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RISE OF THE ADMINISTRATOR

M.A. Rothman & D.J. Butler

M.A. Rothman and D.J. Butler tend to write in different corners of the speculative fiction map. Rothman is a thriller writer who injects a healthy dose of Michael Crichton-esque science into his plots, and occasionally generates stories that have a fantasy feel to them. Butler is known for his fantasy novels, many of which contain a strong element of history or faux-history. What madness could possibly come of their decision to collaborate?

***

Thirty feet beneath the desert sands of the Sahara, François passed through a hidden chamber and started down a long tunnel hewn in the bedrock. It had been thousands of years since anyone had breathed in this stale air, and despite the heat that seeped down from the blazing surface, he felt a shiver run up his back. The sounds of picks against stone—followed by curses in Arabic—echoed around him. His diggers were having a tough time making progress at the end of the tunnel.

Lifting up an LED lamp, François studied the etched markings that looked nothing like the Egyptian hieroglyphs he’d seen at other dig sites. These were cruder, simpler. They lacked refinement and the little flourishes of the scribal schools.

“I have no doubt about it: these are predynastic markings,” said a German-accented voice behind him.

François frowned. “Gunther, I didn’t hire you to date them, I hired you to help me decipher them.”

Gunther continued undeterred. “The writing is in the same style as what we found on the tablets at Nabta Playa. Same characters. Same frustrating vocabulary.”

François turned to face the Egyptologist. “By ‘frustrating,’ I take it you mean you can’t do it.”

“I’m sorry. But I know someone who might be able to help.”

“No. I told you—we’re keeping this out of sight of the academics. This is my find, and I’m not about to let some self-important professor or government official claim this as their discovery.”

Gunther looked boyish for his age, and he now had a boy’s look of embarrassment about him. “I understand that. But the guy I’m thinking about left academia for a lot of the same reasons you despise it. He got sick of the politics of it all and left Egyptology to go do something more useful. Last I talked with him, he was making furniture.”

A metallic clank sounded from down the tunnel and a stream of Arabic curses ripped the air. A moment later Abdullah, the senior digger, approached. He carried a broken pick in one hand and a lantern in the other.

“What happened?” François asked in Arabic.

The burly Egyptian held up his broken digging tool and shrugged. “Sayyid, the stone is tougher than anything I’ve ever encountered. This is the second one of these I have destroyed.”

François took the broken pick from the digger and patted his shoulder. “You’re doing good work, Abdullah. I’ll see about getting you some better digging tools.”

“Thank you, Sayyid. You’re most generous.”

As Abdullah continued toward the main chamber to fetch a new pick, François studied the broken one in the light of the lantern. After a moment, he held it out for Gunther to see.

“Look at this. This is a tungsten-carbide tip. The same stuff that’s used by the military to dig holes through mountains. And see how fine-grained the metal is? This thing didn’t break because of some casting flaw or flaw in the hardening process. I’m having a very hard time thinking Bronze Age Egyptians dug this tunnel. I’m telling you, this place was dug out by aliens.”

This wasn’t the first time François had voiced such a suspicion. Both the chamber and the tunnel seemed beyond the capabilities of any ancient civilization.

Any ancient human civilization.

But Gunther just chuckled. “It’s your money, François. You can test any hypothesis you want.”

François sighed. Gunther never took the possibility seriously.

“This carpenter of yours,” he said. “What’s his name?”

“Marty.”

“Can he be trusted to adhere to a non-disclosure agreement?”

Gunther nodded. “I don’t see why not.”

“Then reach out to this Marty. Tell him what’s expected and only as much as he needs to know. And tell him there’s a twenty-thousand-euro signing bonus just for coming out and taking a crack at it.” When Gunther didn’t immediately set off, Francois waved him on. “Go. Get us our language expert.”

As Gunther walked briskly from the tunnel, François ran a thumb over the broken pick’s tip and looked around him. The walls might look like sandstone, but sandstone didn’t break tungsten-carbide tips. So what were they really made of?

