The Orb of Terra
Copyright© 2025 by Sci-FiTy1972
Chapter 2: Red Stone Silence (Part Two)
Ty didn’t move for a full ten seconds.
He forced himself to count them.
One ... two ... three ... The old training surfaced like a hand closing around his throat: Pause. Don’t chase the shock. Assess the environment before you assess yourself.
His lungs worked again. The world held steady. Wind scraped through the basin, shifting sand in soft little avalanches. Somewhere far off a coyote yipped, the sound thin and strangely unimpressed.
The orb sat half-buried at his feet as if nothing had happened.
That was the part that unnerved him most.
Not the star field or the voice that had spoken in his head. Not the impossible symbol or the mention of ancestors. Those things could be filed, however reluctantly, under brain misfiring under stress. Trauma had taught him that the mind was capable of staging a whole war inside a quiet room.
But the coldness of the metal beneath his fingertips?
That was real.
The way the headlamp had died, not sputtered?
Real.
The way the air had smelled metallic for a second, like electricity before a storm?
Real.
Ty crouched slowly and placed two fingers on his own wrist.
Pulse steadying. Strong. Maybe stronger than it should’ve been after that wave of panic.
His other hand hovered near his knife, more comfort than threat.
“Okay,” he said aloud, and the sound of his voice seemed to snap a cord somewhere in the canyon. “Okay.”
He had learned, over time, that saying a thing out loud didn’t make it true—but it did make it manageable. Words turned chaos into a shape.
He looked at the orb again.
Not the whole of it—his eyes traced the exposed arc, the curve of it disappearing into packed sand. The surface was flawless in a way that made his brain itch. No scratches. No weathering. Not even dust clinging to it, as if the sand didn’t want to touch it.
He reached for his headlamp and tried the switch again.
Nothing.
Battery shouldn’t have died; he’d checked it before leaving. He’d checked it twice. Habit and paranoia were cousins.
He stood and pulled the spare light from his pack, a smaller one he kept clipped inside a pocket. He flicked it on.
It lit.
The beam cut across the basin and returned to the orb’s surface. The metal looked darker under the light, as if it absorbed illumination instead of reflecting it.
Ty exhaled.
The first real thought formed, clear and cold: You don’t leave this here.
He didn’t know why he thought it that way. He wasn’t an archaeologist. He wasn’t a treasure hunter. He wasn’t even someone who believed in mysteries worth chasing.
But he did understand threats.
And he understood that something capable of doing what it had just done—something capable of reaching into his perception and rearranging reality like a room being redecorated—didn’t get left buried in a canyon where anyone with a metal detector or a curious kid could stumble onto it.
He glanced at his sat beacon.
He could push the button. Call it in. Let the government do what governments did: show up in black SUV’s, cordon off the area, ask questions that weren’t questions, then bury the truth under a new layer of sand.
Ty didn’t trust that.
He didn’t trust anyone with secrets. Not anymore.
He stared at the orb, then at the sky.
The stars were ordinary again.
But he felt, deep in his bones, that ordinary was no longer guaranteed.
He knelt and dug again, faster now, controlled but urgent. He used the knife to cut into compacted soil, careful not to scrape the surface. Sand poured away in little slopes. The orb’s curve became more obvious—yes, a sphere, almost perfect.
His hands worked until his wrists ached.
He stopped when his fingers found a point where the orb met stone—no seam, no hatch, no obvious way to lift it. It felt like the orb didn’t just sit in the earth; it belonged to it. Like it had grown here.
Ty leaned back on his heels, breathing hard.
“How do you come out?” he murmured.
He didn’t expect an answer.
He got one anyway.
Not as a voice this time.
As pressure behind his eyes.
A subtle pulse, like a thought that wasn’t his pushing gently against the inside of his skull.
Ty froze, knife held still.
He could almost sense direction—here—a kind of internal compass turning toward a specific angle of the sphere.
He swallowed.
“No,” he said, more to himself than to the orb. “No, we’re not doing that. You don’t get to start living in my head.”
The pressure didn’t increase. It didn’t argue. It simply remained—patient, quiet, persistent.
Like the desert itself.
Ty’s jaw tightened.
He shifted the dirt from the indicated spot.
His fingers brushed something different. Not a seam—but a change in texture, subtle as breath. When he pressed there, the surface warmed under his touch.
Warmed.
The orb responded.
A thin line appeared—light, not bright, a faint silver glow tracing a perfect circle around the sphere, as if the orb had decided to show him where the door was.
Ty pulled his hand away as if burned.
“What the—”
The circle widened.
Not opening outward. Separating.
A section of the orb’s surface slid aside without sound, revealing an interior that looked deeper than it should’ve. Like the opening led not into a cavity but into a pocket of space.
Ty’s mouth went dry.
He angled the small light into it.
The beam seemed to dim as it entered, swallowed by darkness that wasn’t shadow.
Then, inside that darkness, something glimmered—metallic, angular, not natural.
A handle?
No.
A core.
Ty reached in before he could talk himself out of it.
His fingers touched something cold and smooth, and immediately the world tightened around him—air thickening, sound muffling, the canyon holding its breath again.
The thing in his hand pulsed.
His forearm muscles tensed, not from strain but from ... activation. He felt it: the nanobots, the quiet machine under his skin, waking like soldiers hearing boots in the hallway.
Ty yanked his hand back.
In his palm sat a small object the size of a deck of cards, shaped like a flattened prism, edges too precise. It looked like metal but carried the sheen of something that didn’t belong to Earth’s periodic table.
The orb’s opening sealed itself with the same quiet elegance it had used to reveal itself. The faint glowing circle vanished.
The sphere returned to featureless silence.