The Trigger

A Short Story with Stelllar Scribe

The air in the Göbekli Tepe dig site was thick with dust and secrets. In 2015, Dr. Elara Voss crouched in a trench, her trowel scraping against something that didn’t belong—a smooth, crystalline surface glinting beneath 12,000 years of earth. The Turkish sun beat down, but a chill ran through her as she brushed away sediment. The object was no ordinary artifact: a fist-sized prism, its facets catching light in unnatural hues—blues shimmering like liquid, greens pulsing like a heartbeat.

“Careful, Elara,” muttered Kadir, her local guide, his eyes darting nervously. “The elders say this place is cursed. The stones speak to those who listen too long.”

Elara smirked, adjusting her wide-brimmed hat. “Good thing I’m a terrible listener.”

But her pulse quickened as she lifted the prism. Impossibly light, warm to the touch, it was etched with symbols blending Sumerian cuneiform with something… alien. She’d spent years chasing anomalies—artifacts defying human history’s tidy timelines—but this felt alive. She held the prism to the light, and a low hum vibrated through her fingers, sinking into her bones. The world tilted. Her vision blurred, and she wasn’t in Turkey anymore…A windswept plain stretched before her, the sky a riot of colors no human eye should see. Tall, luminous figures flickered like mirages, their forms neither fully human nor solid. Their voices—vibrations weaving through the air—threaded into the minds of stooped, fur-clad hominids huddled in caves. Homo erectus, Elara’s trained mind noted, but they were changing: eyes widening, postures straightening, as if the vibrations unlocked something within. One turned, locking eyes with her across millennia, whispering a word she couldn’t grasp.

“Elara!” Kadir’s shout snapped her back. The prism slipped, landing softly in the dirt. Her heart pounded.

“What the hell was that?” she gasped, unsure if she meant the vision or the hum echoing in her skull.

Kadir stared at the prism, face pale. “You saw something, didn’t you? The elders warned us—the old ones left things here that wake what should stay asleep.”

“Superstition,” Elara said, her voice wavering. She wrapped the prism in cloth and tucked it into her satchel. Whatever it was, it didn’t belong in a museum catalog. Not yet.

That night, in her cramped tent, Elara pored over notes by lantern light. The prism’s symbols nagged at her—cuneiform-like, yet twisted, as if drawn in more than three dimensions. Cross-referencing her database, she found Sumerian myths of the Anunnaki, sky gods who “brought the spark of knowing.” Scholars called them metaphors, but Elara wondered. The “great leap forward”—Homo sapiens’ sudden burst of art, language, and thought 70,000 years ago—lacked a clear cause. Climate? Diet? None explained it fully. She unwrapped the prism, hesitating. Its hum returned, a whisper from elsewhere. The vision replayed: luminous beings, hominids, a song igniting potential. What if the Anunnaki were interdimensional, turning a key in humanity’s latent DNA? Her neuroscientist friend, Dr. Lin, would scoff, but Elara couldn’t shake the thought: was that potential still inside us?

A shadow moved outside. She froze, clutching the prism.

“Kadir?”

No answer. The air grew heavy, the hum intensifying. Outside, the dig site was silent, Göbekli Tepe’s pillars looming like sentinels. But something watched her—a pressure in her mind, like eyes from beyond.Her phone buzzed wildly, set to silent. The screen flashed a message from an unknown number:

STOP DIGGING. THE TRIGGER IS NOT YOURS.

Elara’s breath caught. The prism pulsed faintly in her hand. Whatever she’d found, it was a key—and someone, or something, didn’t want it turned.

In 2020, five years after Göbekli Tepe, Elara knelt in Iraq’s Uruk desert, her fingers tracing a Sumerian seal unearthed from the ancient city’s sands. The carved basalt shimmered under her headlamp, its winged disk and star patterns pulsing faintly, echoing the Nazca lines she’d studied. At 33, she was a pariah in academia—an Archaeologist with a PhD in Astronomy, mocked as “Star-Whisperer” for claiming Sumerian seals, Mayan glyphs, and Nazca lines were evidence of interdimensional visitors.

Since the 2015 prism and that cryptic message, she’d felt a shadow—grants blocked, her Boston office burgled. Tonight, under a star-strewn sky, a chill vibrated through her bones, the prism’s hum echoing in her satchel. The prism’s vision of luminous beings had sparked her obsession. At Arecibo, her telescope caught faint radio pulses from the asteroid belt—unexplained anomalies. The seal’s carvings—a winged figure holding a star—felt like a message. “This isn’t art,” she whispered. Her spectrometer pinged, detecting quantum fluctuations in the basalt, matching the prism’s frequency. “They’re interdimensional,” she murmured, picturing beings crossing realms, not skies.

Her Boston lectures drew laughs. “Voss thinks aliens doodled in Mesopotamia,” Dr. Hargrove sneered. But her dual expertise linked Sumerian star maps to the asteroid belt’s signals. A drone’s glint interrupted her—a sleek, unmarked craft scanning the dig. X posts tied such drones to the Concord Group, a shadowy elite linked to the 1973 Davos Manifesto, hoarding ancient tech to control knowledge.

“They’re watching,” she muttered, pocketing the seal. In her tent, Elara uploaded the seal’s data to an encrypted server, hands trembling. Her dreams flashed: a glowing figure vibrating, “The Trigger is in you.” Did humanity’s genome hold a latent frequency, awaiting a cosmic signal?

July 1st 2025, NASA’s announcement of comet 3I/ATLAS, screaming through the asteroid belt at 245,000 km/h, reignited Elara’s quest. Its signals, undetectable by standard scopes, matched the prism and seal’s frequencies. She drove to Baghdad’s museum, where Dr. Amir Khalid guarded a hidden vault.

