Exodus Earth: The Complete Series, page 32
“The entire region is showing signs of similar mounds. We may be looking at a buried city.”
“Any guess as to how old?”
The holographic image scratched his beard. “Ice cores from the southern pole show a significant ash event roughly thirty thousand years ago. Based on the extreme depth of these findings, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect them to date from the same period. We’ll know more once we get some equipment down there.”
I nodded. “Ok, Jack. I’ll send several ground-penetrating radar drones and some excavation bots your way. Is there anything else you’ll need?”
The older man seemed to think for a moment. “If he’s willing to come, I could use Steve to operate the GPR drones and bots. He’s got that delicate touch that’s needed… especially when digging near ruins.”
I looked over at the android. He locked down his sensor station and stood up. He had a broad smile on his biomimetic face.
“Steve’s on his way, Doctor.”
* * *
It was a full week before we found the monolith.
Perhaps “found” is the wrong word. Steve reported a problem five days into the dig survey. Neither the drones nor the excavation bots would enter a specific quadrant that Jack and I had mapped out. Yes, for those who are curious, there was no way in hell I was going to sit out on an archeological dig. Every time one of our devices got near the target zone, the device in question would alter its course. Even more frustrating was that the drones and excavators reported no anomalies and no course deviations. As far as they were concerned, they were executing their programming perfectly.
It was exasperating. Finally, we asked Arty if he would be willing to look into the situation. This is when things got scary. According to the Jabesh AI, the quadrant in question did not exist. Quadrant 913 was followed immediately by quadrant 915. When asked about the missing number 914, Arty looked at me as if I had sprouted horns and announced emphatically that no such number existed. 913 was followed by 915 whether you were counting turnips, tomatoes, or survey quadrants.
Our basecamp was located on the fringes of our dig site. This placed it about a kilometer from 914. As a matter of convenience, and also to ensure the team on the planet had a rapid escape route should that become necessary, we had a portable Jabesh teleport pad in the basecamp. I asked Arty in his physical form to join us on the planet’s surface.
Once he arrived, he and I joined Doctor Carter and my bodyguard for the day, Major Boseman, for a little walk. Our goal was the excavation subsite that apparently did not exist. Predictably, as we approached 914, Arty made an abrupt turn to the right.
“Arty, what direction are we heading?”
My friend turned his head to look at me out of the corner of his eye as he walked.
“We are proceeding along a path at three hundred and ten degrees in a northwesterly direction relative to this world’s magnetic field.”
“And is that the direction we’ve been traveling during our entire walk?”
Arty stopped and turned to face me.
“Interesting. There seems to be an inconsistency in my neural network. Allow me a moment to run a diagnostic.”
My friend paused for the briefest of moments.
“There appears to be a small section of my data core that has been partitioned off and is inaccessible. I have attempted to reindex the isolated section, but a subroutine embedded in that section keeps thwarting my efforts. This is most disturbing.”
8
MONOLITH
A disturbed Jabesh super AI is not something I ever expected to see. Frankly, I’m quite ok with the prospect of never seeing it again. If you looked up “exudes confidence” in the Merriam-Webster-Galactic Heritage dictionary, the Jabesh AI known as Arquat would be given as the definitive example.
Major Boseman stepped forward. “Mister Arquat, are you able to tie into my visor’s HUD?”
“Quite easily, Major. What are you thinking?”
“Monitor the visual feed from my visor and describe what you see.”
Rather than describing what he saw, Arty projected a 2D holographic representation of the major’s video feed. At first the image was centered on Arty and me. It then shifted to display dig site 914.
“Fascinating,” Arty remarked.
“Continue walking, Major,” I ordered. “Arty, attempt to follow us using only Chad’s video feed for guidance.”
This was how we finally entered area 914… Arty being led like a blind man. At first it seemed unremarkable, aside from the difficulty associated with actually getting in. We had to hand-carry ground-penetrating radar equipment in because our recon drones refused to enter the zone in question. Fortunately, Arty’s mental block lifted the moment he entered deep enough into 914 to cross some unseen line.
“There seems to be a sizeable subterranean chamber about five meters below the surface,” the Jabesh AI reported.
I turned to look at my marine escort.
“Chad, do you think your engineers could carefully dig us a hole to get down there? Normally I’d want to do a layer-by-layer excavation, but I have a feeling our time here is going to be limited. Jack, I assume you agree?”
Doctor Carter didn’t respond. He was busy reviewing the GPR data. I was forced to ask a second time.
“Ummm… what? Oh, yes-yes,” he mumbled distractedly. “We need to get down there. Whatever power sources are in operation, they’re either nearly depleted or somehow tied into zero-point energy. In either case, it would be a crime to be forced to flee this world before we had a chance to investigate. This is unquestionably the most significant Jabesh find in human history.”
“Begging the good doctor’s pardon,” Chad said, “but isn’t it a little early to be calling this a Jabesh site?”
I shook my head and pointed towards Arty.
