The Old Masters

The ancient Pyramids of Giza are said to have been built over four thousand years ago. They tower over the Egyptian sands, the Great Pyramid taller than a thirty-floor building and nearly twice as wide. The pyramids are a massive necropolis where the old pharaohs were laid to eternal rest alongside their devotees with the expectation of becoming gods. They were constructed with great effort and care, each stone block weighing between two and thirty tons. Our best and brightest still haven’t been able to figure out how the ancient Egyptians were able to move these blocks, much less to stack them perfectly to form a grand pyramid. 

Dr. Cleo Helena wrote each note down carefully in her field journal as the wagon full of researchers approached the excavation site. Writing things down allowed her to make room for all the new bits of information she was about to cram into her mind. The carriage finally stopped at the base of the pyramid. Cleo realized she had been holding her breath as she took in the sight. It was truly even more spectacular in person. She was fortunate enough to be one of the first people to go through this newly-discovered entrance to the pyramid in thousands of years. She had to pinch herself to remember that she wasn’t dreaming. 

This was Cleo’s first exhibition since she had visited Teotihuacan last year. A member of her team had uncovered a compartment lining one of the pyramids with liquid mercury. While everyone was busy theorizing about its purpose, Cleo had dug into the volcanic rock and found a collection of strange, golden orbs. She picked one up with wide, hungry eyes. It opened to reveal that its core was empty, perhaps meant to hold something in place long ago. She put one in her pocket before alerting the group to the rest of the orbs in the ground. 

Today, she carried that golden orb in her pocket. She slipped her hand in her pocket and squeezed it tightly for good luck before stepping into the chamber. A slight breeze swirled the golden sands around her ankles as she walked in. She took a deep breath as she took in the view. This was her favorite part: the moment when her eyes finally fell on the art and inscriptions on the interior walls. She imagined ancient Egyptians walking through these corridors and chiseling entire life stories into the walls. 

If she squinted, the reflection of her flashlight on the walls made the pictographs look like they were dancing. The careful lines of paint and mosaics of precious gems almost appeared to sparkle. Cleo could have sworn that she really did see some of them sparkle out of the corner of her eye. She could barely take her eyes off the artworks spanning from floor to ceiling. 

The sparkle in the corner of her eye got brighter. She turned to find a faint glowing light blinking under a thin sheet of sand. The rest of the group had advanced deeper into the corridors while Cleo had been admiring the beauty of the walls in front of her. She could hear the light tapping of hammers on chisels and sneezes from the ancient clouds of dust in the next chamber. She spun her head around to confirm that she was alone before bending down to inspect it. Her hands brushed away the layer of sand to find what appeared to be a glowing crystal. Its purple light pulsed and brightened as she approached it. 

She grabbed it with wide eyes and a growing list of questions about how this crystal was possibly being powered. Humans would not harness the power of electricity for thousands of years after this tomb was sealed. She shook her head. It was a common human fault to only consider a single line of technological evolution, the one that led to the technology we have today. It’s hard for most people to think of other paths to the future than the ones paved right in front of them, but Cleo hadn’t really felt like most people since Teotihuacan. 

She carefully held the crystal in her left hand as she probed it with her right hand. This was unlike anything she had ever seen. She must have been staring at it for a few minutes when she heard a chorus of shouts in the next chamber. She could hear the sound of sandals slapping on the ground toward her, but she wasn’t ready to share her discovery with the group. She tried hiding the crystal in her pocket, but the glow was impossible to cover even through her thick khaki pants. 

She had a crazy, desperate thought. She took the golden orb out of her pocket and pried it open. Its empty core seemed to be about the size of the crystal. She shoved the crystal into the orb and silently cheered when it managed to close. She managed to slip the orb with its new, glowing, crystal into her pocket right as her colleague came barging in. He took a minute to catch his breath despite the short jog over.

“Cleo—phew, give me a second. Okay. We found some kind of door, at least, that’s what we think it is. It looks like it has been sealed since this tomb was completed. But—well, just come with me. It’s easier if you just see it for yourself.”

She followed the young man through the winding corridors and into the chamber where the rest of the team was waiting. They were all crowded around the door. It had to be at least twice as large as the biggest blocks at the base of the pyramid. A linguist broke from the crowd and approached her.

“I just needed another set of trained eyes to confirm for us all that the inscription on this door is in modern Egyptian Arabic.”

Cleo furrowed her brow. She must have heard that incorrectly. This tomb was thousands of years old, so old that Queen Cleopatra herself would have considered it ancient. Surely this was graffiti from some young locals who had discovered the tomb on their own — but this tomb was sealed. There were ancient traps found undisturbed and a complete lack of flora or fauna inside it. They were the first living beings to walk these halls since they were built. 

The crowd of researchers parted like the Red Sea to reveal the inscription carved into the enormous block of limestone. Cleo was a bit rusty with her Arabic, but the message was clear. The characters carved into the door read: “Arrive, build, repeat.”

She stepped forward to inspect it more closely. She could see the ancient chisel marks that created these characters over two thousand years before humans first put them to use. How could this be? She looked incredulously at the linguist. He could only nod back at her in bewildered agreement. The orb felt like it was getting hotter in her pocket, but she figured she was just imagining things. It was probably a weird manifestation of guilt for not sharing the crystal with the team. It started burning hotter, enough that she could no longer ignore it. She yelped as the orb burnt a hole through her pocket and landed on the ground in the middle of the circle of researchers. Their jaws hung open at the sight of the now glowing, golden relic. 

