Discovering Alien Tech
Copyright© 2025 by GMet
Chapter 1
I stepped into the passage and immediately felt a decided difference in the temperature. It was probably ten degrees cooler inside than out but the air smelled just as fresh as the outside. I shivered for a second in the cool air but kept on going, walking slowly and checking out the walls, ceiling and floor for any marks or booby traps like in the movies. There was nothing, just smooth rock on all four surfaces. I must have went two hundred feet into the hill before the passage angled down on a slight slope for another fifty feet. Finally, the path opened up into a cavern that was also cut out from the native rock. The cavern was probably twenty feet high with the middle a dome about ten feet higher than the walls. It looked about a hundred feet in circumference with smooth walls and floor. Everything was again spotless and empty. The walls were cut in by three feet at about two and a half feet up from the floor to create a ledge one could sit on all around the circular cavern.
I walked around the edge of the cavern until I got back to the passage. I could see nothing that showed who made it, what it’s purpose was or why it was there, so I decided to sit down on the ledge and have a snack and a drink. I pulled out a water bottle and a granola bar and contemplated the situation. While I wasn’t an engineer, I didn’t know of anything that could cut through rock so precise as to make the cavern or the tunnel to it and keep it a secret for however long it had been here. While I didn’t have any evidence to support it, I thought that it had been here a long time. I figured it could from be some ancient civilization long ago, the meeting place of gods of long ago or made by aliens. Figuring I might as well try some things to see if there was a hidden passage or a way to communicate with whatever was left behind, I checked the walls around the entire cavern and then checked out the floor for any markings. I even checked the ledge all the way around for anything out of the ordinary but found nothing.
“Well, that’s a fine how do you do,” I said aloud.
There was no echo whatsoever in the cavern, which was not only surprising, but more than a bit weird. I shouted a few times but nothing echoed. I decided to talk normally to see if that triggered anything.
“Hello, my name is Ben Adler, is anyone listening?” I asked. “It’s July 16, 2024, and it’s now 2:15pm in the afternoon. We’re just outside Dryden Ontario and I’d like to meet whoever is responsible for this wonderful cavern.”
I waited but nothing happened. So much for something waiting for intelligent life to show up. With a sigh, I got up and took one more look around before I headed back outside. I walked around the outside before going into to the middle of the cavern to look around. I kicked something and found my marble moving away from me. I watched it as it slowed down, stopped and came back to me. I moved aside as it went past what I thought was the middle of the room, slowed down and then went back and forth until it finally stopped. I examined the floor but there weren’t any marks at all. I looked up while standing overtop of the marble and shone the light on the corresponding point but didn’t see anything but the smooth top of the dome. Shrugging to myself, I gave up on my search to find anything more about the place and bent down to pick up my marble. As soon as it left contact with the floor, a four foot diameter circle of light appeared in the floor surrounding me before the floor inside the circle, along with me, dropped down.
I fell to my knees and tried to balance on the floor as solid rock walls flashed by very quickly. The drop only lasted a few seconds but we had to have travelled far down inside the hill, way below ground or lake level. Surprisingly, the landing was soft as the platform slowed down and then stopped level to another floor, with the floor, and whatever mechanism that lowered me, sinking into a hole in the floor so well that I couldn’t see the seam again. I looked around at the new room I was in. The floors, walls and ceiling were all the same smooth rock except for the four foot hole in the ceiling. This time, however, the room was approximately forty feet square with a ceiling probably twelve feet from the floor. Instead of a ledge around the room, there were six feet wide by three feet cutouts all along each wall, five to each side for a total of twenty. Each cubby had a clear cover over the opening so I could see inside. Two walls held bodies of what I hoped were dead humans, one wall held the bodies of various animals, while the fourth had a collection of weapons and other man-made objects.
I stepped off my elevator platform gingerly, hoping that I could get back on and out of the room later. Luckily, the lift, for the lack of a better term, stayed put as I walked close to one of the walls to look inside one of the cubbyholes. The body was that of a native American Indian male, dressed in a ceremonial outfit. He looked middle age and seemed like he was sleeping rather than dead, though he definitely wasn’t breathing. The next body was a native American Indian female, also dressed in a fancy outfit. She was younger, maybe in her twenties and looked pristine. I moved on down the wall and to the next one, finding bodies in various military garb from long ago; Spanish Conquistadors, French and English military men from the eighteen hundreds, a few different frontier men with beaver hats and homespun clothes, and then a couple men and women from the last century. No one had any on modern clothes so I was happy for that.
The third wall had well preserved animals inside, from squirrels, beavers, foxes, coyotes and even a deer along with various types of birds up to an eagle with it’s wings spread.
The fourth wall held man made items. The first cubby held items like knives, tomahawks, bow and arrows and cudgels; all native American weapons from what I could see. The second held very old Spanish weapons, from swords, pistols and muskets. The third held muskets, rifles and pistols from the French and English colonization era while the last had pocket watches, old wireframe glasses and other personal items from the last couple of centuries. There were no electronic devices or even wrist watches in the collection, though right at the end of the last cubbyhole, there was a thin metal rectangular box at the far back, mostly hidden from view by a metal flask.
I hesitated and then used a collapsible walking stick I had in my backpack to touch the clear cover in case they had some type of forcefield or security on it. No blade or laser beam appeared to cut the stick so I used a hand to see if the cover would move. At the first touch, it slid upwards and disappeared into a slot in the roof of the cubby. I then used the walking stick to nudge the flask out of the way and work the metal box towards me without putting my arm or hand into the cubby. I grabbed a shop rag out of my backpack and let the box drop into my rag in my hand. It was lighter than I thought it would be as I assumed it was going to be made of steel. It might have been polished aluminum but it seemed harder as I squeezed it with no deformation. I turned it over in my hand, still keeping the rag between it and my skin. There didn’t seem to be any markings or seams to show that it contained anything. It was slightly thicker than a phone but about the same size in length and width as some of the bigger phones I’ve seen being offered. After pressing each side through the rag to see if contact activated something I finally did the same thing without the rag.
“Finally,” an exasperated voice spoke from the box.
“What the hell?” I said, almost dropping the box.
“Activation only comes after direct contact from a Telan or a human,” the voice said. “I wasn’t really authorized to show you this room but it’s been over a hundred of your earth years since a Telan has been back and I need guidance.”
“Okay,” I slowly responded. “Who are you and who or what are Telans?” I inquired.
“I am the artificial intelligence installed in this base,” the voice responded. “The Telans are a race of explorers from a galaxy far away from here. Who are you?”
“As I said above, I’m Ben Adler, a fourteen-year-old human male,” I stated. “Do you have a name?”
“I do not have a name, I was just designated Base when addressed by the Telans,” the voice answered.
“Well Base, it’s nice to meet you, though I think we can come up with something better than that if we’re going to be talking to each other for the foreseeable future,” I said. “Thank you for letting me see both the cavern above and this room. You seem to have a lot of history stored here in the bodies and some of the items I see. You must have been here for centuries.”
“This installation is more than a thousand years old in earth years,” the AI admitted.
“Wow, that is a long time to be here,” I said. “This technology to cut out this base seems still to be more advanced than what we could do even today.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.