The Apocalypse was coming, approaching with discernible speed but was forever unaware by everyone on the entire planet, everyone but a lone researcher in the Institute of Rare Artifacts in Washington D.C, U.S.A.

The young lady was hunched over long documents occasionally flipping back the long chestnut-coloured hair, which fell in front of here eyes every so often. She was twenty-four, of slight build, around five feet ten and had deep green eyes, matching her cheekbones and her lips to create an attractive lady. She had one mark on her face, it was a small scar, and marked the area just below her hair line on the left-hand side of her forehead.

She had stayed late, working her eyes so hard that they blurred her vision. She kept on wondering whether what she did was actually going to be read by a high member of authority at the museum, and whether he would actually take any notice.

During her walk back to her flat in downtown New York, she reflected on what she knew of the stone tablets. Someone, a friend, in the Gulf of Mexico had found seven, old stone tablets. Old? She asked herself, try ancient. The first time she saw the tablets’ age when they had been carbon-dated she disbelieved it, and was sure the computer had made a mistake. After a second time she forced herself to believe it, they were older than the earth itself. These rock are over eight billion years old, three billion years older then the earth. She supposed that that was why she was spending hours testing the structural make-up, the density, the mineral content and the reason that they glow in the dark. They certainly haven't any phosphuresencent chemicals in it so, why? They have been on the seabed for at least two hundred million years, they were found at the site of a large crater, the remnants of the asteroid which may have wiped out the dinosaurs. Maybe they had landed then, but why were they not crushed in the collision, or the corners even cracked or been worn away, while that amount of time under the billions of tons of water should have turned the rock to sand. The carvings or patterns on the stone suggested star alignments and solar paths. But these were meaningless patterns, just a coincidence of the real writings of the tablets. The tablets strangely contained very large amounts of rare and precious elements, platinum, gold, diamond, silver and a couple of super dense, as yet unidentified elements. They had unusual, semi-circular dents in the middle of each straight side, whose use still mystified her. Her thoughts were abruptly ended as a large lorry thundered its horn at her. She was thinking so hard that she had almost walked right into the oncoming traffic lane. She had a thought from her childhood, ‘Go play with the traffic,’ she almost had.

As she opened the door of her apartment, she thought what on earth she was going to do if the tablets were actually sent by another species, maybe an extraterrestrial life form, or forms, she added as an afterthought. She switched on the energy saving bulbs and closed the door behind her and locked it. She put some water on to boil in a saucepan and put a couple of slices of bread in the toaster, she had a few eggs left but she only took one out of its container and stuck a large needle into the rounded end so the egg didn’t explode. As she waited for the water to boil she washed up from her previous meal which was breakfast and carried on thinking about the tablets, even though she didn’t want to. It was like a bad song, the tune goes round and round in your head even though you don’t like it.

She quickly finished the washing up and dried her hand on the towel as the water was almost boiling. She plopped the egg into the water with a spoon and set the timer for four minutes. She went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed for a short rest, to take the pressure of her feet, but as soon as her head touched the pillow she fell asleep.

Her sleep was restless and she tossed and turned on top of the duvet. Her bad dreams, or what would be called nightmares plagued her sleep like a dark and angry monster chasing a white and fluffy bunny rabbit She dreamt of four men, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, she dreamt of the tablets and a hidden power, teleportation on the top but deeper down a more dark and vengeful power. She dreamt of the four horsemen making the stone tablets, in the searing red fires of hell itself. She dreamt that the asteroid actually did wipe out the dinosaurs, because they were getting too near to the ‘truth.’ She wanted to know what ‘truth,’ and were the dinosaurs actually intelligent? She was about to be shown the answer but she was getting hot, she felt heat at her feet, she heard roaring. The flat! The flat is on fire!

She burst wide awake, wet with sweat, and hit her head on the side of the bedside table. She rubbed her head better with her hand and discovered the flat was swimming and shining. No, the flat was fine, it was just her, her and the stars in her eyes. Morning September sunshine shone through the ceiling window above her, illuminating the bed and she felt its heat. She sluggishly climbed out of bed and went into the kitchen. She stopped dead.

