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CHAPTER 6

“Two days? How can we possibly finish what we have to do in only two days?” Dr. Carrie Shavers asked, unable to contain her exasperation. Since they landed and discovered all the artifacts in the pyramids, she had been working at 125 percent of normal speed and efficiency. And she knew they were getting close to uncovering something, she did not know exactly what, that would rival the discovery of the sleeping Atlanteans—hopefully something a bit less deadly. She was in that state of mind that some would call “flow.” When she reached it, it was like time stood still and all that mattered was the unfolding of the task at hand. It was euphoric.

Late yesterday, and it only seemed like moments ago, they had been able to power up some of the systems in the room outside the cryobeds. On the workbenches they had discovered were embedded video screens, not unlike the ones that were now ubiquitous back at Earth. Throughout the solar system, people had grown accustomed to the flexible graphene displays that now covered nearly everything used in a normal day, allowing instant access to information and some very interesting camouflage or video simulations. They were becoming even more popular recreationally as virtual reality simulation rooms. And the Atlanteans appeared to have used them extensively.

The problem was that when the screen powered up, incomprehensible patterns were displayed and no one on the team had the slightest idea of what they meant. Were they welcome screens written in Atlantean? Error messages from a malfunctioning computer system? Or simply visually appealing artwork evoking an Atlantean aesthetic? The team quickly confirmed they were touch sensitive and it was all they could do to keep the Fintidierians from simply touching them to see what happens. Though, to be fair, as time was now in short supply, the “see what happens” approach might have been the way to go.

They had just finished lunch and had a good four or five more hours of work left in them before they would return to the shuttle and bed down for the night. Shavers intended to make the time count, especially now that the atmosphere they’d pumped into the room was, finally, warm, and somewhat comfortable. Whatever materials were used in the construction of the pyramids acted as a tremendous heat sink, absorbing almost all of the heat they pumped into the room for the first day or so before the ambient air temperature began to noticeably rise. The warm air had allowed them to remove their spacesuits, making the job of figuring out how what things worked in the pyramid much more tolerable.

“If that’s all the time they are going to give us, then I think we need to do like Mr. Bob has been urging. We need to touch the various symbols and see what happens,” Shavers mentioned to no one in particular.

“Now wait a minute, Doc. All we did was walk into the cryobed chamber and the Atlanteans started thawing and then one of them went berserk on the ship, maybe damaging it and, by the way, killing two people along the way. How do you know that you won’t be turning on the self-destruct mechanism or the ‘sterilize the room’ command?” Chief Warrant Officer 5 Joni Walker protested.

“She may have a point,” Dr. Vulpetti added. “Mr. Bob said he recognizes some of the symbols on the screens. They are similar to some of the runes in Misropos.”

“And?” Walker asked with a shoulder shrug. “The last time we talked, you guys still don’t know what any of those runes mean there either.”

“Well, that may be strictly true, but working with Mr. Bob, we have some theories,” Vulpetti replied. “Mr. Bob, tell her what we’ve been discussing.”

The usually silent Mr. Bob looked uncomfortable being asked to speak. Shavers knew it was because he was not a native English speaker and that he was afraid he would embarrass himself in front of the Earth scientists that he thought were a lot smarter than he. Of course, Shavers knew better than to equate intelligence with knowledge. There were many people with lots of knowledge who just happened to be clueless as to how that knowledge should be applied to solve problems in the real world. She had certainly dated enough of them.

“When I was studying the symbols from Misropos, there was one that appeared in many places. In English, Dr. Vulpetti told me you would describe it as a target symbol with three wavy lines underneath it. Here, this is a picture your team took of it when you were in Misropos.”

target symbol with three wavy lines underneath it

“We did some searching, and it is nearly identical to some ancient runes from back on Earth, this one related to ancient India. It refers to one of the chakras. Translated literally, it means ‘wheel,’ and refers to energy points in the body. They are thought to be spinning disks of energy that correspond to bundles of nerves and areas of our energy in our bodies that affect our emotional and physical well-being,” Vulpetti interjected.

“It’s an ‘on’ switch,” Shavers remarked.

“It’s an ‘on’ switch,” confirmed Vulpetti, smiling.

“Okay, let’s assume you are correct. What then?” Walker asked, still looking skeptical.