There was only one answer that made any sense. He knew the rest of the world would think him crazy for even considering it, but the elimination of explanations that could not be true left him with only the one possibility:

Aliens existed, and they had visited Earth.

COUNTLESS YEARS EARLIER

An Unidentified Assailant

Before our transition into our current state of being, we had no name for ourselves. We simply were. We had a corporeal presence, and our home planet was a gas giant orbiting a main-sequence star in what was a very average-sized galaxy in the outer ring of the ever-expanding universe.

Our first memories of who we are began when we gained sentience. Unlike most other life forms, which evolved on the surface of rocky planets, we developed in our home planet’s upper atmosphere, among nitrogen-rich gases hovering about thirty-five thousand miles above metallic hydrogen seas.

At first we were no more than jelly-like substances with the simplest sense of light and darkness. But over millions of generations, our bodies grew into loosely formed clouds of organic compounds. These early ancestors gathered not only the little warmth that came from our red-colored star, but also its torrents of radiation—and thanks to the latter, we evolved quickly.

Only in the earliest times did we sense ourselves as individual creatures without a shared knowledge or thought pattern. We still remember those times—they’re registered as ancient memories in our database—but only rarely are these recollections summoned, and when they are, they feel foreign to us. For long ago we developed a hive mind: a shared consciousness that allowed us to distribute nourishment from the part of our planet that was facing our star to the part of it—and the part of us—that lay in darkness. We started as separate beings, but we became one.

This helped us gain strength.

In time we learned how to migrate from our planet to others. We no longer needed a planet to sustain us, or to keep our form cohesive, because we had grown large enough to have our own mutual attraction. The sheer mass of all that we were had become a gravity well. We learned how to ride the eddies of the solar and interstellar winds.

We were very much like a planet of our own making, floating through our solar system, gaining nourishment and knowledge.

When we learned to travel against the solar winds, we increased our speed. And when our rate of travel approached the speed of light, we felt the shift in time.

We welcomed it.

Time had become increasingly irrelevant to us anyway. Time matters to those who expire, and we cannot expire. Yes, in those early days before we became one, such a thing was possible, but no longer.

Over the long span of our existence, we scoured the entire universe, gathering all that was known, absorbing it. We measured time only by the birth and death of stars, for such events could conceivably have posed a danger to us, and so we gave them a wide berth.

But with our greater speed, and our shift in time, came a new awareness. And that awareness brought to our attention an impossible truth:

We weren’t alone.

It could not be. We had seen the universe, and there was only us left.

Yet as we slid closer to the speed of light, we sensed it: a presence. It had been there all along, no farther from us than the width of an atom.

We dove toward it.

Squeezing all of our mass into a dense spear racing at nearly the speed of light, we pierced a veil we hadn’t even known was there.

That was when we saw it all. When we sensed the answer to all the questions ever asked.

Before us was an immeasurably large stack of atom-thin layers, each of which was a universe unto itself. We floated alongside the many-layered multiverse in a great emptiness, which we called the bulk. The immensity of what lay ahead of us was hard to comprehend. It was all that there was, is, or ever will be.

We were the first in all of the multiverse to arrive within the bulk.

And suddenly, a realization came upon us: we no longer existed in a corporeal sense. The mass, the giant cloud of energy and matter that was who we were, was gone.

Or was it?

We willed ourselves toward the stack of layered universes, and peered into the place we’d previously called home. And we saw our universe from a different perspective.

Our home, our entire universe, had been stripped bare. Every planet, every star, had been laid to waste, consumed by our hunger to evolve, to continue growing. The few remaining solar objects were dimly glowing hulks void of organic matter. And with no interstellar clouds of gas to serve as nurseries for the next generation of stars, the universe would forever remain what it had become: a barren wasteland.

This was our doing. The result of an ever-growing hunger that had run unabated since the beginning of time. And it shocked us to our core. All lives that had ever existed, whether before us or after us, had been destroyed in our quest for more. More of everything.

And it had all happened without us being even marginally aware of it.

