At Doom's Gate

Chapter 4

I will make an effort to reproduce Dr. Abrams' file as faithfully as my fragmented mind allows at this moment, for this is, I believe, the most important element of this account.

Mission Erebus 12

Doctor Natanael Abrams

April 18, 1985 – Periodic Report No. 26

[...] we found this object in the shape of a trapezohedron. The team nicknamed it Blake's Trapezohedron, referencing the obscure literature of H. P. Lovecraft. It was in a state of levitation over a black metal pedestal, we weighed the risks and decided to remove it. The object offered no resistance or apparent risks to the team. We are facing the greatest scientific discovery in the history of mankind. We don't have many resources here in space, so the balance of risks may sometimes seem lopsided, often this is the price of scientific pioneering, which has indeed claimed the lives of many researchers in the past, like the archaeologists who fell to the traps of ancient Egypt during their expeditions. Necessary and perfectly justifiable sacrifices considering the knowledge they provided us.

After a thorough examination, we noticed something inside the trapezohedron. Our mathematicians were quick to discover the secret to opening it. We believe it was designed to be accessible enough for a civilization with mathematical knowledge and too complicated for a civilization in a lower stage of technical and scientific development.

The real work, however, came afterward. The mysterious artifact contained within it a type of black metal nanoparticles, which took on various forms, from what we assume to be an intricate self-sufficient magnetic mechanism.

We did not dare to dismantle the mechanism and lose its original function, we needed to unravel it as it presented itself to us, after all, we adopted the maxim put forth by Descartes and later reclaimed as a fundamental principle by Gestalt theorists, that "the whole is more than the sum of its parts." The question of perception was also raised, allied to our knowledge of physics, to understand that we were inside a structure built in four spatial dimensions, which gives the construction its confusing and "impossible" aspect. In other words, it is not possible for us to see the structure in its entirety, but we can interact with what our perception, limited to three spatial dimensions, allows us.

The particles inside the object presented us with shapes, cosmic schemes, and various symbols. We assumed that the knowledge of that civilization was contained there, the key to unraveling the workings of the entire structure. Translating it became the focus of my work. After years of poring over the trapezohedron, we managed to translate the symbols and understand the message. To the frustration of the entire team, the message the trapezohedron conveyed was not a compendium of technical and scientific information. Like our ancestral civilizations on Earth, this civilization also recorded its myths. We wondered why such an advanced civilization still reserved so much importance for myth, to the point of recording it in a mechanism clearly developed to preserve and transmit information to whoever could decipher it.

However, it was not a myth as we know it, but a kind of cosmic myth that spoke of an ancient and advanced civilization, the first to explore the cosmos at a time when intelligent life teemed throughout the universe. We identified this species as the architects, unable to pronounce the name we translated from the symbols. They were the first, the space pioneers, a civilization that managed to reach level 3 on the Kardashev scale. However, they were not the only ones in their time.

The architects were a technical civilization focused on the development of knowledge, which, however, did not take long to evolve for combat once they encountered other species with more belligerent customs. The architects initiated a broad program of colonization and ordering of civilizations across the cosmos. To surpass their rivals and secure a prominent position, both practical and symbolic among the peoples, they set the goal of mastering a kind of primordial black hole originated from the very Big Bang in a region they identified as the center of the universe. They would obtain energy from its accretion disk, dominate the monster for all possible uses, and consolidate their superiority over other peoples.