The entrance to the Library had changed little in two decades. The burnt out remains of the 4x4s had been taken away, one of the few things to have been achieved by the local government before greater worries came about. However, despite the attempted clean up, the main entrance was still a pile of rubble, with a hastily excavated path cleared down to the Library beneath.
Gail fished a flashlight out of her pocket and tested the bulb. It came on first time, as bright as it had been in Walker’s hands eighteen years before. She had rarely used it, to the extent that George was surprised she even had it on her, fully charged and ready.
“I always thought it might come in handy, one day,” she explained.
They worked their way through the rubble and down the stairs, and quickly found themselves back in the Amarna Library. Memories came flooding back to them both, but while George sounded excited as they retraced their steps to the huge halls beyond, Gail’s humour gradually faded, until when they were standing in front of the Xynutian airlock, her face was sombre and voice passive.
“I need to go in alone, George.”
George hesitated, not least because that would mean leaving him in the dark.
“There’s light in there, remember? You can keep the torch.”
Before he could answer, she had passed it to him, and was entering the airlock, which had suddenly opened of its own accord. He leant in and hugged her, reluctant to let go. “I love you,” he said as he eventually loosened his embrace, and looked her directly in the eyes.
The stone-like door of the airlock slid shut, separating them with the faintest waft of stale air.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. He couldn’t remember where the phrase came from, but it described the door perfectly. Thinking about how the door could possibly work; not only its mechanism, but also its longevity, to function so well after countless millennia, and its behaviour, to seem to open and close when it wanted. Magic before the Chaos – now in its wake even more so, he pondered.
He sat down next to the naked statues of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and waited for his wife to return.
Chapter 102
Gail hesitated as the inner door slid open. After a deep breath, she took a step forward, and almost the moment her trailing foot cleared the threshold she felt the slight rush of air as the door shut behind her.
Did it shut differently all those years ago? She stood in silence for several minutes, until the ambient sound of her pulse and breathing had become almost unbearable. She looked up to the face of the Xynutian statue.
Memories of the traumatic events from before the Chaos came flooding back. She looked to the floor where Walker had fallen, gunned down by George.
Curious, she wondered, and moved round the statue to take a closer look at the floor and walls. Walker and Patterson’s bodies had been removed by the local police in the days after their escape. She looked to the opposite wall, against which Patterson had gasped his final warning to them regarding DEFCOMM. It all seemed so distant now, like it was from a different world.
She knew from reports from their friends that the local police and forensic teams had performed a routine clean-up of the scene as part of their investigations, but there had been more pressing matters to worry about, and the amazing finds and criminal events in Amarna had quickly been overlooked and forgotten. The fact that there had been no interest or reporting of the finds hadn’t surprised her at the time.
What did surprise her now was that there was absolutely no trace of blood, dirt, fragments of clothing or even marks on the walls from ricocheted bullets.
It was then that she noticed the staff.
She recoiled in shock. She had already seen the statue; it dominated the centre of the room, and as such was impossible to miss. But the fact that it was once more holding the staff aloft, as if she had never ripped it from its grasp years earlier, sent a shiver down her spine.
The room was, as far as she could tell, as perfect as the day they had first discovered it.
It was absolutely timeless.
“The perfect time capsule,” she murmured in wonder.
“How else?” said a voice behind her.
She froze. There was something wrong about the voice. Something disconnected. Gail instinctively knew what she would be facing as she turned, slowly, towards it.
The Xynutian stood in the doorway. No, ‘stood’ was the wrong word; at over seven feet tall and with the muscles of an athlete, it dominated the doorway. A simple cloth skirt hung round its waist.
This wasn’t a statue, but an actual Xynutian; he, as she assumed it was a male, was practically human, and yet not at all. There was something unfamiliar about it. All she could think of was that word, superior; this was a superior human. A superhuman.
The involuntary whimper in her throat barely made it past her teeth as she stood rooted to the spot.
“How else could we build something that would last through the ages, and allow us to return once more to the surface to rebuild our civilisation?” he said, his lips and jaw unmoving as he stared deep into her mind with his jet black eyes. “This Facility is self-healing. It is at the same time the oldest and newest structure on the planet, constantly regenerating and rearranging itself on an atomic level, like the cells in your body, except with no degeneration whatsoever. It will be here as long as required, waiting for the time for us to return to the surface.”
“How are you talking to me?” Gail managed to ask. “You’re speaking English, and yet your mouth isn’t moving.”
“I am creating telepathic communication between us. More accurately, the Facility is creating it, but I am the channel it is using to do so. We are both thinking in our own languages, which are both, in essence, electrical impulses in very specific and controlled orders throughout our brains.
“Telepathy is not beyond your understanding. And before you ask, you heard my voice behind you because that is where I was in relation to you. If your ears can tell your brain that I am behind you, then why would it not be possible for a direct message to the receptors in your brain to give the same impression?”
Her mind was racing. The initial shock gone, she found that she was concentrating now more on the conversation inside her head than the actual Xynutian standing before her.
“So many questions!” it said. “You will shortly know the answers to most of them. But let me tell you first of all that I, indeed we, cannot answer everything. You must find some answers within yourself. I will answer the second most important question you have asked of me.
“Why did we not return to the surface after the apocalypse that we suffered? That is an excellent question.” He shifted his weight slightly onto one of his massive legs and brought his hands together. “For that, I need to start at the very beginning. I have already mentioned that the Facility is self-healing. It is also self-governing, and the intelligence that governs it is based on the moral and scientific knowledge of my time, and that of my civilisation. Luckily, or unluckily depending on your point of view, morality changed significantly in the years it took to build the Facility. By the time it was complete, my race had become more attuned with the world around it; we felt that we were not at the centre of our ecosystem, but rather an integral part of it.
“And so you are standing within a store of life as it existed nearly two million years ago. We saved everything that we could, from the tiniest insect to the largest land and sea creatures, the greatest trees to the most beautiful flower. I can see that that age surprises you, as you have by a great margin underestimated the distance in time between our two species; but it has indeed been that long since any of us walked the Earth.