Egyptian Ruins

        The ruins were in a remarkable state of preservation. I shone my flashlight around, a huge 12 LED bright white beam, and could still see the color of the pigments on the walls behind a thin layer of dust. My colleague and I let the underground area breathe a bit and used a remote controlled robot to enter and check the air quality.

        She read the words off of a strange seal, and there was an audible pop. Several Egyptian looking gods (human bodies and animal heads) rushed in glowy apparition towards our little opening.

        “Finish the incantation!” I urged.

        She did so, and the gods receded, as if plastered to the surface of a deflating bubble. However, amongst the red and ochre, grey and brown, there was the glitter of gold and the stirring of flesh. Apparently the gods had revived two of the mummies.

        Even though I was pretty sure there was some magic involved, I was immediately infatuated with the gold covered woman. We helped the pair of them out of the buried ruins, and they seemed grateful.

        Some time passed and our guests were pronounced healthy and allowed to return to the dig site. By that time, we’d managed to clear out a large amount of the dust and debris, the murals were amazingly well preserved and there was such a large quantity of painted hieroglyphics that this site alone had more than doubled the effective library of ancient texts.

Both our mummies had served as consorts in their previous life, and neither had been particularly happy about being chosen for the honor of accompanying their mates into the afterlife. They had actually lived decades apart, and their lives had not actually overlapped, so they were strangers to one another. You would have thought that they would have become friends, since they spoke each other’s native tongue, but that wasn’t the case. The woman and I had become close, and the University had “allowed” it, as we had been able to argue that, regardless of the mechanism, both of our guests were fully human and therefore had their own human rights.

We returned as a much larger team to the ruins to get their help in deciphering some symbols and interpreting some phrases that we had never seen before.

Once there, the male guest intoned an inscription that reformed the strange soap bubble, and the woman grabbed on to me. The three of us were transported back into time, not too far, as I could hear the machinery against the far wall of the outer chamber that would soon break through. Glowing apparitions pressed against the bubble near where our digging would soon break through. The male guest threw himself to the ground, prostrate before the apparitions. The female guest grabbed my arm and pulled me back further into the ruins where the gods couldn’t see us.

“They will escape into the world if we don’t read the incantation,” she whispered to me.

“I can’t actually read the incantation,” I admitted, I’m more the technology guy.

“I can read it, but I can’t see it from here.”

“Oh, I can help with that.” I pulled out my computer slate and brought up the image library, it only took a few moments to find the pictures of the seal.

“If we stop them, will I be reborn?”

I didn’t know the answer, but sure enough, their mummies were there in the front chamber, just as they were when we broke through. I wondered if I would be duplicated from now on also.

“Perhaps we should talk to the gods, first, find out their intentions.”

“Okay.”

I stepped out to where the deities could see me. The male guest was still worshipping the glowing apparitions from the floor.

I hailed them and got their attention, they didn’t seem too happy to see me. I called a few of them by name, the one’s I thought I recognized, and they moved to get a little bit closer to me.

I don’t know what possessed the male guest to jump up at that point, jealousy, anger that I wasn’t bowing and scraping the floor or some other emotion, but he crossed the dusty floor to interpose himself between the gods and myself. As his reward the foremost deity grabbed him and pulled him into himself, impaling the man on three foot long spikes that had suddenly appeared from his glowing body.

I heard chanting start behind me and fully expected to be killed next.

Instead I found myself in the clean and well lit present. I heard my tablet clatter to the ground and spun around, fearing the worst.

Instead the female guest knocked be back, holding on, crying. Even though I was certain the fascination was still mostly magic in nature, I was hugely relieved.

Ad astra per technica,
FF