Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

The Awakening

I am the only person here, or at least that's what I tell myself.

I sit in doctor Travarious's old office, surrounded by his things, his paperwork his filing cabinets, his research, and all around the red mist hands like a brooding thunderhead.

I am the only one here. I say to myself as I look down at the papers through the mist.

I know I am the only one here, because I am the only one with authorization into this part of the building. I am completely alone..... yet there is something about this place that gives me the odd impression of being surrounded, surrounded on all sides by a crowd, sitting silently and staring at me as I work, yet as the fog dissipates, there is no one and nothing there.

Well, nothing accept for the alien structure of human bone that twists and winds it's way through one half of this entire facility.

It's growing, that I have been able to determine over the past few weeks.

It is getting harder to come inside and get to my desk, it reaches closer and closer to the doorway into the rest of the station.

I get a sense of.... Intent... when I am in the room with it. Like it is going somewhere or doing something.

It was found on an unnamed and classified planet, and around it tends to appear cryptic messages and writings. From what I can determine, the red mist emanates from the bone structure , though as far as I can tell the chemical compound that makes up the fog is of completely unknown composition. None of my equipment can identify it, and none of my careful examination has discovered a source of the red fog.

I have moved onto other projects since then.

Decoding the cryptic messages left behind.

Again from what I was able to determine not so long ago was that the instructions were for the creation of an organic vessel that is used to house some sort of powerful energy core, or at least that is what I thought. The more I looked into the instructions, the more it became clear to me that, I was not looking at any organic housing.

The structure had, again, a pump for circulating mineral rich fluid to the cells throughout the body. It would be run by protein and sugar chains combined with oxygen. It would be able to consume and produce waste to fuel itself. At first, looking upon it, It seemed to me to be a design for some sort of complex organic robotic structure, but the more I looked the more it became clear.

These were not instructions for the formation of a robotic structure, these were instructions for the creation of life.

I sat back in my desk and stared down at the blueprint.

The blueprint for humanity.

I....

Couldn't understand it, didn't know what it was supposed to mean..

I move onto the next part of the message which was left behind, carved into he glass of the containment unit when it was still small enough to fit inside.

I have translated most of the markings using a template used by other scientists to read words that were left on the red planet. The linguists agree that this language shares characteristics with very old human languages like Sumerian, however, I have noticed something else interesting.

It's similarities with Ancient Drev writings.

They have similar sentence structures, though the sounds produced are primarily human in nature.

It does not take me long to read what remains.

Again, it feels like I have eyes on my back as I work, and I turn my head behind me but find only the wall, and the snaking churning lines of bone that curl across it, spidering up the wall like the roots of a tree. I turn back to my work