A break follows Ivanov’s last words, while he checks the acidity of the liquid that he is mixing, using a pH meter.
“An artificial structure in the heart of Antarctica? How is such a thing possible?”, asks Moore, somewhat doubtful whether Ivanov is making fun of her or not.
He keeps describing the room buried deep in Antarctic mountains, apparently ignoring her question. “From our analysis, the ice crystallization found in the chamber had an approximate age of not less than five hundred million years, although I personally think that it was older, almost double that.”
For a moment, Moore’s eyes seem to become enormous, to emphasize that huge time interval.
Ivanov smiles at her stupor. “Wait to wonder, I haven’t even told you the best. The walls of that huge room were entirely carved in exquisite bas-reliefs. They described the history of a race, highly developed creatures coming from outer space, who had visited this planet in an extremely remote age. They mastered bio-engineering, and created complex life forms on this planet. At the center of the room, there was a kind of low stone fence, perfectly circular.”
Ivanov’s gaze moves inside again, while describing memories and feelings of the extraordinary discovery. “I remember that day like it’s yesterday. I was the first to cross the threshold of that stone fence, shortly followed by my dear and unfortunate friend, Yuri. It was like stepping into an area where the atmosphere was almost as dense as being liquid. I could feel a sort of clicking on my skin, as if the clothes were charged with tiny electrostatics. I perceived a distinctly sour taste in my mouth, like when you touch the poles of a battery with the tip of your tongue, to check whether it’s fully charged o r not. The air before my eyes quickly began to take a slight bluish glow and an ozone smell. The strang e phenomenon grew up in intensity till it turned the place around me in a completely white world. After the first terrible moments of disorientation, a new universe took shape. Scenes came to life, and they were not just holograms. I could feel the wind, the smells, the warmth of the sun on my face. At first my point of view was from the upper atmosphere, as if I came from space. I remember that I recognized our planet, and I realized that the morphology of oceans and land surfaces was quite different than today. I cried as I realized I was staring at a still virgin Earth, ancient and unspoiled. Time didn’t flow in the usual way, the visions – or should I say the memories – flowed in me like high-speed transmitted packets. I saw the arrival of strange creatures on this planet. Their appearance was monstrous, and the way they manifested themselves was always in some way infused with the same feature. Everywhere, in architectural structures, in ships, in the furnishings, there was a radial starry geometry. The creatures communicated with what people would call a form of telepathy, or distance communication without the help of any visible machine. I personally think they were using very low frequency sounds to communicate, because I remember well that I experienced the feeling of strong vibrations that shook my body to the core. While scrolling through time at amazing speed, I saw those beings create immense cities in the deep sea bottom and on the land surface. They mastered genetic engineering and were capable to instill the spirit of life into inanimate organic material. They created the first plant and animal life forms on the planet, populating the continent they had chosen and launching entire ecosystems, aimed at the production of food and raw materials. They used specially designed creatures to build their immense megalithic constructions. These creatures were amorphous protoplasmic masses, which could be molded to shape limbs and new weird life forms, following the directives imposed by the influences of their creators. It was a magnificent world, clean, but at the same time terrifying. In my journey I saw beings that don’t appear in the history books or in museums, some of them were created for utility, others for purposes that we may define funny. I saw whole forests of trees with colossal proportions, far bigger than today’s giant sequoia.
Then, in that sort of alien golden age, something happened that deeply marked the history of the planet itself. Apparently some kind of accident happened in one of the facilities where the protean organisms were genetically designed and created. Something escaped the control of the genetic engineers and the protoplasmic creatures underwent an uncontrolled evolution, soon gaining their own awareness and intelligence. Very quickly they became unmanageable. There was a kind of rebellion, followed by a war between both races. It lasted for thousands of years, with terrible losses on both fronts. The mucilaginous beings were fin ally exterminated, and only few of them managed to escape hiding in the volcanic caves of the underground and into the deep of the mountains. In a desperate attempt to resolve the war once and for all, the creators drew upon them their most fearsome technology. Through the use of this technology, far beyond our actual knowledge, they altered the Earth’s axis, causing the lush land that had once been their first home to become the actual Antarctica. This caused enormous upheavals in the earth’s crust, a global catastrophe that caused the extinction of many animal species that they themselves had created.
The creators themselves lost much of their knowledge and they risked extinction.
Think about it… in geographic and star maps carved by the creators along the walls, this planet was depicted with not one, but three moons, and the orbit of that area of the solar system that we call “asteroid belt” was occupied by fewer asteroids than today, but almost as big as planetoids.
In my journey through millions of years of the planet’s history, I saw as the creators had calculated that a swarm of comets would have traveled through the asteroids belt that stood between Mars and Jupiter. The percentage of hitting the bigger planetoids was extremely high. The following chain reaction would have caused strong upheavals in the inner solar system. Scientists of that magnificent race calculated that many debris would hit the Earth, causing a new planetary catastrophe. They didn’t have the possibility to avoid this occurrence, so they prepared to depart, leaving this region of space. Most of them went toward the constellation we later identified as that of the Pleiades. Just small detachments remained on Earth. If they survived to the looming disaster, they would make sure that life on the planet would keep existing, waiting to start over and re-create the conditions for the return of their people. Their last vestiges were concealed in huge cities carved deep into the earth’s crust, in the bottom of the ocean abyssal plains and on top of the highest and remote mountains. Some of them survived, and I think it’s plausible that they can still be alive today.