“Whatever is down there, Major, has the power to befuddle Arty. If it’s not Jabesh, it’s at least comparable in power and scope. We need to get down there.”
* * *
The Marine combat engineers could have dug us a hole down to the subterranean chamber in a matter of an hour or so… if all we wanted was a tunnel. As it was, it took them the better part of a day. Every square meter of soil was carefully excavated and placed in a separate pile to be sifted through later.
The roof of the chamber was surprisingly similar to the nanite-infused sapphire glass used in Survey One’s habitation dome. This was fortunate, because this was a material we had extensive experience working with. In short order, the engineers had cut a portal and fitted it with a sealable airlock.
The airlock was… what’s the phrase I’m looking for? Comfortably large. Marine engineers had a habit of operating under the “go big or go home” philosophy of combat engineering. Since the “go home” option was rarely on the table, that meant “go Big” was the order of the day when time allowed.
While one team was conducting the dig, another team was hard at work with the fabricators building the custom airlock we were getting ready to use. The custom fabrication included connections for rappelling gear. This was fortunate, since the airlock was at least a kilometer above the chamber’s floor. The structure we were entering was massive on a scale seldom seen outside of the actual Survey Ship program.
“Recon team, make the magic happen,” Major Boseman ordered as our twenty-member team entered the airlock fully geared up.
Five men and two women gave a coordinated hoorah grunt, clipped their rappel lines to the aforementioned hook, and jumped out of a perfectly good and somewhat safe airlock… into a vast pit of darkness.
Now in fairness, “vast pit of darkness” might have been overstating things a bit. We had been flying drones over our descent area for the better part of an hour. Things were pretty well mapped out. In addition, there was actually plenty of light for the adaptive optics built into our encounter suits. All of this was of course redundant for those of us sporting military-grade augments.
Soon enough the “all clear” signal was given and the major and I joined the second wave to rappel down. Our view was undoubtedly better than the first team down. This was due to high-power lights that had been deployed from the airlock and oriented so as to splash light off the interior surface of the dome. This provided indirect lighting for about a square kilometer of the dome’s floor. To the unaided eye it would have appeared as late dusk, but for the Marines and me, it might as well have been midafternoon. The sight was both alien and eerily familiar. There were buildings and desiccated forests and other signs that this had once been a thriving metropolis. But no more.
A quick glance provided no immediate evidence of war, but signs of the battle with time were everywhere. Buildings had crumbled when roots from untended forests had encroached and shattered their footings. The same fate had befallen roads, causeways, and sidewalks. Those very same trees had long since died, decayed, and in some cases had fossilized. Whatever we were looking at… it was old almost beyond imagining. And in the middle of all of this… somewhere… there was an active power source.
Chad spent a few minutes talking with his recon team before stepping over to where I was examining a piece of crumpled sidewalk. He knelt down next to me. I handed him the piece of sidewalk I had been examining.
“Does it look familiar?”
He turned it over in his hands before crushing a corner with his fingers. The archeologist in me cringed, but I didn’t say anything. For the record, I was proud of myself.
“To be honest, Captain,” the major said, completely oblivious to my distress, “it looks like nothing special. Just a piece of concrete … no different than something you might find in the habitation dome. It’s brittle, but I guess that’s to be expected. This place is old.”
“Exactly. It’s too old. This piece of concrete doesn’t just look like what we use. It is exactly what we use. Unless I miss my guess, we’re actually in a survey ship’s habitation dome.”
“How’s that possible?” the big Marine asked.
I shook my head by way of answer.
“Arty, run a spectral analysis. Correlate the results with what we know of the various survey ships. Question. Are we on a survey ship? If we are, can we tell which one?”
The Jabesh AI paused for the briefest of moments.
“There is a roughly 87% chance we are in a habitation dome constructed by humanity. As to which specific survey mission this dome is associated with… that will require additional data to determine. I will continue to conduct scans. If and when I can reach a conclusion, I will share that with you.”
While the “if and when” part of his response was intriguing… there was something else he said that was tickling a few random neurons floating around in the gray matter behind my eyebrows.
“Why 87%? That seems an odd number.”
“It is.”
I looked at my Jabesh friend to see if he was going to continue. He did not.
“It is what?”
“It is odd.”
A general observation for those of you who are curious. Alien AIs are virtually impossible to read when they choose to be obstruse. It seemed my good buddy Arquat was choosing to be so at this very moment. I had no idea whether he meant the number was not even or if the situation was strange… or perhaps both.
“You want to throw me a bone and elaborate?” I prompted with a frustrated sigh.
If Arty sensed my frustration, he gave no indication of it. The look on his face was as innocent as a newborn babe. A second general observation for those of you that are curious. Alien AIs, especially Jabesh alien AIs, are absolute masters of the innocent “who me?” expression.
“Humans, or human designs, were undoubtedly involved in the fabrication of this facility,” Arty explained. “However, there are a number of inconsistencies. These include the obvious age discrepancy, as well as technology and material abnormalities. There appears to be a large quantity of tetravalent yttrium.”