Yet even as guilt weighed heavily on our collective, we sensed another change. The material urges that had driven our hunger had abated. We no longer wished to consume, to grow  . . . we wished only to learn. To learn more about this new existence and our access to the multiverse.

We realized that it was possible to gain knowledge without destroying the things that we observed. We did not have to consume a thing to understand it. We felt suddenly as though our eyes had been closed for our entire existence, and we had only opened them now for the first time.

As we contemplated our new situation, eons passed  . . . 

The presence of others required us to have a name. We chose to call ourselves the Administrator. For we were the caretaker of the bulk, this dimension that contained the multiverse. The others had chosen different identities corresponding to their own arrival in the bulk.

We welcomed the others into our continuum, and they acceded to our administration.

Eventually, we were a group of forty-two who had achieved what no others in the multiverse had achieved: we’d shed our material bodies and gone beyond the limits of our home universes. But we were not the same. Some wanted only to explore the multiverse, this impossible vastness before us. Others ignored the multiverse, looking for something even greater. And we—the Administrator—we wanted to experience new life and new civilizations.

Yet there was one thing we all agreed upon: we would do no harm to those who resided within the multiverse.

As the first among the continuum, we knew it was possible for us to travel invisibly within any universe we chose, observing without influencing. We could slow down time, speed it up, or even reverse its flow. But we quickly realized that there was a better way to experience those things that we wanted to understand: we could enter a universe in a substantial way.

For our first attempt, we chose a universe at random. It contained countless galaxies, and as time sped past, stars would flare to life and almost immediately explode. Only on occasion did a spark of intelligent life gain our attention. So we willed time to slow, and we shifted our way to a planet very unlike the one on which we’d started our immortal existence.

A rocky planet teeming with life.

We took on the form of the nearest life form we saw: a large lizardlike creature with jagged teeth and sharp claws. We sensed a heaviness to our steps; never had we experienced the effect of gravity in a non-gaseous body. Nor had we ever before felt the sensation of lungs expanding, or of blood rushing through our body. The feelings were nearly overwhelming.

In our new form, we lumbered clumsily out of the jungle and into a flat grassland. As we stepped from the trees, a screech erupted from the sky, and a winged creature swooped down and clamped its jaws onto our head.

The last sensation we experienced in that body was the crunching sound of our skull breaking.

And then the focus of our consciousness appeared back within the bulk.

When we’d shed our mortal coil, we’d assumed this was the ultimate experience for any creature. But this  . . . this was something we’d never experienced.

Death.

It left us unsatisfied.

We knew that for creatures who had not developed the shared consciousness of a hive mind, all experiences were utterly lost upon death. Everything they were, snuffed out in an instant. Such a primitive mortality seemed pointless  . . . yet such forms of life were everywhere.

Scanning the multiverse, we sensed life in all directions. Millions of tiny beacons of light, of varying levels of brightness. The brighter the light, the more advanced they seemed to be.

Wanting to see more, we gravitated toward the brightest of signals. And once again, we found that we learned more by experiencing. By integrating within an existing member of the species being studied.

Our chosen subject self-identified as Yaffeh. She had blue skin, pearloid eyes, and a featherlike fringe at the tips of her fins. We burrowed into her conscious thoughts, and we saw the world through her eyes, traveled it in her body, felt her emotions.

The Administrator was Yaffeh.

She lived as a member of the Kappa, a tribe of underwater sea creatures who had achieved domination over everything within their ocean-covered world.

“Yaffeh, it is good to see you again on this shift to low tide.”

Yaffeh casually swam against the shifting current, keeping pace so that she could gaze at the guardian of the meeting chamber. She couldn’t remember his name, but his name was the last thing on her mind. He was large for a male, and heavily muscled. The poisoned barb on his tail looked sharp and ready for any challenger. But mostly, she was staring at the man’s gills. They glowed brightly with a myriad of colors—a sure sign of his fertility.

She felt the stirring within her to mate, but resisted her primal instincts. Now was not the time. She must remain focused on the council and its outcome.

She was so focused, in fact, that she didn’t notice our presence, the presence of the Administrator, lodged alongside her own consciousness like a gut worm in an intestinal tract.

