“Dr. Wonton. Thank you so much for the recommendation. It is such a privilege to be here with you.”

The newcomer’s attempt at conversation, however, was ignored. The senior scholar did not reply and just walked on, faster than his age would have you believe him capable of.

Whether Dr. Wonton heard him or not, the newcomer neither knew nor minded. He had clearly arrived at a pivotal moment in this expedition. The dig site personnel were flying around them in a hurry, hauling heavy machinery to and fro. The air itself buzzed with electric anticipation to an end he could not wait to uncover.

The two men zig-zagged around scattered tents in silence as they made their way somewhere along the shore. They passed dozens of lodgings, many of which were accommodating men and women in uniforms that had no business being in an archeological dig site.

What could they possibly be looking for? The newcomer could only guess.

This project will be a turning point in his career, Dr. Marrero knew. With all the secrecy hovering over it, it had to be.

He knew from the moment he got that impossibly vague call from his old professor that he had to be there. So, without knowing what he got himself into, he booked the first flight to North Carolina that he could find. At the airport, he was escorted, by military personnel no less, to the beaches of Cape Hatteras where, in lieu of an explanation, he was presented with a non-disclosure agreement to sign.

“Dr. Wonton!” called a man agitatedly. He was middle-aged with skin marred by a tale of years of sun damage. The man stood waiting by a small motorboat, excitement painted all over his face.

“They just finished pumping the last of the water out of the caisson (*view the image below)". Upon hearing the news, the old professor hurried even more. “Finally!” he shouted.

“Please come this way,” he extended a helping hand. Dr. Marrero awkwardly followed.

The three men boarded the generic motorboat. The engine carried them across the Atlantic in a nauseating sway that had the young scholar bracing the vessel. “Can you tell me now what this is about, Doctor?” he asked after his nerves had settled some.

Startled, Dr. Wonton turned to him. “Oh yes, yes, forgive me, Dr. Marrero,” he apologized wiping the sweat off his forehead. He had grown so much, that spirited young student he took under his wing eight years ago.

“I couldn’t tell you this on the phone. As you must have noticed, this is a highly confidential operation,” he explained.

“You see, two months ago, a group of scuba divers came about this… this… I don’t even know what it is in all honesty,” finished the professor in exasperation.

“Is it some kind of shipwreck?” This place was famed for shipwreck hunting after all. “No, it is definitely not a shipwreck. I haven’t seen it myself yet, as it is submerged undersea, and I am in no condition to dive, but I have seen the footage. I have touched it even, and this thing... It glows upon touch.”

Dr. Marrero was perplexed. Could it be some sort of fluorescent corals? We are in the Atlantic, and the water is shallow.

Dr. Wonton went on. “At first, the coast guard was alerted lest it turns out to be some kind of weapon, but when they went down there to investigate, they found it to be mere rock. The sample they cut and called me to examine was nothing but rock, carefully and masterfully carved rock into symbols I have never seen the like of before, granted.

“When I say that it glows I am talking about the symbols themselves. They shine from within at the mere touch of a finger.

“And not just that, it gets warm upon touch too. Don’t look at me like that. We ground the thing to dust -or a part of it at least- and it had no wiring inside whatsoever. Yet you would touch it with the tip of your finger and not just the piece you held would light up, but the whole of it would.”

“How is that possible?” What Dr. Wonton was telling him sounded like a fever dream, a tale of fiction.

He is well past seventy, he must be losing it, he reasoned but was instantly uncomfortable with the idea. It was his old mentor he was jesting about. He owed a big part of who he had become to this man. Besides, even if he were out of his mind, that did not explain the heavy military presence nor the reality of the site all around them.

“We will find out soon enough.”

The two archeologists sat in silence. The boat carried them closer and closer to their destination. The solid structure looked at odds with the swaying of the waves all around it, an unwelcome intrusion at the peace of the ocean. The caisson was a square wall of substantial proportions surrounding a patch of land where a ship’s bow lay rusted and broken on its side.

