The Voice of Giza's Skies

The voices in his head had already silenced themselves by the time he touched the first stone.

Unable to sleep, well before sunrise, Sam had trudged across the sand, almost in a trance, toward the Great Pyramid.

It should really not be there.

Despite the Egyptologists and archaeologists and historians who ambitiously—no, arrogantly—insisted on descriptions of how it came to be.

"That shouldn't be there," he said aloud, his hand on a block at the base of the marvelous structure.

"How do you KNOW?" boomed a voice from deep within. Not from the block, from inside his head. Like the night before... The voice inside his own head demanded a response. The voice, singular, was silent no more.

He tried to focus, to distinguish his own thoughts from the voice, as had been a struggle the previous night. Wiping sweat with the back of his hand, the booming continued, "Not so good at controlling your thoughts yet, are YOU?"

Before Sam, the blocks of the Great Pyramid piled up one upon another, like blocks from a childhood game... Not only should this pyramid not be here, but neither should THIS VOICE.

"And yet here I AM," came the voice once more.

Fumbling nervously, Sam released from his chest pocket a diagram he'd scribbled only hours before by match-made candlelight when his last torch batteries had eerily and suddenly drained.

"What are YOU doing?" the voice insisted.

It didn't appreciate Sam trying to ignore him, or it, whatever it was. Stop giving IT the time of day, Sam thought. The drawing, when held up to the pyramid as a backdrop, allowed Sam to visualize the interior, to visual the mysterious chambers that lore and myth had layered upon hints of historical evidence throughout man's seemingly very short time (perhaps a few thousand years), in this region of Earth.

"You wouldn't DARE, would YOU?"

Sam had endured persecution throughout his entire career. Had his theories mocked, his detailed evidence censored and spat upon. But every time, after the suffering, was a glimmer of something new, novel. Was novelty what the universe yearned for?

Maybe, just maybe, the dare was an invitation.

His drawing had similarities to those seen on the interweb, of this chamber and that being arranged just so to allow ancient technology to have calibrated.

"CALIBRATED to do WHAT?" At the question, the stone sent a minor shockwave through his body. He pulled his hand away, startled, but not frightened.

Was the voice on his side now?

At the questing thought, the stone just above him jostled, pulling away from the Great Pyramid like a young boy's hands loosing a Jenga block. Sam had to sidestep it to avoid being crushed. It toppled heavily into the sand with a groan. Sam noted how close to dying he'd just been and held onto his hat as a gust of wind tried to strip him of his clothing. His necklace, a golden piece surrounding a stone not found on Earth (that Sam could tell) however pulled away in the direction of the wind.

Sam looked.

To the east yet another stone was coming alive, wriggling out of its slumber and out its cage. It pulled away... and up...

Then another and another.

The stones took flight. A handful. Two handfuls. A dozen. A score. The massive blocks, heavier than any number of men no matter how strong could possibly lift together, were somewhere elevated, uplifted not by the wind but by some unseen force.

The great stones of the Great Pyramid were a constellation of starlings, at first moving slowly, then steadily, all the while more joining the group, unmasking the core of the ancient structure.

"You no longer DOUBT."

Sam no longer doubted. Sam no longer doubted that he knew anything at all, but properly humbled, he did not doubt what he was seeing.

The sun was rising and the stones fluttering about in their intelligence cast shadows on a wrinkly interior to the structure. To Sam, the shape was vaguely like the brains he'd witnessed viewing cadavers of those infested by the recent plague.

The aged researcher withheld the urge to look around. Sensing somehow that if he looked away what was being witnessed would no longer carry on.

"YOU are part of this."

Part of what?

"The PROCESS."

Sam watched his sand-drenched boots, mud-dried tracks from distant swamps, laces sewed with seeds from far away mountains, take step by step through the desert sand toward what should not be there, what could not, by any rights, and yet was.

The voices that had woken Sam in the night—on the third day of his expedition here, to these worn ruins, ruins which on the one had their meaning decided and on the other had their meaning yet to be uncovered—had aroused him like a baby to his mother and father's quarrel.

As he listened to the voices, he had taken out his charcoal pen and scratched the visuals that he was interpreting. The voices though had became further fragmented, as though not in alignment. And as Sam drew he had the distinct memory now of a choice. To succumb, to surrender, or... to take part.

What part he would play would not be revealed in advance.

So, is this faith?

But there was no one to argue with him. No readers of his research. No arm-chair academics calling names behind the anonymity of the interweb. No lover to distract him from confronting the fact that everything he did in this life came down to every little choice. And out of every little choice came every opportunity.

To commentate, or to co-create?

That is what the massive starling stones that had stripped themselves from the once and still Great Pyramid were asking.

Co-create.

At the psychic command the stones settled into two parallel but oblong rotating rings, orienting to the north and east and above the kernel of the pyramid's core, what Sam had decided was the brain.

Questions of who or what put this here, and when, flashed around Sam's inner space.

"No. WHY."

Yeah. Why?

"That is correct."

And then it struck Sam. Three parts. A ternary structure. The two rings rotating and the center switch. Not one more important than the other. All part of the one.

Move UP.

The brain lifted its forehead to the sky.

Down.

It softened, settling.

Open.

Nothing happened, at first. But by now, having moved closer still, Sam's vision was engulfed by the brain and the floating stones remained in their rotating pattern on the periphery. Closer still...

There were smaller stones making up the brain, smaller versions of the same outer stones once comprising the pyramid's skin.

Open... Open... Open...

"There is NO turning back."

Enter.

Sam suddenly felt what it was like to be those flying stones, whirling about, all separate, all one, which had like drops in the ocean traveled through Siberian clouds, Atlantian seas, and Egyptian skies, on this world and many others. Pulsing across different planes of time, then one.

And then his attention was back in his boots in one plane of time, on Plane(t) Earth.

The wind had dissolved. The bickering voices were still. Even the loudest of the voices made no indication of speech.

Sam thought, as clearly as he had in his entire life: Where we go one, we go all.

Then the stones before him shifted, a light pierced outward, enveloping him, welcoming him in.

"Well. COME."

Up the ramp the stones slid shut behind him and Sam took the only empty seat next to the others who looked like him but may have been from past lives, as familiar as his grandmother and grandfather he'd never met.

It's time to go home.

Through gaps in the brain-like interior of the craft, Sam watched the starling stones come back to the center, forming the pyramidal shape once more.

The one who Sam perceived as his grandfather turned to him and Sam already knew what he was going to say, because that's how it worked, but nevertheless, perhaps only for the humor of it, through a thick beard and thicker accent not of this world he was asked: "Where to?"