Ark Vault
Chapter 1 Mystery
A team of collage age people get together and form a club to explore their surroundings in their free time.
The group eventually stumble upon several mysterious groupings of structures which lead them to believe something is hidden nearby, but difficult to get to.
One of the team members dies trying to find the entrance alone after the team abandons the prospect of finding it.
The team member that died found the entrance, but couldn’t get in.
The other members regroup after some years, as older adults with more resources and skills, to try once more and honor their friend.
The team reach the entrance and open the vault. They are presented with a long tunnel that can be lit with a torch. There is a torch and flint and magnesium lighter at the entrance. After playing with the object for a few seconds, the team member pushes the button, making sparks and then she ignites the torch. The hall is very long without any slop, digging straight into the heart of the mountain. After a long way, there begin to be shown replica’s of all the famous cave paintings from around the world, by series of age. They walk along the tunnel, the art progresses through the millennium depicting the history of the human species and documenting the rise of humanity.
The tunnel ends at the Gate of Civilization. There is a laser engraved image of a person carrying the torch, putting the torch down into a small hole in the wall and walking through the gate, at the end of this small series there is a polished, reflective object in the wall surface that is a mirror showing themselves holding the torch.
The person on the team put the torch down into the hole, and they all walked through the Gate of Civilization.
After walking through the gate, deep in the mountain, the hall opens up into a large chamber. The light from the torch illuminates the chamber by reflecting the lit torch light along a series of polished tubes which open into holes in the ceiling revealing the constellations, projecting their spectrum's with prisms built into the small tunnels.
Thus the chamber is illuminated. The group walk in and stare at t he ceiling for some time before noting a block about waist high with an image laser engraved of someone looking up at the room with a small mirror to the left, showing the group looking at the ceiling. Then there is an arrow pointing left.
The group gather that humanity was far older than they had ever guessed and someone had left this place for them. They vowed to return there after a few days prepared for studying the chamber and what else may exist deep in the mountain.
The group leave, take the torch with them, and exit the tunnel. Unsure how to extinguish the torch they set it down inside the entrance and make their way back out of the cave.
Chapter 2 Aristotle’s Adventure
The group reconvened four days later with enough supplies to spend about a week studying the cave and chamber. They made camp at the cave entrance. They would prepare each day to go into the cave, explore during the day, and share their finding in the evenings over dinner.
When they reached the tunnel entrance they found the torch unlit and feared the fire would not come back. After playing with the torch again for a few seconds, one of them got the torch re-lit and they carried on down the hall as they did on their first visit. Eager, one of the crew decided to begin the study with the cave painting replicas and would catch up with the others when they returned. He lit his own gas torch from his pack, and set it down on the floor of the hall. The rest of the team carried on joyful and exited as they walked quickly to the chamber gateway. They stared in awe at the paintings and engravings quickly rushing by them. They would have ran if the hall had not been so utterly dark ahead of them.
Just as before, they reached the gate, set the torch in the hole, and walked through the gate. The ceiling was set ablaze with bright light of exaggerated starlight illuminating the chamber. There were reds and greens, purples and golds, bright blue and white, and the constellations were reborn.
But they were different than the ones the group knew, and a few very large stars they did not know.
This time they followed the arrow to the left. A team member said they would study the light source and constellations. The rest carried on. Following the arrow to the left directed them toward a wall with lines engraved they neither understood nor recognized. About chest height was a line of inscription that encircled the entire chamber. There was the same arrow as on the pedestal pointing from the left to the right as they faced the wall. Never having seen writing before, they stared at the engravings, touching them gently and wondering what it could mean. The single line was embossed with a line above and a line below the inscription in white with a black background and white lettering. The letter was blocky and full of hard lines. There seemed to be many circles and curves, dots accompanied some of the shapes, but not many. Two of the group said they would study this art as it seemed much more significant to the progress of this strange path. The other’s agreed and turned to look around the rest of the chamber.
The other three team members broke off to explore at random. There were many pedestals, not all the pedestals were the same shape or size. Some were tall and then, others were short and broad, no pedestal was larger than a medium sized table neither smaller than a chair. The pedestals were organized into geometric shapes of increasing complexity: a circle, triangle, square, pentagram, hexagram, etc. up to a dodecahedron. They formed an arc away from the gate. On the floor of the chamber were many intersecting lines with many curving symbols. The three immediately recognized the solar chart from the position of the sun and moon, they traced the orbital path through the year. At the very center of the floor was an analema.
