Here is the second chapter, in which the plot starts to evolve. I hope you'll review. I'm looking forward to some constructive critique, as this is my first story.
Enjoy:
Chapter 2 – Information, astonishment and curiosity
She had slept like a rock, got up late and eaten a sandwich in the kitchen. They had been exhausted the night before, so Djin had given them a quick tour of the house and then showed them to their rooms. Now she walked along a corridor when she heard voices behind a door. She opened and looked inside. It was a large room with a long table in the middle and high ceilings. Along one wall the sunlight was pouring through a series of windows. All around the rest of the room there were bookcases and various cabinets with heaps of artifacts, scrolls, books, stacks of papers, boxes and various trinkets and nick nacks in large disorganized piles. Her father was sitting at the table working at his computer and Djin was leaning against the table where a collection of books, photos and documents were spread out. He looked up when she entered. "Good morning sleepyhead" he said with wry smile. Her uncle looked up from his computer and said: "Ah, Jessie! Good to finally see you up. Come over here, love. I'll bring you up to speed on things." She walked over to him and pulled up a chair as Djin poured her a cup of coffee.
"Now, this energy source I was telling you about" her uncle began, "I first heard about it from our friend Djin here. He recommended I contacted an Egyptian family he knew to posses some interesting texts about it. I'd have to tell them that Djin vouched for my integrity or they would of course deny any knowledge of such texts. When I examined them I was not only reassured of their authenticity, but also that this subject was worth investigating further. The remarkable thing about the texts was that they reflected an exceptional insight in quantum physics, far ahead of their time. Right up your alley, love." He said looking at her with raised eyebrows.
"Wow" I said. Not being able to describe my surprise in any other way. "Could I see these texts?"
"Thats not possible I'm afraid. I was extremely lucky to have been aloud to examine them in the first place. In fact the guy who showed them to me got in a great deal of trouble with the rest of his family for my sake. I did take a lot of notes and you can see them right here." He opened a file on the computer and placed it in front of her. She began to read through her uncles notes.
"Did a text from 2.000 b.c. really document this?" she gasped. "This describes the basic forces of quantum physics and how they are carried. Electromagnetism, the strong and weak force and even gravity. We didn't really understand these things before we had the large Hadron Collider that can split atomic particles. This can't be true. How would they know?" She looked from her uncle to Djin.
"Read further" her uncle said mildly.
She returned to the computer and learned that the ancient texts had described an energy she'd never heard about. The notes got a little vague on the subject and she was about to ask her uncle about that, but he'd already seen where she was in his notes.
"Yes, i know" he said with regret "I was a bit in over my head there and it was really difficult to make sense of it, but this is as close and precise as I was able to make notes."
She sighed a little, wishing she could have been there with him when he made these notes. Perhaps she would have understood it deeper. The energy, the texts had described, was believed to bind together force and particle, the Higgs particle with matter. Thus it was the one thing which made existence possible. This was the end of the notes and she leaned back in the chair just starring at the computer screen. This was unbelievable. The elusive Higgs particle was only just recently discovered after years of searching at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. An underground particle accelerator so powerful and large it crossed three countries.
"If you have room in your head, theres more" her uncle said and opened another file. I researched for some years when I found out, that the original texts was written by a certain group of scholars. I spent a long time tracking their lineage, and it was quite a headache I can tell you. Their tracks mostly just disappeared, but one of them I tracked down to India. I started going through any and all things that might prove relevant from the area I had narrowed the search to. I was about to give up, and I were in fact sitting at the airport waiting to board a plane home, when I had a revelation. I was looking at a poster with one of these 3D holograms you can only see if you look at it the right way. You know them, right?"
She nodded. Yes, she knew them. She could never see anything in the damn things, all she got was a headache.
"You have to see right through them, you know, focus on something beyond the surface of the paper. Then you realize the image was right there all the time" Her uncle said and winked at her. "I had assumed I was looking for something never seen before. It had never occurred to me, that the clues could be right in front of me. I just had to look at it the right way."
Djin sat down on the table next to the computer and looked down at her. "Your uncle is a brilliant man, Jessie. I have wondered about this stuff for..." he said, but paused for a moment. Then continued "well, ...for a long time, and what Steven had realized, never even occurred to me. Not even close."
He was inches away from her and his closeness sent a rush of heat to her cheeks. She felt a bit embarrassed. After all she wasn't a teenager and she had only just met the guy, not to mention his odd appearance. He was kind of cute though, and she surprised herself when she nearly broke into a girly giggle.
