The guilt now, too much. He had thought he couldn’t survive out here, and he had very nearly proved that belief correct. If this was called surviving. Still, he hung on, hoping it wasn’t over, not yet.
Maybe…maybe she could still help. Maybe even…
Stop what was to come…
8
Caleb had long ago lost track of time.
The date, the month, anything resembling the passage of time in the terrestrial world, it was all a blur as he spent every breathless second studying the images sent back from the Cessara satellite. The resolution, although grainy, was surprisingly clear, and Diana was quite proficient at magnifying, cropping and adjusting the resolution and lighting to bring out symbols hidden in the shadows and multiple levels of grooves.
Diana had been busy isolating the images, compartmentalizing them and securing all sorts of data in encrypted sites, siphoning off and duplicating the files simultaneously with NASA’s receiving the same data.
“No way they’re going to hide this forever,” she said early on.
“Or bury it with the other UFO evidence.”
“So paranoid,” Diana quipped, giving him a quick smile. “However in all seriousness, this information will have to come out at just the right time and after a lot of analysis.”
Caleb barely heard her, focusing on something else as he learned to navigate the image resolution process and control the views.
“…study the impact to global religions, psychology and…”
“Oh my God.” Caleb leaned closer. “I’ve seen this before. This configuration on this panel here…”
The image resolved into a clearer picture of something distinctly reminiscent of an early Egyptian dynastic period. Several pillar like structures, with ringed circular edges along their centers, connected by what looked like wires and held up, shouldered by godlike jackal-headed figures. Gods that were surely giants, standing over a row of smaller subjects, prostrate below the pylon-like objects.
“Egyptian?” Diana said. “Or wow…maybe this somehow influenced the Egyptians?”
“I know what you’re going to say. Maybe early Egyptian priests had our sight, remote viewers who could see things like this, millions of miles away.”
“I wasn’t going to say that. Not right away, but yeah, it makes sense.” She frowned, looking closer. “This reminds me of something else though.”
“Me too.”
“I’ve seen those pillars before.”
“Yes, but in a different setting, more recent.”
“I can’t recall…”
“Hang on.” Caleb called up a new window, and his fingers raced across the keyboard, searching the web, calling up…
“Here it is.”
Diana leaned forward, peering at the screen. “Not quite the same, but that is so familiar. It’s from…”
“The World’s Fair, 1930—”
She read the caption under the illustration of a man’s face — with wild hair electrically charged it seemed — amidst a backdrop of a pair of giant Egyptian-like pylons transmitting electricity into the sky. “Nikola Tesla. That’s right, now I remember, but why would such a thing be on a comet, on the outside of some alien structure, mirroring what Tesla designed?”
Caleb considered it for a moment before responding. “The bigger question is, whether or not Tesla’s designs were really original or whether he had seen them…the same way the Egyptian priesthood may have seen them. Tesla may have been a remote viewer. He often claimed to go into trances where he received visions, designs he claimed were from extra-terrestrial sources. He saw great airships, free energy powering the world from grid-lines and massive transformers, a whole new world. And even stranger marvels.”
Diana read the captions. “Wireless world-wide energy, a power source generating current across the atmosphere.”
“Or through the land itself,” Caleb said. “Many theories and hypotheticals. A lot of conspiracy theories out there claim that Tesla had his reputation tarnished, his life threatened and his inventions destroyed, not just by his rival Edison, but by the government itself.”
“Why?”
“To control the source of energy? To monetize and profit from it?” Caleb shrugged. “Or maybe it was more than that. There were stories of side effects of all this technology, tales of unexpected earthquakes, seismic shocks destroying whole city blocks. Disruptions in the phases of reality, wormholes to other dimensions, teleportation, telepathy even, and bizarre human mutations.”
Diana scratched at her nose. “Didn’t he also come up with designs to manipulate weather and use electromagnetic waves to alter atmospheric conditions half a world away?”
“Yes, designs that were ultimately incorporated into the HAARP facility in Alaska, which we here at Stargate dealt with first hand.”
Caleb tapped his fingers together absently.
“What are you thinking?”
He licked his lips. “I’m wondering why this is here. What’s so important about it? Obviously the early dynastic priests incorporated this design into their artwork and religious texts, but there’s little evidence, at least so far, that anything resembling this power structure was ever implemented or put to any sort of use back then, if it was even possible.” He took a breath, thinking, blinking fast. “More likely they had these visions, presumed to be direct gifts from the gods, and inscribed them in stone, but that was as far as they got, maybe believing that their successors could determine what to do with this knowledge and implement the gods’ will.”
“Well then they had to wait some two thousand years. Until Tesla, but we all know how that turned out.”
“Yeah. Edison’s ideas won out, and Tesla’s name, at least for a time, became associated with a fanatic, an overly talented crackpot.”
“So, again…” Diana leaned forward, staring at the scene on a comet millions of miles away. “Why is this so important to leave it on a desolate hunk of rock that they knew only psychics could ever see — or our satellites thousands of years from whenever this was left there? Why this comet in particular?”
“That’s the bigger question,” Caleb responded, shaking his head. “And to answer that, we have to understand Tesla further. I am going to suggest another group objective. We need to focus our questions, probe this issue and his work, and figure out what he was trying to accomplish, really. Why this was so important, because now I’m thinking he wasn’t just silenced for the sake of competitive economic rivalry, but something far more important.”
As they sat in silence, thinking about the implications, the door buzzed, then flew open.
“We’ve got a problem!” Phoebe shouted, breathless. Her eyes locked on the screen and went wide with awe, but her words kept coming. “Actually, more than one.”
“What’s going on?”
“Where to start?” Phoebe said, almost doubled over from a run through the halls. “But the main crisis? We’re all needed in the conference room. Xavier’s on the line, from Geneva, where shit has seriously hit the fan.”
“With the Al-Hansi operation?” Caleb rose fast. He had been expecting to celebrate that win with the team in a few hours. “Impossible!”
“Yeah,” said Phoebe, “that’s what I said. But there’s more.”
With difficulty, Caleb pulled his attention away from the comet — and what was likely the greatest discovery in the history of mankind. No easy feat, and the conspiracy paranoid in him gave in to a fleeting notion, that the timing of whatever setback just occurred couldn’t be more suspect. Something to throw them off of this new discovery, divert his attention from where it was needed most.