It's lonely up here in the room, tonight. No hookers, sent 'em away. No movies, the DVD player broke.
Just me, my guns, my booze, and the elephant I've been tapdancing around since we liberated this place.
The Chamber.
Now you know me, son. I'm usually a straight shooter, if you'll excuse the turn of phrase. If I got something to say, and you're authorized to hear it, I'll give it all three barrels and cram it up your ass when I'm done.
So when I say that there's something scares me, I'm not being funny. I'm scared.
And if I'm scared, well, maybe you should be running.
You want to know why I just sent my best Agents to Neo York to get claymores to terminally inconvenience the UN? It's because of the thing that ABWEHR's been sitting on this entire time.
The thing that they were digging ultra-advanced tech out of all those years, including that UFO and what turned Magda Goebbels into that killer womb.
The thing that makes my brain go quiet, my balls retract, and the whole world drop away, every damn time I walk in there and look.
The thing that I had to drain a whole bottle of something potent enough to strip paint off a battleship to even be able to contemplate talking about.
The thing in the back of the Ice Palace. The vast emptiness that is so very far from empty.
The Chamber.
(Deep, deep !@#$ breath)
A million years ago, Earth was visited.
That, in and of itself, isn't such a big deal. There's about ten alien races living or operating on Earth at any given time that we know about, and maybe five that we can't confirm yet. If they behave, there's no problem.
If they don't, well, we've got DAMOCLES, and DAMOCLES has the trans-lunar defense grid.
(So does GORGON, apparently, but that's something to deal with another day when I'm not nearly so mindsmashed.)
But we obviously didn't have DAMOCLES a million years ago. Hell, we didn't even have us. Homo Erectus was the only game in town.
So when we were visited, we had no way to record it, and no words to pass the legend down. It probably stayed in our racial memories, giving rise to stories, and acting as the cause of certain, instinctive fears.
Very large fears.
The Chamber is in the very back of the Ice Palace. According to ABWEHR's records, the Nazis didn't even know it was here.
Sure, the Ahnenerbe had certain legends about things that happened down here, at the grave-cold ass end of the world. But they had no clue how true some of them were until they started digging out the Ice Palace.
Until the day they broke through rock and found something waiting there for them.
That something is a large, irregularly-shaped chamber, about two miles across at its' widest point, and about a mile high. The walls are as smooth as glass, and glow with just enough phosphorescence to see the other side.
And in the middle of that room is a literal mountain of junk and debris that measures about a quarter of a mile high.
It is not cold in there. The temperature is a stable 80 Fahrenheit. The Nazis piped it out to heat the Ice Palace, which was a lucky break for them. But in all the decades that they were down here, digging around in that massive, oddly-shaped room, they never learned what produced that temperature.
What did they learn? Plenty, but thankfully not enough.
They learned that The Chamber had been there for a million years, under the rock and ice and snow. But they never found out when it was abandoned.
They learned that the junk and debris in the middle was just left there, stacked on top of each other like it was half-cleaned by a clumsy maid. But they never figured out what most of it did, or still does, except in a few cases where they got lucky.
A perfect example is the UFO. You know how I said the outside was perfect, but the inside was cobbled together out of old U-Boat parts? That's because they never figured out what made the outsides and propulsion work, but were at least able to get it moving and steer.
They also learned that, above a certain height, the walls are very sensitive to any motion, and that things and structures appear if you make certain motions with a large enough object. But they never got those things to do anything other than hover in space for a time, and then disappear.
Not until the last few years, when, thanks to advances in computer science in the outside world, those supernazi bastards realized that what they were calling up weren't solid objects. They were holographic, fully-interactive representations of programmed functions.
Makroschaltkreis, they called it, and started using them to try and understand what else was back here. Thankfully, they did not get too terribly far.
But what they did find out was enough to scare the hell out of them. And that's also saying something.
They happened upon the genetic library of the beings who created The Chamber. They gained an exact knowledge of what life on Earth was like one million years ago, and were able to follow the chains of genetic lineage up to the literal minute.
Worse that that, they were able to use that knowledge to create mutations in certain things, and people. They could even get the machinery in The Chamber to do some of it for them.
Hence Magda Goebbels. Hence a few other, grotesque failed experiments they tossed down the red line, thankfully.
Hence the working components of Jormungandr, giving a whole new meaning to the term "human bomb."
I told myself I was going to try and avoid cliches, but in this place and this time I am rendered so speechless that they're all I can resort to. So I'm going to say I shudder to think what else they might have uncovered, if only they'd had enough time.
But that's the rub, isn't it? They were siting on a gold mine they could only prize a nugget out of every couple years, but they thought they had a thousand years to get it right.
Blame the translation programs. Whatever made The Chamber did not go out of their way to influence our emerging language centers, or give us the tools we needed to contact them. None of that Space Odyssey crap.
What did they do? Well, one of my rocket scientists has a theory that what we're looking at is the same kind of story you see every day out in the real world. College kid's in the middle of a thesis, has a sudden craving for Taco Bell, puts the PC on standby and leaves the apartment, only to choke on a burrito supreme and never make it back.
Only they stepped out a million years ago. And for all we know, the Taco Bell's only as far away as !@#$ Alpha Proxima. Which means that, for all we know, they're on their way back, even now.
And what are they going to do when they get here? Because I'll tell you this much, son, unlike the 10-15 other alien species running around on this mudball, they are not going to blend in.
There's something I haven't told you, yet. Mostly because it still bothers me. Just the thought, and the sheer scale that thought requires.
The chamber wasn't made to house a city. That's what the Nazis first thought, until they realized the junk in the middle was just the equivalent of small boxes and electronic doo-dads tossed off to the side when not needed. "DVD Remotes of The Gods."
There's a reason the junk pile is a quarter of a mile high. There's a reason The Chamber, itself, is two miles wide and a mile tall. There's a reason the gestures have to be made high up on the wall, and with something fairly large.
There's a reason the UFO they found was so easy to hollow out and turn into a vehicle. It didn't have a whole lot inside it because it was just a simple little thing to the likes of them.
A floating pad for small objects. Maybe an anti-gravity beer coaster.
Understand that we can't be sure. But we've found things that suggest immense size. "Buttons" on objects that are of a same scale with what might be sliding control rods and power source ports. Graphical representations of scale on some of the biological presentations on Earth life.
Based on those things, if they are humanoid, then the aliens who made The Chamber are at least 3960 feet tall.
Three quarters of a mile.
The Bible speaks of the Nephilim. Many other cultures have legends about giants walking the Earth, causing problems for us little folks, but the phrase "There were giants in the earth in those days" has always stuck with me. In my youth I wondered how they got it on with meek human women, but they told me not to worry about that so much.
Now I can't help but worry, because I have the uncomfortable feeling I'm going to be seeing those giants before too long. And I can't be sure we'll get along so well.
(SPYGOD is listening to Natural Science (RUSH) and has drunk himself sober)
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