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*** SOUTH OF MODERN-DAY EGYPT ***



Marty was in his workshop, touching up the last details on a dining room table for a customer, 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


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Framed