"I felt a little stupid when I realized." her uncle said. "This was very important knowledge. Knowledge is power as you know and it can be dangerous. Especially if it's far ahead of your time. These scholars and their descendants would most likely conceal their knowledge for the uninitiated eyes. Probably in code or a symbolic language only they understood. I had to look again, and this time for any possible symbolic or coded language that could fit with basic quantum physics."
She held a hand against her forehead. "Call me narrow minded, but this is all a bit too much for me. Perhaps I'm just not smart enough."
Djin put a hand on her shoulder and looked her straight into the eyes. "Don't say that".
"Right" her uncle said, "had it not been for you, your excellent insight in physics and your skill for explaining it to me and others so we understand it, I would never had understood what I has looking at, when I read the Egyptian texts."
She looked gratefully at both of them. In part grateful to Djin for touching her shoulder. "Teenager!", she thought scolding herself.
"I'm going to show you a series of photos of various buildings and works of art" her uncle continued as he picked out photos and documents from the piles on the table. He laid them in front of her. "This is what I found interesting." He pointed out a number of symbols and detailed adornments on Indian ruins and explained how they were connected.
"You see love, if you put your "quantum eyeglasses" on and compare with the original Egyptian texts, it makes sense"
She couldn't see it and concentrated harder. Then it struck her. It was maps. She had assumed the carvings and illustrations was letters or basic pictures, but it was illustrations of subatomic particle relations. She gasped. "My god! Why didn't anyone see this before?"
Her uncle said: "Because they weren't looking the right way. Like with the holograms."
Djin added: "How many people acquainted with advanced physics would study these ruins with the specific purpose of finding illustrations of these quantum, uh... the relations of..." He sighed, "well there you see. It's all gobbledygook to me, but then i'm not a physicist."
Her uncle continued: "Look at this." He pointed at an aerial photo of a collection of ruins surrounded by jungle. On top of the photo the outlines of the buildings and roads were highlighted with an red pen. The other photos you've been looking at are all taken at different places in these ruins. Look at the square at the far east of the city."
She looked and saw a square shaped like a semicircle.
"In the middle of this square is a large block of stone with a symbol of a rising sun. Beneath it you can see this line of symbols." He showed her another photo. "These are numbers. It has long been assumed that they are dates of whatever calendar the original inhabitants used, but think maps love. You have the large sun pointed east, a star carved into the floor underneath and then numbers."
He paused and looked at her. She was confused. Then it struck her and she smiled. "Of course! It's coordinates."
Her uncle looked impressed and said with astonishment: "Very, very close. It's a scale."
"Scale?" Now she was confused again.
"See, the whole city is a map, and this is the scale you need to read it with. Now you only need one thing to put it to use."
Djin said: "A "You are here" dot!" with a deep laugh."And given that the original builders plastered an encyclopedia quantum mechanica all over the place, we can be sure that whatever this map points to, it's probably something very cool."
-o0o-
He could see she tried to cope with the large amount of information her uncle Steven had explained to her. She seemed smart though. Quite brilliant in fact, so he was confident she would quickly absorb it all.
Steven looked at his niece and said: "This is where I got stuck however. I couldn't seem to crack the code to any fixed point on the map. I just don't have enough information. But he might have." He said pointing at Djin. Jessie looked up at Djin with large eyes full of surprise. He took a deep breath and cleared his throat. Mostly to conceal that her eyes mesmerized him. "Well, uh..." he started. "I have quite a collection of books and stuff. Some of it rather rare". She pushed the chair back a little and took a long look at him squinting her eyes. "Boy, she's sharp", he thought. "There's no fooling her". He couldn't help but smile a little. She had delicate features, a small pointed nose and clear blue eyes that radiated with intelligences. Her blond hair had a glow of red and looked soft. "Hold it right there or you'll get hurt you fool!" he thought to himself.
"And where exactly do you fit in to all of this?" She said snapping him out of his line of thoughts.
He fingered the collar of his shirt. "What do you mean?" He said cautiously and hopeful.
She said: "I don't mean to sound rude, ungrateful or imposing here, but I get the feeling there's something you're not telling me. Perhaps the both of you." She glanced at her uncle. "You have a large collection of rare and valuable books and artifacts here. You know about Egyptian texts which apparently no one knows about, and furthermore, the owners of these texts are willing to let a stranger see them, with only your word vouching for him. And..." She paused looking rather uncomfortable.
"Just speak your mind" he said mildly, "I won't be offended".
She continued: "You look...so different. Who are you really?"
Silence. For a long moment.
He sighed. A sigh full of anxiety, hope and surrender.
"It's going to take a while to answer".
-o0o-