They docked the boat and stepped onto the roof of the caisson’s wall. Dr. Marrero offered his senior a hand to steady him before having a better look at the site.

He could not see it from the boat, but now with his hands on the railing, he could make out a sharp stone protruding from the sand next to the shipwreck. It was small compared to the ship’s bow, yet so out of place that once you see it, you cannot focus on anything else.

They descended to the bottom of the box where the sea level stood several feet above their heads. It made for a terrifying sight, this concrete coffin blocking the Atlantic from view. His mind could not avoid conjuring images of waves crashing down on them and sending them to their deaths. A chill ran down the young man’s spine. He shook the image out of his head.

The two scientists advanced to the relic while their escort remained by the staircase. The wet sand swallowed their feet with every step they made, adding to their anticipation.

The relic stood at about seven feet high. The bulging part towered over Dr. Marrero’s five feet and ten inches. It was the tip of a sheet of rock over a foot thick that came out of the wet sand at a lazy angle. Under the light blanket of moss that covered the rock, Dr. Marrero could distinguish the outline of carvings. He reached forward with trembling fingers to push some of the vegetation aside, but he yanked his hand away when the stone lit up like a firefly.

“The fuck!”

The luminescence was short-lived, the rock regaining its grayish tone as soon as Dr. Marrero’s hand left its surface, but the shock it caused made his heart beat faster for minutes still.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“That’s what I thought when I first saw it too,” said the senior archeologist. “Only I touched a piece of it in my office and this part of it lit up too”.

“That can’t be possible”

“Yet it is”.

Dr. Marrero turned back to face the now dim relic. A crab emerged from the wet sand and made its way slowly across the dull gray stone and the moss, soon to be lost in the shadows of the rock.

*****

Dr. Marrero reclined on his chair. He ran his palm over stubbles he neglected to shave and took a deep breath in respite.

In the three months he had been working on this expedition, they had uncovered a total of five fragments, but they only managed to dig out three.

Besides his primary work with Dr. Wonton and a few others who have joined their team to date the fragment, he took a secondary interest in the linguistic aspect of the unraveling. Dr. Marrero picked up on a few patterns in the script and he amassed a few theories as to what those characters stood for.

The first fragment they extracted contained twenty-two characters. The second one added three to the archive, and the third another four characters, hinting at the possibility of there being more in the two fragments still undersea, a possibility that excited him to no end.

He gathered his papers and headed to the door.

The senior archeologist was alone in his office, the rest of the team having left for their lunch break. He was standing in front of the first fragment they came across while a printer was busy on the desk.

Now that it was completely uncovered from the water, the sand, and the moss, the three relics stood tall and heavy in the white tent.

The young man stood beside Dr. Wonton. “No matter how long I look at it, it never fails to amaze me,” greeted the young scholar. He stepped forward, extended his hand to the cold gray stone, and watched it come to life. How he loved doing that! He could not keep himself from feeling its warmth. It made him feel like a child again, taking an afternoon nap in his mother’s arms.

He stepped back, the warmth of the stone lingering at the tips of his fingers. The printer stilled in the background.

“I updated the list of characters. There are four new ones”. He gave the papers to Dr. Wonton and watched him flip through the pages. “I broke them into three different groups-”

“Never mind that. The relative dating results just came through. You will want to have a look at them,” interrupted the somber old man.

Finally, thought Dr. Marrero. Chronically contextualizing the relic will facilitate its deciphering. No matter how hard he categorized and theorized, the chances of them decoding these scripts blindly without a historical context were slim, if not impossible.

“What does it say?”

"Read for yourself." Dr. Wonton walked to his desk in front of the massive rock. He handed the fresh documents to his colleague and sat down.

“I do hope that these tests will finally clear some of the ambiguities of the chronometric test results. There is, after all, not a chance that what we have between our hands was built over 200 million years ago”. The old man turned his chair to face the stone as the young man sat down on the other end of the desk to read.

The test results, however, said otherwise.

“So not only is this bloody rock buried under a 270 million-year-old layer of soil but so are the four other fragments we’ve found,” Dr. Marrero threw the papers on the desk and rubbed his temples.