When Cleo bent down to grab the orb, it flew up and zipped toward the door. It slowed to a stop and gently landed on the last word. The glow appeared to pour out from the crystal to fill the carvings on the door like purple rivers. The ceiling above the group started to tremble and rain dust on their heads as the stone door shifted itself back and away into the darkness. They stepped in as the ceiling began to glow purple, illuminating what they could now see was an impossibly large chamber. It simply didn’t make sense according to the scans done and measurements taken of the pyramid.

The purple glow above reflected off of hundreds, if not thousands, of sarcophagi carefully laid out on various surfaces around the room. An old woman wearing small, circular eyeglasses was less concerned with the technological mystery overhead than with the countless relics in front of them. She stepped away from the others, still frozen in place, to inspect the coffins and asked the linguist to help her read the hieroglyphs, which were interlaced with those same Arabic characters: “Arrive, build, repeat.” He got quite excited once he had a chance to squint over the pictographs. 

“These are telling elaborate stories about how the pyramids were built, in greater detail than we’ve ever been able to find,” he gasped.

The old woman asserted that this was a tomb for the pyramid workers, just like others they had found in the past, and the group quickly agreed. It was easier than admitting they had stumbled upon something truly unexplainable. She slid the cover off of a sarcophagus with a grunt and shone her flashlight inside. She stared inside with widening eyes. She was mesmerized by whatever was inside and impervious to the questions being yelled at her from twenty feet away. Cleo ran over and looked in. She screamed.

Inside lay a skeleton. Not a human skeleton, but a, well, they didn’t really know. It had limbs twice as long as they should be and its bones — if you can call them that — looked to be held together with a webbed connective tissue made of the same material. Cleo hoped they would find a well-preserved, mummified form of whatever this was so she could do some anatomical studies, but even these dusty remains threatened everything they knew and believed in.

This warped skeletal formation could only be described as truly grotesque. The oddest part about it was the skull, though. It was shaped just like their own human skulls, though significantly larger, but was made of pure crystal. Cleo could hear it hum when the group’s chatter finally stopped. The humming turned into a low voice that whispered hello and the researchers jumped. 

The old woman frowned. Her back hurt and she had been expecting to be back in her cot by now. She called out impatiently, “Who’s there?”

“What really matters is that you are here,” a disembodied voice responded calmly. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Everyone jumped. Half the researchers screamed.

“You are here,” the voice continued, “but I am not. I am sure you have no idea how this is possible given your primitive civilization. First, thank you for reactivating one of our Central Devices.”

The crowd looked at Cleo. She could only look at them blankly and shrug. She just wanted a chance to figure out the artifacts alone before weighing herself down with the curiosity of others. She wasn’t trying to open some sort of extraterrestrial connection. 

It continued, “Congratulations, you were the first of your species here on this planet to make contact with us despite several millennia of coordinating your societal development.”

The researchers all looked at each other with confused faces. The old woman piped up first. She asked again, more impatiently now, who was speaking. 

The voice replied, “I am Osiris, one of the Masters. Our kind keeps your kind on track to hit all of your societal milestones. We are caretakers for humanity to make sure it develops and progresses in the way it needs to in order to support life.”

The voice jumped to the sarcophagus they had opened. “I have ascended after giving my life to construct this monument for your kind. We have always stepped in where your undeveloped species could not, though even now you lack the ability to comprehend the idea of a universal network outside your own planet. Your culture relies on the success and longevity of previous cultures to learn from. Art and culture are what keep your kind progressing forward for so long. You would rip each other to pieces without it.”

A new voice now boomed throughout the room. “As the discovery was made today in celestial year 4.6B, our calculations have been proven to be correct. We have finally enabled you to build your own forms of our language and have equipped you with our tools — at least the ones we felt you were able to handle. Humanity must sustain itself from now on. It is time to shift focus onto the next planet where your kind is just starting to blossom.”

The first voice returned by Cleo’s head next to the open sarcophagus. “We have arrived and built for the last time on your world. You shall not expect a return.”  

“Goodbye,” the voices whispered in unison. 

The silence pierced the air until all anyone could hear was the low hum of the otherworldly crystals. Cleo remembered how she felt standing in Teotihuacan with the orb in her pocket. It’s how she felt now: deeply uncertain of whatever the universe had in store for her next. The orb made her question what else was out there. The crystal taught her to question who else was out there. 

Now, she was the harbinger of the potential downfall of humanity. Certainly, no one in this room would ever bet on humanity in the race to eternity. There must be an error in the Masters’ calculations. Surely, they would return. They need to return. We have too many unanswered questions in this half-baked civilization we call Earth for them to simply leave. Who else was out there? Are we really not only not alone, but actually mere parsecs away from our own kin in parallel worlds?

Cleo’s head hurt from all the questions. She slumped down against the open sarcophagus and felt the humming get louder between her ears. It soothed her like a familiar lullaby. Maybe they would be okay after all. Or maybe this was the beginning of the end. Who knew? She sure didn’t. She couldn’t even tell what tomorrow had in store for her, much less for the fate of humanity. 

She opened her notebook and started writing down everything she could remember from the past few hours. She furiously scribbled words onto the page like they were about to disappear forever. The humming in her head got louder as she filled the pages. With her thoughts dumped into her journal, she finally felt ready to walk out of the chamber. Walking outside meant facing tomorrow. It meant a new world order for humanity to sculpt on its own.