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Discovery Pt. VII (standard:science fiction, 1465 words) [7/8] show all parts | |||
Author: Goreripper | Added: Dec 11 2001 | Views/Reads: 2591/1836 | Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes) |
The door to the inner sanctum of the Daktar relic is opened at last, and with it the secrets of Arcana's doom. | |||
VII Except for the swathes of light provided by our torches, utter darkness met our eyes when we stepped through the door into the labyrinth's inner sanctum. Darkness, and total silence. Thousands of years had passed since any living thing had entered this chamber. Taking the first steps into that place was as momentous for me, an archaeologist, as when I had first set foot on Arcana. There was the thrill not only of discovery, but of being the first to witness something that had lain hidden for millennia. Our team set to work without delay, erecting batteries of lights that, once they were switched on, illuminated a vast, round chamber, encrusted with the dusts of time but otherwise virtually untouched. The almost cryogenic state of this place had served to preserve it in an almost pristine condition, and we were alarmed to think what effect even the merest touch of our hands would have on the objects arrayed before us. The room was circular, somewhere in the vicinity of quarter of a span in diameter. Around a large central pillar that appeared to consist of a range of sophisticated equipment including vision screens there orbited several rings of what were most obviously work stations. Many of the objects on the desktops were on the verge of almost complete ruin merely due to their incredible age and several turned to powder at the merest touch, but at isolated locations we found rather well-preserved examples of many devices, some of which we took to be visual display units and manual input interface units that looked very much like our own keyboard units from antiquity. Several of these still had characters apparent on the top faces of each key. By far the most significant find however was one which we simply did not expect to make. Considering the vast age of the place, and the completely deserted state of the rest of the complex as we had so far explored it, we just were not prepared to find, slumped back in a chair in a position of evident prominence in the room, a magnificently preserved specimen of the race we had come so far to discover. The excitement this caused can no doubt be imagined; it took considerable time for it to pass and I am quite sure Professor Neffergi would never have forgiven himself if he had not been there to see it. To say that the corpse was perfectly preserved would be to overstate the facts. The cadaver was, in fact, exceedingly wizened and blackened, completely dehydrated and brittle as the salt crust on a dry lake bed. It was, after all, 100,000 years old. The back half of the top of the head was nothing but a hole and at first we could not identify what that meant, until a younger colleague retrieved an object from under a nearby desk. It had most likely fallen there after being dropped by the creature before us. The object was easily identifiable as a small projectile weapon; such things had featured rather too prominently in many of the transmissions we had received from Arcana. It would take several months before we would discover the reason for the creature's suicide, and with it we learnt what had become of the ancient civilization of Arcana. Many of the items our team removed from the facility on Daktar can now be found at the best museums and universities throughout the sector, some may even be part of private collections, and the body we found now lies in state in an airtight coffin as the principal display piece of the Neffergi Wing at the Calambrosi University. The function of most of the things we found were almost immediately apparent, often because we had seen them in intercepted transmissions or because their design was so similar to objects and tools of our own design that they quite simply could not be anything else, but the decoding of the data we discovered took a great deal longer. We quickly learned that the central pillar of the chamber was also the mainframe for the ancient computer system and once we had ascertained how to effect the removal of the data banks we did so; both these data banks and the mummified remains were sent directly back to the Discovery with Professor Neffergi, whom it would seem had no difficulty finding enthusiastic team members to begin work on them virtually instantly. For my part, I stayed on at the site with Guillamo and several others, carefully cataloging and packaging objects, mapping and recording their positions within the room, measuring, weighing, speculating. It was some weeks before the Professor called for us, which only meant that he had become Click here to read the rest of this story (67 more lines)
This is part 7 of a total of 8 parts. | ||
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