He picked up the papers and continued reading. He could not believe his eyes. From uranium-lead dating to stratigraphy, the results they got were coherent yet completely devoid of common sense. Just how did these people manage to make this? Whatever it is.

A fog of silence filled the room as Dr. Marrero leaned against the back of his chair and stared at the lights overhead.

“What do you think these people were trying to build anyway? We looked all over Hatteras Island these past three months and there weren’t any more parts to this structure,” asked the junior archeologist, but his senior was just as lost.

Dr. Marrero laughed. Then he laughed some more. He got up and stepped forward. He put both hands on the carvings. Light spread through the relic to the separate fragment on Dr. Wonton’s desk across the room. He stared in renewed wonder savoring the warmth creeping through the skin of his palms.

“Maybe this is 280 million years old,” his mind darted off to all the science fiction ideas they had brainstormed. Aliens, Gods, an extinct species that died out without leaving a trace… maybe all the unlikely hypotheses his brain rejected were not as far-fetched as he had originally thought. “Maybe a bunch of T-Rexes built this together with those tiny hands of theirs.”

“I am afraid that was before even their time,” humored Wonton.

The laughter slowly died out. Dr. Wonton checked his wristwatch. It was well past noon. “We missed lunchtime. What do you say we go grab a bite now? We can think of what to do next later. God, do I need a break!” Dr. Marrero did not answer. His gaze was fixed on the relic in a trance.

Now that it was completely uncovered, you could see its dimensions more clearly. It stood at forty feet at its highest and had a curvature like what a sheet of paper would look like after rolling it into a cylinder and then letting it loose.

He had been struggling with the language since he started on it. What if he was reading it wrong? What if he had been holding the book backward?

“Dr. Marrero?” called the old archeologist. “ If it was indeed built 280 million years ago, that would explain why all the fragments we have found faced East and why we could only find five fragments in this place.” The disbelief in his eyes matched that of the man before him.

“280 million years ago, this beach didn’t even exist. North America was connected to North Africa and the rest of the modern continents in what then made Pangea.”

“Are you suggesting that some synapsids made this? There is no record of an intelligent species other than us capable of making something like this.”

“What if this is that record?” answered his student defensively. “Because only then does it make sense! The position of the stones and the angle they were laid in... It’s all consistent with the outer wall of some circular structure falling outwards!”

The two stared at each other in silence. There was merit to what he was saying. What is science after all, If not a never-ending challenge of old beliefs? If what Dr. Marrero said was true, it changed everything they thought they knew about the history of their planet. Their staring contest was interrupted by the sudden glowing of the wall. No hands were touching it as the only uncovered parts of it were in this office, and the two men stood feet away from them. “Could they have reached the last two parts?”

“To my knowledge, they have stopped their extraction. I’ll go check,” offered the old professor.

After the senior scientist left, Dr. Marrero ran his hands through his hair. His mind was a mess. Uncovering an extinct intelligent lifeform capable of such feats would cement his name in history, but what if that was not it? He had tried so hard to ignore the alternative, but the possibilities tugged at his heart, ripping the fabric of a belief system he had spent years weaving into existence.

Maybe this was not human-made. Maybe this was not made by any organic lifeform, human or otherwise.

Why does it glow?

Now that I think about it, it had never been set off by anything other than us.

I can’t believe I have not noticed this before! Wonton’s dog was here last week and not once did the relic light up! Dr. Marrero tried but could not remember seeing whether the dog touched the stone or not.

“There is not a person near the two sites.”

The young man turned to look at the distraught doctor coming in and asked. “What do you mean? What is setting it off then?”

“Maybe-” but he was silenced by a sudden shaking of the ground. Marrero reached for a chair to steady himself while Wonton braced his hands against the door.

A loud blast echoed all around them, seeming to come from everywhere all at once, and the carvings beat hotter at the rhythm of the blast for what seemed to last an eternity.

*Caisson

This is how a Bridge is Constructed across water. : r/pics [https://i.redd.it/8cqbnyefnaq01.jpg]