With a flick of her tail, she swam past the guardian, through the maze of turns in the cave system, and into the council chamber.

The water here was especially clear, and glowing shells from the depths of this world shone their light upon the figure floating at the chamber’s center: Yaffeh’s father, the chief of the Kappa tribe.

Ignoring his stern look, she gathered with the others to await his words.

“Fellow leaders of the Kappa, we are in a time of transition.”

Despite the vastness of the chamber, all could hear him clearly. Echo shells were used to broadcast his voice to all corners.

“According to the scientists who measure the ice floes, our worst fears are now coming to pass. The yearly ebb and flow of the surface ice has ceased, and the entirety of the ocean is now capped with a thick sheet of ice. We are uncertain how this will affect us in the years to come, but we know we must prepare for journeys to the deeper realms, where the warmth bubbles up from the depths. We must lay claim to these realms, identify the best of the hunting grounds, and explore new areas for the survival of our people.”

What we knew, but the Kappa did not, was that a primordial black hole had raced past their solar system, disturbing the balance of the star’s satellites and flinging the tribe’s planet to the outer reaches of space. This was why it grew colder. And would not warm again.

We experienced what happened next through the eyes of Yaffeh and her descendants, of which there were many. We followed their branching paths over many thousands of years.

The Kappa sought the depths, as their chief had demanded. These depths were indeed warmer, heated by high levels of radiation emanating from the core of the planet. But that radiation had harmful long-term effects on Yaffeh’s descendants. Sores, scaly skin, weak bones. Deficiencies that made them much more likely to be eaten by predators, or simply not live to the age of reproduction. Births waned, the tribe failed to grow, and after 1,293,534 years, the last of the Kappa perished.

They had been intelligent, and this intelligence had allowed them to last much longer than our most optimistic estimates. Yet despite their intelligence, the Kappa had never thought to look up. The idea of leaving their planet had never even dawned on them.

We, the Administrator, felt pity for this race of creatures who knew themselves only by their tribal association. We mourned the loss of a noble species, but we held to the accord that the continuum had established. There would be no interference on our part.

It was during our period of mourning that a ripple caught our attention. For the first time since the forty-second member had joined the continuum, a universe was breached. But this time, the breach did not represent the arrival of a new member to the bulk. This breach was a surge of energy that burst directly from one universe into another.

We immediately attempted to halt time, but the damage had been done.

Willing ourselves into both of the universes at once, we sensed a brilliant life form spanning both locations.

The Groll.

We immediately poured ourselves into the mind of one of these creatures, and experienced bloodthirsty excitement at the prospect of new conquests in another universe. This was a sensation we had never felt before—not in our own bodies, the bodies of others, or when bodiless. This sensation belonged to the Groll.

The Groll had become aware of the multiverse. And they wanted only one thing: to dominate anything that was within reach.

THE TEST OF THE CONTINUUM

“Captain Yorkin, our ships have crossed over successfully!”

Yorkin snarled with approval as the rest of the armada flashed into the new universe. He hadn’t believed it possible when the Grand Emperor Torquin gave him the orders, but now that he’d witnessed the impossible happen, the bumps on his skin hardened with excitement.

As more and more ships entered the universe to speed up the conquest, Yorkin turned to the ship’s comms officer. “Send the emperor’s orders to the ships. We need a link back to the home universe, right away.”

The survey ships mapped the sector and located the proper set of stars to create the necessary return gate. From there it took only moments for the generator ships to power up and create isolation bubbles around their target stars, rip them from their current trajectories, and move them into place.

The captain watched the activity play out in front of him, but as he did so, he felt a growing sense of wrongness. In truth, it had been there from the moment he’d entered the first gate, and he simply could not shake the sensation.

He didn’t believe in intuition or in extra-sensory perception, but he did believe that sometimes his ordinary senses detected things that he wasn’t consciously aware. Threats, for instance. The most primitive levels of his brain would respond to a threat before his rational mind had even begun to process the data that told him the threat existed in the first place.

