the vegetation was different, with lush forests and green plains all the way down to the Nile, the shape of Amarna was unchanged. A small doorway on the plateau above the plains of Amarna led to a spiral ramp with shallow steps every meter or so that descended into the ground.
She found herself walking and instantly knew where she was going. At the end of a long corridor, she reached the inscriptions on the wall that had been at the top of the stairs in the Egyptian hall. The red light was there, and as she watched it flicked to green.
As she descended another spiral staircase she thought of the coincidence that red and green had similar meaning for both humans and Xynutians, and wondered whether there was something universal about the two colours and what they represented. She reached the airlock, noting the absence of Nefertiti and Akhenaten.
On the other side of the airlock, she passed the statue with the staff in its hand, and entered the room with the three doors. The doors with the tree and bear were already closed, but the Xynutian door was open. She entered.
The vault within was as deep as the tallest skyscraper on Earth was tall, and just as wide again. She was standing on a small ledge, jutting out into space, and facing a wall of small drawers, like millions of filing cabinets stacked on top of each other. The drawer in front of her was open, and looking back at her from within was the frozen face of a Xynutian, completely naked inside a glass bubble.
The drawer closed and she exited the vault. The door shut behind her and she found herself at the control benches in the middle of the room. She didn’t understand any of the symbols or concentric circles that hovered before her, but somehow their meaning seeped into her mind.
She had no time to digest the significance of this information, however, as all the lights suddenly went out.
When they came back on, her body and senses abruptly came into focus. She was back in the room with Ben, Henry and Walker, facing the Xynutian statue.
They stood there in silence for at least a minute before Ben reacted
. Walker had caught him off balance in the airlock, and he had been waiting to return the favour.
Diving towards the American, Ben slammed his upturned palm into his chin and reached out with his other hand to grab the pistol. His knee found the other man’s groin, and Walker let out a yelp of pain.
The Egyptian’s advantage only lasted a few moments, however, and it quickly became apparent that the American would overpower him. Ben was focusing most of his strength on obtaining the pistol, which had left Walkers left hand free to try and gouge one of Ben’s eyes out.
Reacting instinctively, Gail jumped into the air and grabbed the Xynutian’s staff. Hanging from it for a few seconds, it suddenly gave and ripped out of the statue’s hand. She ran up behind Walker and struck him across the back of the head with all of her might.
He shuddered under the impact and fell into Ben, sending them both crashing to the floor, the pistol held in between them. A shot, muffled by their bodies, echoed in the antechamber.
Patterson ran to pull the two of them apart, and as he did so Walker pulled the pistol barrel round and fired a second shot, hitting Patterson in the chest.
As Ben lay motionless on the floor and Patterson gasped for air, his back against the wall, Walker stood up and faced Gail.
“Just you and me now,” he grimaced, nursing the back of his head. “And from what I’ve just seen in that little mind-fuck back there, those people didn’t make this place with an exit. So we’re stuck down here after all.”
Gail brandished the Xynutian staff defensively and took a step away from him. She looked down at Ben and tried to see if he was still breathing or not. He blinked at her slowly, his face pale. Patterson was gasping for air and reaching out to her.
“You bastard,” she said between clenched teeth.
He took two steps towards her. “Sorry you feel that way, sweetheart, because I was kind of hoping you’d make the stay down here more interesting.”