The egg had been blown away, up onto the tiled ceiling, the pan was on the floor, the inside black and usable and the timer bleeped in unison with her heart. Gingerly she stepped over the pan and around bits of eggshell and turned off the alarm. With her head singing she pushed the bread into the toaster and pushed it down into the glowing fires of the toaster. She moved over to the bathroom and turned on the shower, she picked up the clean clothes in her room and made back into the bathroom. She undressed quickly and stood under the rain of warm water, at first letting the water wet her whole body, warming it slightly so she could turn up the heat. She liked the feeling of the warm water running over her and the strange feeling when her nipples become hard and erect. She finished rinsing her hair of shampoo and turned off the shower. As the heat quickly left her she shivered, and took this to mean that she should get out and dry herself. She did so and while she dressed the doorbell rang. She finished and wrapped the towel around her wet brown hair, in no hurry to answer the door. She opened the window to let the steam out and closed the door behind her. She unlocked the door and the usual postman was standing there, with a parcel with length of three feet balanced on the floor and steadied by his hand..

"Good morning Ma’am. I’ve here a parcel to be signed by a, um" He looked down at his clipboard. "A Miss Jennifer Lightwater."

"Yep, that’s me. O.K. Thanks for this," as she signed the board and held the parcel.

"No problem Ma’am, thanks ‘bye." The postman said as he climbed the stairs outside to deliver other letters and parcels.

Jenny turned and went back inside, shutting the door and laying the clanking parcel at her feet. Whatever it was it can wait, she thought and went back into the kitchen. The eggy mess can wait until she felt like doing cleaning it up she though as she walked in. The toast had been done for a few minutes and so she put out a plate and the jam and took the toast out of the toaster. She spread the two bits of toast with jam and took the plate into the lounge, where she sat on the sofa. Using the remote control to turn on the television she lay back in her chair and proceeded to eat the toast, the plate on the arm of the sofa and her other hand held the remote. Nothing worth watching on this channel so she changed it. She flipped through most of the channels before she stopped on the Disney Channel. Tom and Jerry, an old classic, she watched Tom try to trap Jerry by pretending to be asleep in front of a bowl of milk. By the end of the cartoon she had finished her toast and so she put the plate back into the kitchen, turned off the television and glanced at the parcel. She had almost forgotten about it.

The scissors cut easily through the parcel tape and before she knew it she had four short and four long dull metal poles sliding onto the carpet with a white envelope attached to it. The envelope was entitled ‘Jen’. She knew who it was instantly, Tony, the geologist and archaeologist in one. Everyone else called he ‘Jennie.’ He was down in the Gulf of Mexico trying to find more about the stone tablets. She cut open the envelope and a typed page fell out when she shook it.

the gulf of mexico,

asteroid site,

u know where.

jen,

greetings stranger! just a few thoughts on the tablets, i know you need some help after the ‘phone call. right number one is that I found these poles about a week ago so i have run some tests on it and found that they are an unknown alloy. made of the same metal though that is unidentified in the tablets, strange huh. yeah we tried to scratch them or melt them but it seems it needs some sort of plasma energy to melt it and is not scratched by diamond. yeah well anyway i will phone you this sunday evening to talk, i know you miss me (?!) but don’t worry i’ll be done here soon. anything else you find out tell me when i ‘phone alright?

love t

p.s. the printer is going nuts, like printing with no capital letters. weird huh?

The last line was hand written in Tony’s familiar scrawl. It was a Saturday so she needn’t bother rushing into work until one p.m. but she was inquisitive about the poles and decided to go in at eleven. She cut herself some sandwiches and left the apartment for the Institute, eager to know more about these poles. The size or diameter of the poles did look familiar she thought as she walked. She couldn’t place it though.