“The Concord Group’s after these,” Amir warned, his voice heavy with his family’s generations-long duty to protect Sumerian relics. Inside, a clay tablet glowed, etched with a star map pointing to the asteroid belt.

“This predates Sumer,” Amir said. “It’s not human.”

“It’s a receiver,” Elara said, chills surging. “Its frequency syncs with the prism, seal, and 3I/ATLAS. The comet’s waking it.”

Drones buzzed her hotel that night. A black SUV trailed her taxi. The Concord Group wanted the prism, seal, and tablet—keys to a truth they’d buried. X posts claimed they used crises to centralize power, suppressing interdimensional tech and humanity’s origins. Elara slipped the tablet into her backpack and boarded a flight to Peru, where Nazca’s sky-facing glyphs, resembling the seal’s star map, might hold the final clue.

Elara’s boots sank into Nazca’s coarse sand, the Hummingbird glyph sprawling under a sky ablaze with stars. Its delicate wings, etched across 300 feet of desert, seemed to reach for the heavens. The James Webb telescope tracked 3I/ATLAS, its streak cutting through constellations at an impossible 245,000 km/h—faster than any natural object. Her spectrometer buzzed beside the glyph, detecting quantum fluctuations matching the Göbekli Tepe prism (2015), the Uruk seal (2020), and now the Baghdad tablet. The Nazca lines, with star-like patterns echoing the prism’s symbols, hummed under her headlamp, aligning with the comet’s path. Ten years after the prism’s vision reshaped her life, Elara’s obsession had grown. The 2020 seal, pulsing like the prism, drew the Concord Group’s attention—grants vanished, her office ransacked, cryptic warnings sent. Now, in Nazca, the prism, seal, and tablet in her backpack vibrated together.

“They built these to signal back,” she whispered, tracing the Hummingbird’s lines.

Her spectrometer confirmed: the glyph resonated with 3I/ATLAS’s signal. A local guide, Maria, had shared tales of the glyphs as “star paths” woven by ancient hands to call the heavens, echoing Kadir’s warnings a decade ago. Elara’s thoughts drifted to the Book of Enki, its tales of Anunnaki—could they be beings slipping through dimensional rifts, not skies—sparking Homo sapiens’ rise. What if their “spark of knowing” was a frequency, encoded in our DNA, waiting for a signal like 3I/ATLAS?

A drone’s whine pierced the silence. Her headlamp caught its red sensors sweeping the plain. The Concord Group had trailed her since 2015—drones, hacked servers, X whispers tying them to the Davos Manifesto, a Concord Group front for hoarding ancient tech. Her #Anunnaki posts, viral with 50,000 followers, made her a target. Amir’s last message from Baghdad echoed:

“They took the vault. You’re next.”

She ducked into a trench beside the Hummingbird glyph, clutching her backpack. The prism’s warmth pulsed, syncing with the seal and tablet. Her laptop pinged, confirming an encrypted upload to X—data on the artifacts and 3I/ATLAS, tagged #3IATLAS and #Anunnaki.

A helicopter’s roar followed, its spotlight pinning her. The Concord Group’s insignia—a globe skewered by a spear—flashed.

“Dr. Voss!” a voice blared, smooth but menacing, like a diplomat hiding a knife. “Hand over the artifacts. You’re playing with a power your little academic mind can’t grasp.”

Elara stood, shielding her eyes. The prism’s hum surged, merging with the seal and tablet.

“I know enough to see you’re terrified,” she shouted. “The prism, seal, tablet—they’re waking something you’ve suppressed for centuries. What’s the Concord Group afraid of? Humanity remembering who we are?”

A pause. The voice hardened.

“You’re a fool, Voss, chasing myths of gods and comets. Those artifacts are keys to chaos. We’ve guarded the Trigger since Babylon—long before your pathetic digs. Surrender them, or you’ll vanish like your career.”

Her pulse raced. The Trigger. Her dreams since 2015—luminous figures calling her the bridge, stirring her DNA—used that word. The seal, tablet, and comet pointed to a latent spark in humanity, ignited by an interdimensional signal.

“You stole my files, blocked my grants, sent drones,” she yelled. “But you can’t stop this. The comet’s talking.”

The helicopter descended, dust swirling. The voice laughed, cold.

“3I/ATLAS isn’t your savior. It’s a beacon we’ve tracked for millennia. Our order keeps that power dormant. Last chance, Voss—give us the keys, or we’ll bury you with them.”

Elara unzipped her backpack, pulling out the prism, seal, and tablet. Their glow intensified, a circuit pulsing in her hands.

“You don’t decide humanity’s future,” she said, placing the seal on the Hummingbird glyph, the tablet beside it, the prism on top. The ground quaked, the glyph’s wings flaring with eerie light. Her vision blurred—shimmering figures, bending starlight, whispering,

“The Trigger is now.”

Her DNA hummed, a switch flipping.The spotlight flickered. Drones buzzed erratically. The voice faltered.

“Voss, you’ll destroy everything! This isn’t over!”

The helicopter banked, retreating as the artifacts’ light surged.

Elara’s X posts exploded—reports of chills, star-filled dreams, hums in skulls trended under #3IATLAS. The air above the Hummingbird glyph shimmered, a portal rippling like liquid starlight. Figures flickered within—neither human nor solid—their vibrations resonating in her cells. Elara stood, artifacts blazing. The Concord Group’s chopper faded, their threat a storm on the horizon. The comet’s glow bathed Nazca, humanity’s spark igniting. Whatever the Trigger was, it was awake—and Elara was its conduit.

To be continued...