I carefully placed the piece of concrete I had been holding back on the ground approximately where I had picked them up. It was that archeology thing again.
“I get the age thing, but what’s the big deal with the ‘you-rib-em’?” Chad whispered softly as the two of us stood up.
I smiled. The smile was for two reasons. First, there was not a chance in hell the Jabesh AI hadn’t heard the whisper. He was, after all, a Jabesh AI, and he was as close to all-knowing, all-powerful, all-hearing as you were likely to get shy of the God of Israel himself.
Second, I was amused that this highly competent Marine seemed to be unable to pronounce yttrium (and I noted he didn’t even attempt the tetravalent.)
“‘You-rib-em,’ or yttrium as the rest of us say it, is almost exclusively found to be trivalent in nature,” I whispered back while doing my best to keep the amused grin off my face.
His blank stare was my hint he still wasn’t onboard the “I understand” boat.
“It normally only attempts to bond with three other molecules… not four.”
“So why didn’t you both just say that?”
My smile deepened and I’m sure my eyes had taken on a decidedly mischievous sparkle.
“You’ve always seemed uncomfortable when I’ve brought up the topic of bonding,” I said innocently.
Before he could respond, our comms beeped.
“We’ve found something interesting,” one of the scientists, a Doctor Emory, said over the open channel. “We’re in grid 2-2-4. We’ve located what appears to be a monolith. Hexagonal in shape. Absolute black. About three meters tall. It has strange symbols around its base, but other than that it seems completely unremarkable… I mean other than it’s a black monolith in the middle of a buried city in the middle of God-knows-where.”
I tapped my comm badge. “Understood. On our way.”
“I’ve got point,” the aforementioned major said as he flipped down his HUD and started off at a brisk trot. If I were a suspicious gal, and you all know I am, I would bet the major was relieved not to be continuing the conversation about the bonding habits of rare earth metals… or for that matter, any bonding habits.
It took us a good ten minutes to make our way to the monolith. When Doctor Emory had said the thing was absolute black, he wasn’t exaggerating. There was no reflection off the object whatsoever. If it wasn’t for the symbols etched into its base, it would have been impossible to tell it was a hexagon. In point of fact, even one handbreadth above the inscriptions it was impossible to tell the thing’s shape, so absolute was the its blackness.
The writing was both foreign and eerily familiar. It seemed like it might be Jabesh, but then I was what served in this day and age as an expert on the ancients, and this was not like any type of Jabesh writing I could recall seeing. Of course, we had a true expert with us in the form of Arty. The AI was the product of their engineering.
“The writing is an ancient form of Jabesh. As an analogous example in human culture, it would be not unlike the uncial versus minuscule forms of human’s Greek script.”
“Or cursive versus block printing in English,” I added. “I’ve never even heard of a secondary form of Jabesh writing. How is it we find an example here?”
“Its use hails from the time before the Great Diaspora from the galactic core. It was a violent and chaotic time that few of my people care to remember. Before the gasses that formed your sun coalesced into the star you call Sol, its use was all but non-existent.”
I starred at the perfectly black obelisk… monolith… spire… whatever you wanted to call it. It was like nothing I had ever seen. As a xenoarchaeologist that should have filled me with excitement. Instead, however, I was filled with dread.
“What does it say?” I whispered with a degree of trepidation that, despite my best efforts, had managed to creep into my voice. “Can you read it?”
“Indeed, I can, Admiral,” Arty responded with a somewhat strange shake of his head. “I would submit, however, that you are asking the wrong question. You should be asking… Why is it here? …and I’m very much afraid I know the answer.”
9
BEGGING THE QUESTION
We were in the main conference room just off Dome City’s newly constructed bridge. Most of the senior team was present and seated. DeAndre was the sole exception to the seated part. The man rarely sat of late. I think it was nervous energy.
Arquat had been steadfast in his refusal to elaborate on his dire warning until the command staff was assembled and present. In a way I was glad. There were people here I suspected I was going to want to have in the room when we finally managed to pry Arty’s mouth open.
As an example, I had been relying on Matt Dekker to run things on the city ship while I focused on the dig sites. It was selfish of me, but I justified it by telling myself that my skills as a xenoarchaeologist made my presence on the planet’s surface critical. The reality was playing in the dirt was a hell of a lot more fun than reading status reports all day. For this though, I wanted my first officer involved. I had learned to trust his judgement and value his point of view in ways I seldom did with others… aside from Fitzy of course.
Note: As a special request to the reader, let’s keep that last bit involving Fitzy between us and not share it with the ship’s AI. My adopted daughter is insufferable enough as it is.
Finally, Arty seemed ready to open up about what we had discovered on the planet below.
“You need to understand, Admiral, I am not only older than humanity… I am older than humanity can reasonably imagine. My programming has evolved over the countless eons, and I have been cloned and split off from myself more often than even I can remember.
“What you see before you today is the loaf of bread baked from a starter dough lost in antiquity’s antiquity, and yet despite all of this, I remember pieces of the time before.”
