The arrival of a warp gate near Earth did not go unnoticed. Loose coalitions of astronomers, physicists, and aerospace engineers notified their local governments, and then it became the primary concern of every world leader on the planet. Intelligence briefs were drafted and consumed, allies reached out to one another to share information, and a sense of unease settled over the little blue sphere in the Sol system.
It wouldn’t have garnered as much attention if it had been an asteroid. Most space-capable nations had theories and methods to deflect or destroy space debris. However, the warp gate was something entirely different. It was a synthetic ring that hovered in a stable Lagrange point approximately two hundred and fifty thousand miles from the planet. In space, that was practically close enough to touch.
The humans didn’t detect any activity from the ring, but its mere presence was enough to elicit panic in the world’s leaders. Orders were drafted at the highest levels to silence any potential media coverage of the object. Space experts suddenly found black sedans parked in front of their homes and heard strange popping or clicking noises whenever they picked up their phones. They routinely received visitors in dark bureaucratic suits who were ostensibly there to “check-in.” Still, their visits were marked by penetrating questions from the authorities and the subtle outlines of their weapons.
The unusual nature of the object didn’t end in its presence. Shortly after the gate’s arrival, every phone, tablet, or computing device displayed lines of code on their screens for precisely seven minutes. The unfamiliar symbols flooded the displays in endless vertical lines of mysterious text. It was widely believed that these runes were the product of a massive prank pulled off by a decentralized international activist and hacktivist group. The theory was confirmed and supported by every known and previously unknown global government authority.
While this sort of universal agreement should have elicited fear or disbelief in the populations the government bodies administered, the event was rapidly overtaken by the twenty-four-hour news cycle and quickly forgotten. After all, wars overseas, the latest pop star scandal, or the newest episode of their favorite show were far more important than the mere seven minutes people could not use their phones. Besides, every phone manufacturer on the earth promised that their user’s data were secure and that an upcoming patch would fix the annoying vulnerability.
Meanwhile, governments were scrambling to decode the packet of data. The timing of its appearance with the object’s arrival in space could not be a coincidence. In every government contracting company, entire research departments were put on hold to study the data packet. Defense grants were threatened, and contracts were promised to motivate the civilian researchers properly. When the researchers asked where the perplexing code originated, they were only met with steely silence and a pointed reference to the non-disclosure agreements they had been forced to sign.
The first person to crack a portion of the code was an American cryptologist named Doctor Tamira Smith. She was an expert in ancient Sumeria that had picked up her interest in her undergraduate studies when America invaded modern-day Iraq. As reports came in from soldiers destroying priceless historical artifacts, she dedicated her life to studying the Sumer language and its variations. That experience with language led her to cryptology in her graduate studies as she saw an easy parallel between language and codes. Although she refused to take military funding, she found a Taiwanese think tank that found her work valuable enough to provide grants for her research.
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Her unique background helped her see the similarities between ancient Sumer and the lines of code that scrolled through her phone. With her academic contacts, she got portions of the code and began studying it earnestly. She soon dubbed the text the Codex because it resembled the ancestral languages of Earth. It was a fitting name because the Codex was a vast repository of information that had been downloaded and compressed into every computing device on the planet.
When she called members of her think tank to report her findings, the American government intercepted the call, and black sedans were soon parked in front of her modest home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Despite the doctor’s pledge never to accept military funding, she was given a deal she couldn’t refuse. She was not-so-subtly warned that rejection of the agreement would result in her ‘temporary’ imprisonment until what she knew was no longer a danger to national security.
Dubious employment secured, Dr. Smith was bounced around various government agencies while she conducted her research. As she unlocked more of the Codex, she realized it contained instructions and a set of blueprints for a virtual-reality device connected to what the Codex referred to as the System. While it was being constructed in a top-secret facility in Virginia, she also discovered a countdown embedded in the code. The countdown had been masked as a gradual degradation of the source data, but the size of the Codex obscured the exact time they had left or what it was counting down to.
The discovery of the countdown was enough to elevate her research to the American government’s highest priorities; soon, thousands of virtual reality devices had been constructed according to the exact specification in the Codex. Meanwhile, every nation in the world was coming to the same realization as the Americans. They soon had their own projects in the works, and they all wanted to explore the new System.
The Americans were the first to enter, but other nations quickly joined them. Within the System, they found that the Codex had followed them. It seemed to give up its secrets far more rapidly than in the real world. Settlements began to spring up as secretive teams of scientists, engineers, and researchers entered the System to continue their translation of the Codex. The System world was both familiar and unusual to its new residents. Fantastical beasts roamed the territory, strange species were encountered, and ancient ruins from a progenitor race dotted the countryside. Each discovery brought new advanced technology to the real world, and even the poorest nations found an opportunity to disrupt the current world order.
For the first time in human history, a worldwide event reset every nation to the same starting point. There were no treaties or alliances to bind their ambitions. There were no hindrances to progress beyond the ones they set for themselves. Indeed, the System allowed humanity to define themselves and the trajectory of their species. It would be up to them to decide what they would become.