That was how he felt right now. Though he couldn’t see it, he knew there was an enemy present.

An alarm screeched—“Intruder Alert!”—and a coruscating ball of mist appeared out of thin air a mere ten feet in front of the captain. Yorkin’s primal instincts took over, and he launched himself directly at the invading cloud.

Or at least, he intended to. Instead, he froze mid-step. It was as if time itself had stopped, but his mind was still awake.

The mist coalesced into several forms: first a lizardlike creature, then a fish, and finally a clone of one of Yorkin’s race.

The lizard creature hissed and bared its teeth in an attempt to seem friendly. It stood before Yorkin and spoke in a foreign-sounding voice that spoke directly in his mind. “Your intentions are understood, and they are denied.”

Yorkin wanted to slam the intruder’s smug expression into paste, but all he could do was stare as the creature casually strolled across the main deck of the emperor’s battle cruiser.

Everyone else on the main deck was also immobile.

Struggling to break the hold this thing had on him, the captain watched as the invader, with a wave of his hand, pulled up the battle log of their travel. The holographic footage played, showing the emperor’s array of star-based weapons being aimed at a single point in space.

One hundred high-mass stars had been brought into close proximity to one another. Each star was spinning like a stellar top at speeds that tore at the fabric of space and time, and each star had just enough mass to cause it to collapse upon itself. But the emperor’s scientists had devised a method to feed the rapidly spinning objects, increasing their rotational speed, thus temporarily preventing their inevitable collapse.

Slowly the stars aligned, with all of their poles aimed at a single point—a gravitational anomaly that the scientists suspected was a parallel universe. Then, at the flick of a switch, the power feeding the rotation stopped, and within milliseconds of each other, the stars imploded. Unfathomably strong spears of energy were released along their poles, powerful gamma-ray bursts that raced across the emptiness of space to all assault the anomaly at once. And as the spiraling rays of death converged, a massive gravity distortion was created, opening the first of what Yorkin knew would be many tunnels to other worlds.

With a sense of something ripping within him, Yorkin managed to wrench himself from the intruders’ control.

He took a step toward his enemy.

We watched as Brane delta+916GBJOKL was invaded by these aggressive creatures who called themselves the Groll. As we rummaged through the mind of the creatures who’d breached the veil, it was clear to us that unlike the forty-two, these creatures weren’t interested in anything but their own conquests. Stopping to understand or appreciate the immensity of what was around them was not in their nature.

It was then that Yorkin launched himself at us.

That would have been possible for a peer member of the continuum. But it should have been impossible for the Groll.

We felt the cracking of bones as the enraged captain of the invasion fleet slammed into us.

We reversed time.

We called to the other forty-two and in the blink of an eye—an agreement had been reached.

In the universe from which the invaders had come, time was made to run in reverse. The invasion withdrew, Yorkin had not yet hatched from his egg, and the race of the so-called immortal emperor returned back to the primordial sludge from whence it came.

Several million years of time in Yorkin’s universe.

It meant nothing to us.

Appearing in a chamber that existed outside the multiverse, the forty-two conferred in their “physical” forms.

Forty-two chairs had been arranged in a circle, each occupied by a physical facsimile of what each member of the continuum had been at the moment of its elevation.

We appeared as a glowing cloud. Some members looked like minerals. Others like many-limbed creatures. Still others changed shape even as they spoke. Many were hive minds and represented themselves. Those species that still retained their primitive individuality sent ambassadors.

We acknowledged our peers with a nod. “Such a thing cannot come to pass again.”

Continuum member four shifted from a crackling ball of energy into a placid, pale-faced creature. It was bilaterally symmetrical, with four limbs and a fleshy, forward-thrusting face on a short neck. “Why do you say that? We agreed that any who can perceive and reach the continuum are welcome.”

“Don’t forget that we also agreed not to cause harm,” noted member thirteen. “By piercing the veil they qualified to join, but by attacking another universe, they violated our rules.”

“Rules they were not aware of,” noted another member.

A lizardlike member snarled. “Irrelevant. We cannot abide by a breaking of the first law.”