The chamber was irregularly shaped, with a domed ceiling. In one particular corner about a quarter way around the chamber the engraving the two team members studying pictures were joined by pictograms. While the two could not figure out the meaning of the engraving, the pictograms were much clearer.
They beckoned the others to join them. The engraving began to tell a story. The story showed men and women and children, old and young, in large buildings, great fields of food and animals, the sea was full of vessels and the sky and stars were full as well. One picture showed the Earth. More followed, and there were happy faces, but also sad faces. Suddenly the pictures became scary. There were no more pictures of old people or happy people. There were pictures of dry lakes and grey skies. The people had weapons of some kind and many dead animals. The cities were broken with pictures of people crying. There were several pictures in series of red scenes and what looked like storms. After a short sequence of the same picture, the pictures changed to trees and full lakes and rivers with many fish. There were a group of people entering a cave, the Gate of Civilization, and several chambers. At the end of the story there was a depiction of the sun and moon, but also many other objects that the group did not recognize.
Having returned to the gate, the group was stunned into silence. They looked at each other, and looked around the room in awe and wonder. They realized all at once that approximately ten feet from the floor up to the “sky” there were pictograms with a corresponding engraving underneath each. It seemed that every conceivable object or idea was encoded there inside that chamber for them to learn from, to be retaught. Amazed, awed into silence, the team decided to retire for the day.
On the second day, the member who had been studying the entrance paintings joined them. He stood in the middle of the room for about an hour not speaking, and barely even breathing.
By midday, the group had teased out that the string of engravings in the first half of the line surrounding the room were first letters and then groupings of letters that corresponded to the sounds of those letters. It was not only a story, but a way to read the story and then speak and hear the language the story had been written in. Bu inspecting the pictograms one could understand that the bushy thing with a tall brown stalk was a ‘tree’ and the round blue and brown object was ‘earth’ while other ideas like ‘love’ and ‘family’ and ‘war’ were shown by more complex pictograms. The detail was so rich within the pictograms, that one could see the emotion of ‘love’ or ‘jealousy’ or ‘rage’ on the faces of those people depicted.
By the end of the day, the team had translated about a quarter of the engraving and about 200 of the symbols along the wall. During their study of the engraving, they noticed the wall was oddly smooth, but not reflective, all the way up to the ten foot mark before the cipher began. This was the case encircling the entire chamber, oddly smooth, but not reflective. In a room brimming and nearly overflowing with knowledge, this seemed an oddity to have so much usable surface area with nothing on it. Was it for future knowledge to add to the chamber? Was the chamber unfinished? So far, there had been no clues as to what the space between the engraving and what the group had determined was a dictionary could possibly be for.
As they studied the engraving, the members quickly realized the pictures were just a summary of the story, and the story itself was far more detailed. Not only had there been a civilization near the mountain, the civilization had spanned the entire planet. It even extended to the sun and moon.
During one of the longer breaks, after a particularly difficult part of the passage, one of the team members were inspecting the beginning of the story absentmindedly while eating, admiring the detail and wondering about those who made it. After some time, the member noticed she could combine the words that were spaced out every so often to make new words. She was intrigued and thought that perhaps exhaustion had scrambled her brain. She jotted down a few new combinations of words and went off to see if she could find them in the dictionary. Sure enough, near the gate entrance, a little too high, there was the new word. She exclaimed in a high pitched squeal that was immediately embarrassing, but not unwarranted. She ran back to the engraving, jotted down a few more words and went back to the dictionary. Having caught everyone’s attention, they began staring as she rushed back and forth between the dictionary and the engraving.
After a few times of this, the curiosity over came the group and they began to question what she had discovered. She exclaimed that here was more to the story, much more. There were at least two layers to the engraving, and possibly more. Wide eyed, and infused with a rush of adrenaline, everyone got back to translating the engravings. By the end of the day, they had fully translated the entire passage and discovered another recombination of the engraving bringing the total to at least three lines. The most intriguing thing about the passage, one team member noted, was the increasing complexity of the language being used. The farther to the right and the more layers deep they went, the more specific and complex the story became, as though they were being guided to do something.
Ch 3 Lessons from the past
The third day was a grind. At the end of the day they sat around the fire at camp to discuss the what they had so far and the plan for the rest of the expedition, knowing they would need to come back for further exploration of what could be several more chambers by the looks of the first line in the pictogram.
