What would you do if you knew that a book that everyone else thought was mindless pornography was actually a communications handbook?
If you ain't a Sci-Fi Geek, you ain't going to like this one.
Mild erotica, but very interesting Sci-Fi concept.
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WARNING! This warning is possibly not needed for this particular story, but I am including it because it is needed for most of my stories.
If you decide to read other of my stories make sure that you read the disclosures and warnings at the beginning of each story.
All of my writing is intended for adults over the age of 18 ONLY. Stories may contain strong or even extreme sexual content. All people and events depicted are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Actions, situations, and responses are fictional ONLY and should not be attempted in real life.
If you are under the age or 18 or do not understand the difference between fantasy and reality or if you reside in any state, province, nation, or tribal territory that prohibits the reading of acts depicted in these stories, please stop reading immediately and move to somewhere that exists in the twenty-first century.
Archiving and reposting of this story is permitted, but only if acknowledgment of copyright and statement of limitation of use is included with the article. This story is copyright (c) 2016 by The Technician.
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Gloria Powers walked slowly beneath the giant arch of the Omega. As she carefully inspected the metal shape which was several feet above her head, she compared the new structure to fragments of ancient drawings... and to the modern drawings from which the arch was constructed. She gave a sigh of satisfaction as she turned and walked back to the monitoring shed which also served as her living quarters.
She, and the others in the Planetary Exploration Corps, were fairly certain that they had constructed an Omega device extremely similar to those found in ruins in a giant belt around the equator of the planet. Smaller representations of those Omegas were also found throughout the planet. It was almost impossible to walk a short distance without seeing ruins of these arches or finding their facsimiles laying on the ground. The prevalence of the Omega devices had caused the first explorers to name this distant world "Planet Omega."
As Gloria stood at the door to the small shed gazing at the arch, she began thinking of when she had first been selected to be a part of the "reconstruction team." Unlike the other members of the team, she was not a scientist or archeologist or engineer. She was... a symbologist.
She smiled as she thought of that word-- a word which she had created to describe herself and others like her. She had a very special skill, a skill that was more of an innate talent. It was not something that could be taught if you did not have it. She had helped several people further develop their innate symbologist skills, but trying to teach alien symbol interpretation to others proved fruitless. You could either read alien symbols or you could not.
Gloria, as far as she knew, was the only alien symbologist in the Planetary Exploration Corps. She was in the PEC because she could interpret the most alien of symbols. Even if the person who created the symbol was from a far different culture and spoke a far different language, Gloria could somehow understand what they were trying to convey with the symbol. She may not know the word for it-- in English or in the original language-- but she knew what it was.
Gloria Powers was here on Planet Omega because the language of these long-lost people was totally symbolic. She was the one who had interpreted many of the strange symbols which described the devices. The engineers and archeologists then used her guidance to create a translation of the full text. Others worked out the details of the documents, but it was her original interpretation of the symbols which unlocked the complex language for them.
The devices, themselves, were called Omegas because the drawings-- and the device constructed from those drawings-- looked very much like a Greek letter Omega. They also looked very much like a huge horseshoe standing on end, but Planet Omega sounds much more scientific than Planet Horseshoe. Beside, horseshoes do not have the large base going out from the bottom of the arch like an Omega does.
The largest of the devices were all placed-- evenly spaced-- exactly on the equator of Planet Omega. Several of these huge Omegas were found almost intact, but laying on the ground as if toppled by an earthquake. Their metal skins had been nearly eroded away by the sandstorms which plagued the dry planet, but their interior structures were still, for the most part, complete. Most of the other Omegas were all but melted where they stood leaving rusted blobs of metal, polished on one side by the prevailing winds.
The planet itself was very interesting to the astrophysicists in the Corps. It was almost as if it had been artificially modified and set in place. And that was not just because the non-mountainous land mass of the planet was in a wide belt which ran around its equator.
The planet, itself, had no tilt with respect to the large sun and rotated very slowly. Its rotation was minutely slower than its orbital cycle, resulting in each "day" being one "year" in length. That year-- and that day-- was approximately 320 Terran days. The anthropologists theorized that the population had been nomadic and moved with the slow rotation of the planet to live in the more tolerable transition zones between day and night.
There was also a moon, which, like the Terran moon, was about one-eighth the size of the planet. The orbital cycle of the moon was such that it made one complete orbit around the planet every sixteen Terran days, which would mean twenty complete cycles in each Planet Omega year / day.
Because it was also aligned with the equator of the planet, that meant that once every moon cycle there was an eclipse of the sun on one side of the planet, followed eight Terran days later by a corresponding full eclipse of the moon on the opposite side of the planet.
The scientists and engineers were sure that the Omega devices were some sort of energy producing system which drew power from the sun. The spacing of the devices was such that one device was directly facing the sun at the time of the eclipse and while the devices on either side of it were just outside the cone of darkness.
They were sure that this arrangement somehow allowed the Omega devices to pull large quantities of energy from the sun during the eclipse. They further speculated that it was some sort of sun event, such as a flare, which caused a sudden burst in energy, destroying the Omega arches.
In 183 Terran days, their theory would be tested. That is when their reproduction of the Omega arch would be 8 days away from exact alignment with the sun. The team would be returning to Planet Omega thirty days in advance of that alignment to install the final instrumentation so they could monitor any possible energy flowing into the arch as it passed through direct alignment.
Gloria would be staying on planet until then. That was for two reasons. The first-- and official-- reason for her staying behind was to monitor the reproduction as it slowly turned from the darkness into the light. The second-- and real-- reason for her staying behind was that she had interpreted the symbols of
The Forbidden Book
much differently than had the anthropologists, scientists, and engineers.
The Forbidden Book was a thick, leather-bound book found in a cavity beneath one of the toppled Omegas. It was called
The Forbidden Book
because the large symbol on its cover was possibly the symbol for "Forbidden."
The symbol, like the book itself, was badly worn with time. Gloria debated between "Forbidden" and "Powerful" when she first said what she thought the symbol meant. The anthropologists in the group favored Forbidden, and thus the book became
The Forbidden Book
.
The book contained page after page of depictions of naked women bound in the standing position with their arms stretched wide above their heads. The pages were in bad shape and most were incomplete, but it was possible to make out the drawings.
Usually the women were being pleasured by men or other women. The men were entering the women from the front or from behind. The unbound women were using their mouths or their hands with the obvious intent of bringing the bound woman to orgasm. On some of the pages, the women in the drawings were being whipped or struck with large paddles. Each page was slightly different, but one thing which all of the pages had in common was that the face depicted on each and every one of the bound women seemed to be twisted in what appeared to be either extreme pain or orgasmic ecstasy.
The eggheads had looked at the lewd images and symbols and almost immediately dismissed the book as pornography, or its equivalent in the Omega culture. Their only interest was in the last page-- one of the most complete pages-- which showed a woman strapped in place beneath what appeared to be an Omega device. Once they noted that the arch seemed to be drawn correctly and showed no additional structural details, they set the entire book aside.