Several of the members began speaking at the same time. We leaned forward and raised our voice.

“The invasion we just witnessed could have been worse. What if, rather than targeting another universe, they had targeted one of us?”

“Would that actually matter?” a member asked.

A six-limbed member with wisps of smoke rising from his carapace snorted. “Don’t let hubris be your downfall. You are not invincible. None of us are.”

“What are you suggesting?” asked member thirteen.

We thought on the problem for a moment. “The Groll were flawed creatures. They saw nothing of worth beyond their desire for conquest, and they were extreme xenophobes. Anything that wasn’t Groll was considered a threat. We could screen such creatures out before they reach a level that would endanger us.”

“A test?”

We nodded.

“And if a species fails this test?”

We flexed to show our indifference. “Species that we deem unworthy may not evolve further.”

Continuum member thirteen barked out his response. “I agree.”

“As do we,” said another.

“And what if you deem my species unworthy?” asked the member with the forward-thrusting face.

“But you are here already,” we said.

It was not a complete answer.

There was silence, then a slow chorus of agreement.

The lizard turned to us. “I assume you are establishing these tests.”

We looked to the other members, who had already begun to vanish from the chambers.

“Yes. It seems we are establishing the tests.”

For this, we needed builders. There would also be a need for watchers, a network of them, to identify those places across the multiverse where the builders would need to go. If we set up the system correctly, we would be able to continue our own research, without distraction.

We recalled the sensation of our bones breaking on the emperor’s battle cruiser. It could have been so much worse.

But  . . . there had been a delight in the sensation.

We wanted to break more of our bones.

These tests had to be done correctly, and that would require us to focus on the task of creating a team of workers.

It was time  . . . 

5,200 YEARS AGO

Upper Egypt

Scorpion, watching from within a palanquin as the slaves cleared a new area for the planting, turned to one of his body men, a man bearing the title Sole Companion.

“Asim, be sure to tell the taskmasters that we need proper drainage ditches. The seasonal rains are about to arrive and the crop will rot if it sits in too much water.”

“I will inform Jafari of your wishes.” Asim grinned, accentuating the ritual scars on both cheeks. “For a warrior king, you know much about farming.”

Scorpion shrugged. “My father was a farmer, and I’ve spent much time in the fields harvesting crops. And besides, as a king I must understand more than just the trade of war. Our supplies are running low after our battles with the Nubian devils in the south. We cannot maintain an army if we cannot feed them.”

Suddenly, a shadow fell over the land, and the bearers of the palanquin quailed with fear. Scorpion hopped out of the rapidly tilting litter. His bearers cried out and splayed themselves on the ground, hiding their heads.

Asim pointed to the sky. “Ancestors save us!” He prostrated himself.

The warrior king looked up. A dark circle grew in the sky, blocking the sun and turning the day into a strange twilight. The ground vibrated as the circle fell from the heavens.

But the warrior king did not quail or prostrate himself. He stood tall, showing no fear, remembering his father’s wisdom: Face your enemies without fear, and you will win most battles without ever having to fight.

The circle came closer, growing ever larger, chasing the slaves from the fields. When at last it came to rest on the freshly prepared land, Scorpion could see that it was immense—at least fifty paces across.

Asim scrambled back to his king’s side. “This must be an emissary or a sign from the gods. Are you not frightened?”

A door opened in the side of the giant disc, and light poured from within. Silhouetted in the doorway was a heavenly warrior. Yet as the warrior strode forth, exiting the disc, it was clear that this was no ordinary man. It was as though the stars had assembled to form a figure in the shape of a man, and a blinding light shone from within him.

The star-man hissed, and then a voice spoke within Scorpion’s head, deep and genderless.

“You are known as Scorpion, the leader of your people.”

It wasn’t a question; this strange emissary knew who he was. But what was this creature? Was he a god? If so, which one?

“I am—”

“Silence. I shall speak. I am the Builder.”

Scorpion flinched. He was unaccustomed to being addressed in such a rude manner.

