SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

And that was the trick, wasn’t it? The glass was clearly ancient, but there was no sign of seams, or, aside from the dragon art, any imperfections. Once the word about the find got out, the community speculated forgery. Some kind of publicity stunt. But they couldn’t be sure until they could see the actual texts for themselves.

They spent months figuring out a way to open it safely. They finally decided to pierce the glass with a special diamond-tipped device while it was in a sterile vacuum environment, take a small sample of the papyrus and then reseal the glass. When it was pierced, the oddest smell, of white lotus flower, to be precise, Nymphaea Lotus , completely filled the room. At first everyone was terrified, afraid the scent was some kind of chemical weapon, but no one was harmed, and the smell lingered for days.

After resealing the sphere, they scanned everything inside with a new app that used Lidar to analyze the patterns on the scrolls. The language there was nothing anyone had ever seen, even though the room was filled with specialists in ancient languages. The mystery was thrilling, and for a time, the atmosphere of the room was like a party, a carnival.

For a while. Over months, no one was found who knew the language on the scrolls. And when no codex, no Rosetta Stone for this language showed up, it was mostly forgotten. Years went by before anyone thought of the scrolls again except in passing.

Eventually, for record-keeping purposes at the archives where they were kept, the documents, which dated so far back (more than 200,000 years old) that it was thought there had to be an error because people didn’t make paper back then, were scanned. Cataloged. Placed on the internet. Of course. The words were digitized and the shapes they made approximated by the computers and OCR programs.

One day, many years later, a young woman named Sonya was working on her dissertation in mythological languages attempting to discover the Ur language, the language all humanity spoke before the Tower of Babel, the language Adam and Eve spoke. She uploaded her work to the Internet as part of her course requirements.

Her computer froze.

It stayed frozen for hours. Nothing Sonya did could seem to fix it, even unplugging it and plugging it back on just gained her the same odd frozen screen. In the third hour, a symbol appeared on the screen, like a star on a stick, covered by a weird nipple-shaped hat.

She was certain she had uploaded a crazy virus and sadly planned to take her computer to a friend who was an expert on computers. She worried she had lost all of her hard work of that day (but of course, she had everything saved in multiple spots, on the Cloud and email).

But then her computer restarted. At least, it seemed to be rebooting. But it stayed a black screen for a few moments, and Sonya was afraid this was the end. What she didn’t know was that the program that had begun to run on her computer was actually a kind of virus, a previously unknown and remarkably advanced computer language. Her adding her transliteration and interpretation of the Ur language into the mix had triggered a sort of digital Rosetta stone, a viral program loading that was able to combine the ancient language with computer programming binary. And that the accidental confluence of events was changing her computer forever into a kind of universal translator.

A story began to scroll across the screen. Sighing, and thinking that it was still the virus, the student read along, at first with annoyance, then curiosity that turned into shock and amazement.

And the story Sonya read changed the world.

Jude stalked long corridors of the Dragon’s Hall in a huff.

Everything was going wrong already. His parents had woken him rudely just before the seventh hour. After a hurried breakfast, they had dropped him off with warnings to study hard, with exhortations to “hurry to work” and to meet them back at home later, in hour eighteen. Then they continued talking in rapid, argumentative tones.

Something about politics. It was always about politics. His parents were both Judges, the leaders of their community and ultimately the world, elected by the people once every five cycles to make laws and policy. This meant they were always arguing about something, always worried about something else.

Jude didn’t care about the arguments of old men and even older women in the Halls of Government. But he couldn’t wait to get out to the Halls of the Elder Dragons, where his friend Yalta-ba-oath was waiting to instruct him further in Interstellar Navigational techniques. Especially the telepathic interface that would allow him to pilot the starships that would take them eventually to other planets and solar systems and the stars. He had the feeling he almost was there, more times than not he could now sense the Dragon’s empathic voice just at the edges of his consciousness. A tickle, a mental itch he needed to scratch. He could hear entire sentences at time. He was told he was the one who was blocking the link, and that he just had to keep trying.

The Dragons had always been experts on traveling the other worlds, the solar system and beyond. Rumor had it that they came from somewhere far away, but Yalta-ba-oath only smiled and nodded when Jude asked this question. She didn’t avoid answering, but she redirected Jude to answer it for himself.

“What do you think, Jude? Where did we all come from?”

Her voice was deep and powerful but kind, a little gravelly, though. He couldn’t wait until he could always hear it through the empathic navigational interface. The Dragons could speak to anyone telepathically, and this was the way they navigated their ships, which were somehow organic, also. The ships spoke back to the Dragons but none of the humans could speak to the ships without the Dragons helping. And somehow, the ships and Dragons both needed the human intermediary to translate the ship environment to a hospitable place for everyone.

Jude didn’t understand it all yet, but he was studying as hard as he could because he wanted to be a navigator, with the Dragons. He himself had not yet heard the voice of any of the ships. He hoped to someday.

Jude thought about the Dragon’s question. It took him a while to work through everything, but Yalta-ba-oath patiently let him think in his own pace. He could tell that she felt she had all the time for him to figure it out.

He knew that his home planet was not an easy place to live. Its over 1600 volcanoes were beautiful but could be deadly, and the heat of the dayside of the planet could kill if one wasn’t careful to bring water and shade on any trips across the cities on the edge of the daylight cycle. The sharp black sand of the beaches South of his home city, beaches that ended in lovely dark-green water, that sand could cut your feet with its glassy points if you forgot to wear your sandals to the water’s edge. There the sand was softened, eventually, but you must wait ‘til you get right to the edge to go barefoot.

Scientists said that The People, some called the Tribes, had originated in the cooler, mountain lands and that they migrated down and across the planet at some point in the past 10,000 years, while the planet was in its coolest phase, furthest in its relatively circular orbit around the sun. In ancient times, they had been nomads, following the edges of the sunlight, called the Aredvi Sura, sticking to the twilight zones between the dark, the Anahita sides. Nowadays, they had climate controlled buildings that darkened the windows during the planet’s long day and let in artificial light during the slightly longer night cycle.