Like the path, each and every part of the chamber grew in complexity, and there were instructions throughout on how to use the chamber, but they were not always so explicit. Indeed the longer the team was in the chamber the more vague the “lessons” became. However, they were most certainly being instructed in lessons of some sort.
The fourth day began to yield serious results. The message on the wall had a total of five layers, and by late morning on the fourth day the team understood what had happened to the civilization in the story. After reaching a technological prowess unmatched by humanity until that time, humans had broken the rhythms of the Earth. Out of rhythm, the Earth’s ecosystems descended into chaos. The civilization crumbled rapidly and humanity nearly went extinct. After about a thousand years of varying degrees of decent, some abrupt, some gradual, a large group of people could see the demise of the civilization and so began to create a civilization seed with the hopes that one day someone, or a group of someones, could discover the seed and restart civilization if we had not gone extinct.
Armed with their new knowledge of the depth and complexity of the chamber, the group set about to decipher the pedestals. Which, up until then, they had largely ignored as they recognized the room followed a pattern that should be followed and nothing could be learned without first understanding the previous information. Each successive layer built on the previous layer. They could also use the new layers to decipher more complex bits hidden within the beginning layers.
At first, they decided to divide themselves between the pedestals like they had with the engraving, but quickly realized the triangle and circle pedestal groups were so complex they may never understand them, let alone the other ten. The circle pedestal group had eight pedestals arranged in a circle with lines carved in to the floor between them. All were connected with lines between each. Each pedestal was slightly taller than the previous, to create a sort of staircase. However, one could not use this staircase to go anywhere, as it was only from was high to chin height. These pedestals were completely covered in new engravings. These symbols were an entirely new language.
One of the members had been stooped over the shortest pedestal and saw two hand shapes. He placed his hands on the shapes and understood that each symbol above his fingers were numbers for counting. Next to the hands were a small column of symbols, these were followed by a larger combination of symbols. He explained to the others this pedestal told them how to add, subtract, divide, and multiply in the new language. The circle was teaching them rudimentary math. The second pedestal had square roots. The third pedestal had degrees. The fourth had fractals. The fifth had sets. The sixth had matrices. The seventh had imaginary numbers. The eighth and final pedestal had formulas from every prominent scientist of the Age of Science. Having understood that not only did they have math, but that they had another dictionary for using highly complex math, they could now move on to the triangle formation.
The second group in the arc, the triangle formation consisted of three head height pedestals with conical shapes, but with a flat top about the size of a large hand. There were no markings on the floor this time, possibly insinuating the ideas on the pedestals were linked, but not as strongly as the math previously. Upon inspection, there were a lot of circles and lines on these three pedestals. There did not seem to be any clear pattern to the engravings and there did not seem to be a starting point. Each of the team members took up a different strategy. One laid down on the floor in the center of the triangle, in case this puzzle needed a different perspective or perhaps to take a nap. Another team member decided to look at a few inscriptions and see if there were any correlation with the writing on the wall. One member chose to see if they could use the circle formation to decipher the triangle. Still another thought maybe the answer lied in the star graph carved into the floor. Each member chose their own way, and none of them could understand what the triangle formation was about, covered in circles and lines, with little notations carved in between all of the symbols.
After a long time, a few of the team members noticed that the notations were words without definitions written down. Was the chamber incomplete? Was this a dead end or the meaning of the blank space between the floor and the dictionary? The notations carried sound information, they were certain of that, because the writing on the wall corresponded to the pronounced sounds of the language. There did seem to be numbers after awhile, but no numbers were written down. The numbers came out in patterns, and after some time, some of the patterns could be understood to be in an order of sorts, spiraled around one of the pillars, but only in sections. A spiral would appear, and then disappear, there would be staggered symbols and then several lines. On one occasion, a very very bored and distracted team member decided to get up on the circle pedestal steps. Amused, he walked to the top and then down and back up again. When he was on the tallest pedestal he looked out across the room, studying it. Then looked down at the triangle, on the tops of the pillars there were unconnected lines forming a larger triangle. Perhaps this was the key to the formation? He looked up at the ceiling and there were three stars that correlated in position with the pillars. He asked the others if they would follow the point of the lines to the walls of the chamber. Three positions revealed immediate results. One pointed toward the symbol of ‘man’. One pointed to the symbol of ‘body’. One pointed to the symbol for ‘soul’.