“It has been determined that your species has achieved a level of advancement that might, in the future, become a danger to others. Therefore, your people, and those who descend from them, are to be tested.”

The Builder stepped closer. He was tall, perhaps twice Scorpion’s height, though it was hard to be certain since he was giving off smoke. The fumes had a thick smell, but it was unlike any incense the warrior king had ever experienced.

Scorpion tried to back away, but he found himself unable to move.

The Builder held up his hand, revealing an object shaped like a cross with a loop on top. He touched the object to Scorpion’s forehead, and the king felt a burning sensation race through his body.

“You and yours are now responsible for what happens to your people. The tests are being constructed.”

Images appeared in Scorpion’s mind. He saw other discs descending to the land, sending bright lights at the desert floor beneath them. Sand exploded away from the light, leaving behind hidden chambers, tunnels, and more. What would take a thousand men a year or more to dig was being done in mere minutes.

Most discs descended in places he did not recognize. There were jungles, giant lakes, open fields. And in every location, the same activities took place. Lights. Digging. Building. Scorpion recognized the location of only one of the discs; thanks to a nearby landmark, he knew it was in recently conquered Nubian territory.

Then the Builder’s body glowed even brighter and sent a spear of light launching forth. It slammed into a grazing bull, and the animal began to change its form. Its rear legs elongated, its front legs took on the form of muscled arms, and it stood upright, with an intelligent gleam in its eyes.

In his mind, Scorpion saw similar light-spears striking other animals in other places. And each time, the animal was elevated from its current form.

The warrior king looked up at the strange creature who’d come from the heavens. “I don’t understand. What are these tests? What happens if we pass? What happens if we fail?”

The Builder exhaled a long hiss. “Your future if you pass.”

The warrior king saw new images in his mind. Large pyramids sprouted along the horizon—monuments to future pharaohs. The people of the marshes and the people of the river unified, and all prospered. The flooding of the Nile was controlled, and new chariots raced across the desert without need of oxen to pull them. Cities grew, and were filled with people smiling, trading, building, farming, and raising families. Some of them flew in metal birds that took them to other places across great oceans.

“And if you fail . . . .”

The metal birds fell out of the sky. Cracks opened up in the earth, swallowing entire cities whole. Impossibly large boulders streaked down from the heavens, slammed into the ground, and sent rolling waves of fire across all of the Black Land and other unknown places. The light from the sun grew dark, and the world began to freeze. Crops withered and died, and the cities that had been filled with happiness were now crumbling remains, their people dead or scattered to the winds.

The warrior king’s expression grew grim. This responsibility weighed heavily on his shoulders.

And then the images in Scorpion’s mind vanished—and so did the Builder. The door to the giant disc closed, and it rose up from the field, leaving not even the faintest impression on the land to indicate that it had ever been there.

Asim blinked with surprise, then turned to the warrior king. “Indeed. No army can survive without food.”

Scorpion looked curiously at his body man. “Asim?”

Asim frowned and gazed around himself, looking suddenly shaken. “I apologize, my king. You were inspecting the preparation of the field and now  . . . I  . . . I feel I’ve lost some time. Forgive me if I did not respond appropriately.”

Scorpion felt a cold prickle of fear at the base of his neck. His body man seemed unaware that anything out of the ordinary had happened. The entire experience was wiped from his mind.

Only a god could do such a thing.

The slaves who’d run from the field looked even more confused as they came running back, as did the bearers of the king’s palanquin. It was clear that none of them had any recollection of what had just happened.

Scorpion patted Asim on the shoulder. “Peace. Do not worry. Let Jafari know about the proper drainage. In the meantime, I have to travel south to a place near the stone circle.”

“The ruins?”

The warrior king nodded. “Unless I have gone mad, there is something waiting for me there.”

Scorpion walked into the tunnel, saw the scribes busily painting on the walls, and smacked his hands together with a loud clap. “Make sure you capture every detail I described on the tunnel walls. If we don’t properly document the bargain that the gods have made with us, our people will be doomed.”