“Then we…wing it,” Vulpetti said.

“I agree. We’ve got nothing to lose,” Shavers added, feeling the comfortable excitement building in her chest. It was a high and she loved it.

“Nothing to lose? What if it doesn’t mean ‘on,’ but rather ‘initiate self-destruct sequence’?” Walker added again.

“Well, then you will at least have died a meaningful death. What can be more meaningful than exploring millennia-old ruins in the hopes of saving a planet full of people?” Vulpetti asked, smiling.

Walker looked pained, obviously torn as to the best approach forward, and truly didn’t agree with the others.

“Alright, you win, I guess,” Walker declared. “‘Fortune favors the bold,’ as they say.”

Shavers walked over to the screen on the middle console that glowed a pale blue color with the chakra symbol prominently in the middle. Without so much as a pause, she pressed her palm against it.

The symbol disappeared from the screen, turning it completely black. A few seconds later, the screen came back to life and then every screen in the room lit up. Each had a display of symbols that all appeared to be in different combinations. A cursory glance told Shavers that some were common, some more common than others, but each screen appeared to have unique symbols or common symbols in a unique order. There was also a faint odor of ozone in the air, likely caused by electrical circuits getting warm for the first time in millennia.

“Could we build systems to be active this long?” Shavers asked.

“I doubt it,” Vulpetti replied. “A few hundred years, probably. But thousands? No way.”

“Okay. I’m still in favor of pushing ahead, but I think it might be a good idea to send what’s on each screen up to the Samaritan for the computer to run some pattern-recognition algorithms—and to see if any of these symbols are in a database somewhere,” Shavers said. She was eager to press forward, but she couldn’t bring herself to completely ignore Walker’s cautionary tone.

“Who knows? Maybe some of the symbols will be in a database somewhere like the chakra,” added Vulpetti. “Mr. Bob, walk around and see if you recognize any other symbols.”

On cue, Mr. Bob began walking slowly across the room, pausing to stare at each screen as he went. As he did so, both Shavers and Vulpetti set up the multiple minicameras they’d brought with them and started the data relays up to the ship.

“Dr. Shavers. Please come look at this,” Mr. Bob motioned to them. His voice was soft, but she could hear a tinge of excitement in it.

Shavers walked to where he was standing and looked at the screen to which he was now pointing.

“Does that symbol mean the same thing to you as it does to us?” he asked.

star symbol

“I know I’ve seen it, but I can’t place it. It looks like it might be a star,” she said. “Samaritan, are you getting this?”

“We sure are, Carrie. Running it through the computer now.” Shavers recognized the voice but could not place the name of the female crew member who responded. She was terrible at names, even after being so close to the crew of the Samaritan for so many years; matching faces and voices with names was still a challenge.

“Got it! It’s the Star of Ishtar, or sometimes called the Star of Venus. Ishtar was the Mesopotamian goddess of war and love. Babylon had a similar deity that was often associated with the symbol, the goddess Inanna. For both cultures, she was the goddess of love, sex, fertility—and war.”

“On Earth, Venus is the closest planet to Earth, yes?” Mr. Bob asked.

“Some of the time, yes. What does the symbol mean to you?” Shavers asked in response.

“It means the planets and stars. It is our symbol for all things astronomical,” Mr. Bob replied.

“Press it,” Vulpetti admonished. “I have a hunch.”

Shavers looked at the assembled team and saw approving faces and nods, even from Walker. Without further hesitation, she reached out her palm and touched the symbol on the screen.

In the air, immediately above the console, appeared a three-dimensional starfield with Shavers standing at its center. She could still see the room and her team, but they looked hazy and indistinct as she peered through the thousands of stars that now floated around her. She looked up, down, and around and saw the distribution of stars in each direction was different, as would be expected. But what was her perspective? Where in the universe was the center at which the display had placed her?

“Are you seeing this?” she asked.

“Yes. It appears my hunch was correct. You’re in the middle of what looks like a 3D star map. As we look through it, you appear to be a little fuzzy. Are you okay?” Vulpetti asked.

