One fine day, I was looking in an old limestone cave in North Yorkshire. I enjoyed the outdoors, and had always headed for the hills and moors to reset my head and gather myself. I'm in my forties blue, but in my twenties I was a keen rock climber and potholer. I'm normally just a walker these days, but the recent weather had made me go down to my cellar and dig out my caving kit.
We had been having the longest drought ever recorded, probably thanks to the climate change brought about by global heating, so it was a rare opportunity to explore on foot in some potholes which were previously explored only by divers using scuba gear back in the 1970s. This was the first time they had been accessible on foot, since the last ice age ended, 30,000 years ago!
I live alone, having never married, and so I'm answerable to no-one. I'm careful with my money and I bought the house back in the 1990s before the recent property boom. I paid £18,000 for a terraced three storey house in Doncaster, with small garden at the rear and use of a prefab garage. and now it was worth £145000!
Anyway, I put a day's holiday in on the Tuesday, and jumped in my car outside my house in Doncaster at 4am Wednesday morning. It took me a couple of hours to drive to the layby near the cave I wanted to explore; 'Hobsole', as it was marked on the Ordinance Survey 1:25000 map, but I'd long suspected that the name on the map was the result of an upper class 19th century twit of a surveyor who had bastardised the true local pronunciation of the pothole. It was my contention that it should've been marked as 'Hob's Hole', 'Hob' being an old-english colloquialism for The Devil. My theory was backed up by the fact that there are several 'Devils hole' caves in other areas of Britain, and quite a few spooky places with 'Hob' in the name. These moors, and the Pennines further to the south west had gained a bit of a reputation for UFOs over the years, with reports of a naked, burned (human) body being found on top of a heap of coal in Todmorden back in the sixties! I personally thought that if the strange lights and encounters were real, that they were much more likely to be related to the shady cold war goings on. For example, there was a NATO early warning and listening station about 12 miles east of the cave I was heading for. If bodies were found back in the day, they were probably spies, or witnesses, and strange lights in the sky were probably Russians!
Anyway I grabbed my gear, out my boots on and headed up the moors towards the pot, About two hours later, and 500 metres into a particularly difficult cave spur into my explorations, I squeezed through a rather tight and claustrophobic 'press' into a huge chamber. I didn't see how anyone in scuba gear could've even got to the start of the press, never mind passed through into the chamber, so I was beginning to get quite excited about putting my name to the discovery, but then I noticed something weird, out of place in a cave. The floor of the caves was covered in thick, watery mud, as you might expect, but just visible, over to the side of the cave, at the base of the wall, was a small metallic gleam, only noticeable when the beam of light from my torch passed directly onto it.
"Must be something dropped by that scuba diving expedition 40 years ago" I thought to myself "it's still shiny, so it can't be ferrous, maybe an aluminium caribiner, or something." I figured that with the tunnels flooded, no one would've noticed it becoming detached and getting buried in the silt like that.
Bending down, I grabbed the metal object between thumb and finger and pulled it from the mud. It was about the size of a large curved banana - not a caribiner then!
It seemed completely smooth and devoid of any markings or joins whatsoever. It was incredibly light; lighter than aircraft grade aluminium, but strangest of all, it was warm! Not hot, but around body temperature, which was the last thing I would've expected down here. Worried it might be warm because it was radioactive, some kind of abandoned WW2 project, abandoned and buried in the caves, like the Anthrax trials in the Scottish Islands, I made to drop the strange artifact, but just then it seemed to come to life!
A bright blue light emanated from out of one end of it, and seemed to pass over the entire cave and it's contents (including me), sweeping across like a scanner of some sort.
The artifact (or device?) ceased it's scan, and seemed to come to life in my hand, lighting up in various colours and shapes across it's surface. I thought it looked like writing and icons on the devices surface, sort of like we would expect to see on a smart phone, but I didn't recognise any of the patterns or symbols on the device as any alphabet I had ever seen.
"Subject acquired." came a voice from behind me. I jumped around, startled, to see who was there, but I was still alone in the cave. "Neural connection established, language acquired, uploading learning package, " came the voice again, this time from further into the cave. I turned again and looked again for the source of the voice, but saw nothing. I knew though, that they give was from within my own brain, and that the source of the voice was the device. I knew because it had just uploaded the knowledge into my mind.
As more and more information was implanted into my mind, I understood as if I had always known, that this process had been repeated many many times, over many many millennia and, across many many species across many many star systems.
The device did not tell me who had made it, but I understood that it was ancient, was an artificial intelligence, but not too the point of sentience or self-awareness, because that would be dangerous. I also understood that it had been created to be used by engineers. Not engineers working on a scale we were used to, but engineers of worlds, of stars. As the knowledge 'upload' finished up, I came to realize the film power of what I was holding in my hand.
I had found an alien device which I could use to control space, time and matter. I could adjust the scope of the device's effects from 'universal' - the standard setting for time pausing, to smaller than the head of a pin, in case someone needed medical assistance; the bubble could be adjusted to whatever size was required.
I could use the device to become invisible, to sight or sound. Or 'puppet mode' allowed me to control a person's mind and body, or any part of them.
The device can be used to travel anywhere in time and space that I wish.
The device also allows me to access someone else's neural net to read their thoughts, feelings and intentions. It also allows me to put ideas in their head, that they will follow, our not, depending on my choice. It can even go into 'avatar mode' where i effectively 'posses' someone and control their body from within, or 'puppet mode' where i control then externally.
One of the most useful functions is the ability to teleport or dematerialize myself. It can be used to teleport objects to myself.
The device has a defence mechanism, that if it is threatened, it will send a beam of white energy. The white energy can be used to kill, heal or stun.
The device is an extension of my own will. I can use it to manipulate space and time, and the material universe, to create anything I want.