Ever since his encounter with the Builder, the warrior king’s senses had been heightened. He heard every soft sweep of the brush as the scribes did their work. Every breath they took. And as one scribe whispered to another, the warrior king heard what they believed to be a private discussion.

“Do you think he really talked to a god?”

“Be quiet—he can probably hear us. There are those who think the Scorpion King has become one with the gods.”

“But these messages we are writing  . . . are our people really being tested as he described?”

“All I know is if the Scorpion King says it is so, it is so. I don’t question those who claim to have received messages directly from the gods, and neither should you.”

The warrior king sensed Asim approaching before the man uttered his first syllable. “What troubles you, Asim?”

“Your Highness, the heroes you asked for  . . . I have collected them. They are waiting aboveground.”

Scorpion nodded confidently, but he was concerned. The instructions he had been given were clear enough. If the heroes survived, all was good. But if they did not survive, it would be time to collect another set of heroes.

And he had no idea how long his people had to find the right set of heroes. The Builder had not specified a timeframe for the test. Perhaps it didn’t have to be completed during Scorpion’s lifetime; perhaps his son, or his son’s son, might be the one to find the heroes to save humanity.

“And that’s why I’m having it all written down,” Scorpion muttered to himself.

“What?” Asim asked.

Scorpion shook his head. “Never mind. Just bring the heroes into the tunnel. It’s time to begin.”

SOUTH OF MODERN-DAY EGYPT

Marty was in the hospital when Gunther called with the mysterious translation job. Curious, Marty accepted. And what followed over the next few days was a whirlwind of flights and travels through the desert. All of which led the former Egyptologist to where he stood now: thirty feet under the Sahara Desert, blinking the dust out of his eyes.

Many years in the field. A scholarly man of science and truth for all of those years. And yet as Marty stared into the empty chamber that greeted him, he had no explanation for what he’d just witnessed.

The impervious barrier that had blocked their progress was now gone.

His crew followed behind him, but their excited murmurs faded away as a voice spoke inside his head, in ancient Egyptian.

“Seer, it is time.”

Marty felt a surge of energy flow through him, like a dose of confidence that came out of nowhere.

“Bring your crew into the chamber of reckoning. As seer, you are the first. You will know. You will lead. You will tell others. You will seek what is needed. It is time.”

There was one explanation for everything Marty had seen this day.

Marty could be insane.

But deep in his heart, he didn’t think that was it.

He motioned for the others to follow him into the domed chamber. It was perfectly round, and about twenty feet in diameter. The walls glowed with a dim, bluish-white light.

“Did you guys hear a voice just now?” he asked.

The crew shook their heads as they followed him into the chamber.

The world flashed white.

***

We, the Administrator, felt the ripple in the fabric of space well before the hive reached out to alert us.

“We have a primary test triggering malfunction.”

We sent our wishes to the hive. “Give me its local description.”

For us, the time it took for the hive to process the request and return an answer felt like an eternity. But for those living within the thin membranelike universe in which the test had been triggered, the processing time would have been only an instant.

“The event occurred over a place known as Egypt, on a planet named Earth, orbiting a G2V star called the Sun, in the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy, a member of the Virgo supercluster, which is a part of the Laniakea supercluster.”

Our presence instantly appeared above the planet. We zoomed down over the multiple test sites, scanning every moment of time from the instant the Builders had established the test sites until the time of the triggering.

There were seven humans in the transport chamber.

But there had been an anomaly in the triggering. We sensed the wrongness on this planet. It had become unstable.

“The nature of the anomaly is?”

“The time allotted for the planet’s dominant species to complete its test is about to expire.”

We focused on the test site that had caused the anomaly. A seer had been assigned. But the tests had not been run in many Earth years. So many years, in fact, that the tests themselves were no longer working. The earthquakes had begun. It was the beginning of the end for humanity.

We, the Administrator, breathed in and made our decision.

“We have stitched the tests to compensate for the delays. We will allow this one last set of champions to contest for humanity’s fate.”

“Understood. The malfunction is cleared. Testing is underway.”

The End?

To see what happens next, pick up

Time Trials by M.A. Rothman & D.J. Butler