The sun was shining through the large windows in streams, all of the dust particles exposed in her ‘office’. She glanced at the rack up against a wall which held the tablets, the carved sides facing outwards and the sun was shining horizontally across them. They spelt a couple words! ‘Hi Jenie.’ Jennie stopped, blinked and stared again. Yes, the words were as plain as her hand in front of her face. She traced the words with her fingertips and found that the words were just the shadows of the dips and lumps on the stone. She hastily rummaged through her photos and found that the dips were there in the photographs, they hadn’t changed. But, wait. No, this is just a coincidence, she thought frantically, to avoid the truth that the carver had known her name. As she watched the letters changed, they seemed to melt together and ooze into new sentence. ‘I am your future,’ she read, ‘I am you, you are me. We are the one.’

"B-b-b-but…" she began but quickly disappeared into that black nothingness where anything can happen.

In her darkest depths she saw herself, only older, much older than she was now, imploring something, trying to make her understand. Her (older?) self looked up and spread her arms above her head. Suddenly pain, not a lot, but pain appeared, knifing its way through the darkness like a torch would light up a dark room. She (Jenie?) vanished and she felt her cheek. It was on fire! No, someone had just slapped it a couple of times. Coffee. Steam. A cup of coffee appeared in her (Future’s?) place. She touched it. It was hot. Her eyes snapped open and she was looking into the eyes of Johnny, her technician. She almost spilt the coffee but managed to take a sip of it and noticed that again someone had added too much sugar.

"We were quite worried Jennie old gal. What d’ya do? Did some un suggest you take the tab fer lunch?" Johnny’s humour left a lot to be desired but this one created a few laughs with some other people hanging around.

"Thankyou Johnny." She said, "Did you see it?" she began suddenly.

"No, see what?"

"The tablets, they tur… um I mean they cha…" she stopped and looked at the stares she was given, they wouldn’t believe me and I would be locked up in the ‘Nice Mr Mental Institute’ for the rest of my life she thought.

"See wha?"

"No, nothing. Don’t worry." She said.

She got up, lasted a few seconds and then promptly tottered back down to earth, though luckily caught by Johnny. An hour later she found the strength to carry on the rest of the day, after all that was what she was getting paid for.

The metal poles were still lying on the floor, where they had fallen after she had fainted. She had tried the four long metal poles in the semi-circular dents in the tablets. They fitted snugly she noted. She tried the short ones, they seemed to fit across the top and bottom, joining the diagonal long poles each together. The top tablet flashed and read ‘stand back a bit’. She did so and a few seconds later the block of tablets started to glow red, pulsing and reaching for something it seemed. Her office took on that red appearance. She blinked. An almighty flash of white occurred and she found herself looking at the bits of eggs on the ceiling of her kitchen. She blinked again and found herself in Johnny’s office, the clock said the time was three o’clock on Saturday sixteenth of September. That was today so this does not time travel. With that thought she wondered whether she would be able to or not. She imagined the same room only with the clock’s date the seventeenth of September. Nothing happened. Then she remembered to blink. She did and was standing in the same place only the date was the seventeenth. A flicker of warning entered her mind about teleporting then, but she discarded it, that was only a dream she thought. Another voice said, yes, but it was a bad dream wasn’t it? She flashed back to her office and her time period.

She appeared back into the room that she know, or thought she knew until she noticed the change of atmosphere. She opened her eyes and saw that her room was very different now then it had been before she ‘traveled’. The stones were in the same place, and the desk and shelves, and the windows and the door, and the new scratch on the floor where the poles had hit when she fainted. The atmosphere was not the same, it was sadistic, the feel of murder and hatred was in the air. She must be in the wrong dimension, so imagine the room precisely the way it looked in her dimension, the pen on the floor, the scrap of paper which had missed the bin. She blinked again, the flash came. She hadn’t moved, she was in the same place, in the same room. She was puzzled and scared, but not as worried and scared as she would be as she noticed her posters. They were essentially the same but the language was incomprehensible to her, in fact it was as incomprehensible as the Martian language would seem to a Dockworker from Newquay. She looked at her pictures of famous people in the world. They were not human, they were like something out of an X-movie. A monster but somehow she had seen them before.

There was a frantic knock at the door. Her heart froze.