“I’m fine and, for the record, you are fuzzy too. I’m trying to get my bearings and figure out where I am,” she said as she raised her hand and moved it through the projection. As she did so, the orientation adjusted, following the motions of her hand like swiping across a touchscreen that changed the perspective in a two-dimensional map. Earth’s astronomers used similar three-dimensional star maps, so the experience was somewhat familiar.

“I’m going to need some help from the Samaritan’s computer to figure this out,” she noted as she lifted one of the minicameras to eye level and scanned the view she was seeing, from the inside out, and in as many directions as she could.

“We’re on it,” said the unknown female crew member.

“That’s good because I can’t tell what’s what. It’s embarrassing. In the space dramas, I’d suddenly say, ‘a-ha!’ and start manipulating everything as if it were second nature. But I’m overloaded and just can’t,” Shavers replied. It was embarrassing. Like in graduate school, it was taking her more time than she would have liked to learn a new concept.

“We’ve got it! Without moving your arms around, turn to face Mr. Bob,” her Samaritan contact said. “There. At the center where you are is Proxima Centauri, as you might expect. That yellow star just in front of you is Sol. If you look to your left side just a little, you’ll see Alpha Centauri as a brighter yellow star. The distances between stars don’t appear to be at scale, but you might have noticed that you can stretch out or contract the distances by moving your hands as you did a moment ago.”

Shavers turned her head as directed and was a bit startled by the appearance of a bright yellow dot not more than a few inches from her face. She raised her hand and pushed it away toward the bright star and, sure enough, it moved outward from her. She could control not only her viewing orientation, but the relative distances between the stars in the simulation. It was then that she noticed the dim dots of light that were even closer to her head than Alpha Centauri. She peered at one of them and then cupped her hands to encircle it. She slowly pulled her hands apart and the small dot grew to a size comparable to a grapefruit. As she looked at it, she realized it was the planet Proxima b. She could now see details of its surface, including the landmasses and various bodies of water. She reached out to touch it and was then able to change its orientation relative to her eyes, making it spin as she did so.

Next, she reached out toward Sol, pulled it toward her, and then expanded the view. As she moved her hands outward and drew the solar system closer to her, she saw the familiar Saturn and Jupiter, followed by diminutive Mars and, finally, Earth. When she caught sight of home, her heart skipped a beat. The blue oceans and wispy white clouds evoked an emotional reaction that she allowed herself to indulge in for a few seconds before she pulled herself back to the task at hand. Something’s not quite right.

She saw the familiar continents of North and South America, Eurasia, and Australia. But then she realized what had caught her eye only moments ago. There! In the South Atlantic, due west of Capetown, there was a large island with which she wasn’t familiar. She knew there were islands in the South Atlantic, but this one was far larger than any she remembered—nearly the size of the United Kingdom.

She manipulated her hands to zoom in as close as possible and found that she was not able to do more than the equivalent of a high Earth orbital view. That said, its presence was unmistakable. She carefully examined other continental features and found that all looked like she remembered, giving no clue as to when the image was taken. Knowing a bit of Earth’s geologic history, that meant the photo could be as young as a few thousand years or as old as tens of thousands—or even more. She made sure her camera feed was sending everything to the ship and decided to move on.

Next, she zoomed back out to an interstellar view and reoriented herself, locating Luyten’s Star. Let’s see what’s hiding there, she thought as she moved her hands to draw herself closer to the red dwarf that seemed so popular to the Atlanteans on Proxima b. As she did so, she cupped it to allow a view of any planets there, but before she could zoom in, the entire three-dimensional projection vanished—as did the power to every display screen in the room.

“What? Did you do anything to cause that to happen?” Shavers asked, looking at the faces of her colleagues, who appeared to have been as surprised by the power loss as she was.

“No. But we’d better figure out what happened so we can try to get the systems powered up again. The day is almost over and that just leaves us tomorrow before we have depart. Who knows when we’ll get back,” Vulpetti said.

Shavers agreed, but she was a bit distracted processing what she saw of Earth and the large island that featured so prominently when the images were taken, but which didn’t exist now. All she could think of was the lost kingdom of Atlantis and the myths surrounding it. She would write up her observations when she got back to the ship and then compose a message to Earth for someone to investigate the site. Of course, by the time anyone on Earth got the message, over four years would have passed. By the time they did any investigating and sent a message back, more than a decade. Who knew where she and her shipmates might be in a decade?



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