Not Quite There Yet

A beam of yellow light lightened the gray room filled with dust. All the dust was dancing in the now dark room, all the dust hid the room layout. It wasn't big, it wasn't small.

Sudden movement angered the dust as a young silhouette appeared in the middle. Coughing and crying from all the particles in the air, that got in the young boy's lungs. He stood up, but fall on the ground soon after as he tried to find balance. His mind was hazy, his body was disoriented.

"Hello?!" he tries to call to the dark and stumble into a wall, upon which a blue light lit. It looks different from the one the boy knew. The room itself turns on, like if he pushed a button. Other lights light the room from the ceiling and show few screens with dusty keyboard consoles on big pedestals. However the wall, he was leaning on, opened ever so slightly.

He stumbles back falling down on the dusty floor.

"Hello?" repeats his cry and looks around. In fifteen years of his life, he never saw a computer like the one in this room. The screen was thin, and the keyboard big with symbols he didn't recognize. There was no case in which a computer was held, so he assumed it was under the keyboard.

"What is this place?" he could finally walk normally and clean up his face from the tears and dust. He noticed an interesting pattern on the ground, it was a little bit higher than the rest of the floor and had a similar feel like the pedestal with the computer. He saw it once before, in a room he was just a second ago.

Everything started normally when his class had a trip to some old castles near Prague to not only educate themselves but to get to know each other's as well. He didn't know anybody from his class that well since he only met them a few days ago. The school was a private old British school in London and every year the first years had a different trip.

Today they visited a forest in which there were a lot of ruins, they had something close to free time, when they could freely wander in the surrounding area and found some artifacts on their own and that is exactly when this happened to him.

He walked towards something shiny on the ground like a greedy thief and found out a metal hatch before he could have opened it the ground under him broke and he fell in the similar room in which he was right to know, but it was much bigger, and nothing turned on. The sunlight beams marked his landing spot. He yelled for help a few times, but nobody came, so he wandered around the room only to suddenly appear in the middle of it yet again, but this room was smaller with stuff in it.

"I was teleported?" baffled by this possibility he looked up. There was no hole in the ceiling only gray metal, or steel beams. He was lost.

"Oh, mobile!" he quickly looks for his bag and took his smartphone out. It had a full battery since he was careful enough to charge it, but there was no signal.

"Damn it!" he looked at his bag and drunk a little from his bottle of mineral water. His bag was unfortunately not prepared for this kind of situation, so he had no food and no useful tools. Only a camera, notebook, writing utilities, and a bag of tissues. He looked in it anyway, though luck.

"How did I turn the lights on?" he asks himself aloud and goes to the door. There was a device big as his hand, but thin as if it worked on a big credit card. He must have touched it.

"Some kind of motion sensor?" he moves his hand up and down before it and the door move, but something is not making them fully open. The hole was big enough for him to sneak through, so he did, which let him into a hallway, also lighten up by these blue lights. On the other side was three doors each splitting to one direction. He moved his hand before the sensor and opened one to the right. They opened also only a little, but when he turns around to find out why the first one did that, he saw nothing behind them. Nevertheless, he came through the second door and couldn't believe his eyes, since what he saw was stars. Thousands of little yellow spots spread all over the windows, but their beauty quickly disappeared when the windows lit up and silver color plates covered the view.

"Where the fuck am I?" he says angrily and looked around. This room was obviously important, there were several chairs with similar consoles, like the one he saw and many more screens. Even the steps had a light source on them making them shine when he stepped on them.

"Is everything made of motion sensors?" the room got quite dull after few minutes without the stars and he continued back to the hallway, although there were few other doors leading from this room elsewhere.

He tried the left this time and squeezed through the gap without any problems. This time the room only had one big blue light since any other source was covered by tools on regales. There were also a few screens, but that wasn't anything new. The boy rather looked at the stuff on the regales. There were a lot of weird tools, a little bit looking like machine parts from the car or something that sort, but he couldn't be sure after all.

He wasn't a mechanical nerd, the chemistry was his strong suit. One of the machines lit when he touched it, so he quickly backed off, only to bump into the opposite regal and make several things fall on him. This time he wasn't fast enough and something like goggles stuck to his head and showed him flashes of light, made him fall on the ground, and scream. It wasn't painful, just scary, and sudden. After the flash ended, the goggles let him take them off and his eyes had to blink a while to focus again.

"This is getting out of hand!" he says and stands up. This room was from now on, out of limits in his mind and he returned to the hallway, to try the last door. Sadly, it was stuck.

"Is this place broken or locked?" he went back to the room with stars and tried other doors, that led to a second hallway. Showing that this place wasn't any small complex and took him a while to try every door. He found mostly rooms with computers and some he could not get into. Also, one room had similar silver plaiting covering the windows.

"It's been two hours already and I have no idea what to do!" he was losing patience while holding to his little water. He didn't find any other food, or drink and was reluctant to use it all at once. Scared by the lights with a mind on their own, he went back to the small first room.

"I have to do something!" he says but was not able to think what to do. The only possible thing he tried was turning the computer, but for some reason, it had no motion sensors. He pressed several keys, and nothing happened.

"Wait!" he said and looked at one key. It looked familiar to him, was it a Chinese character? Japanese? He didn't know anything about those languages, so he wasn't sure, again. He just had a feeling. When he focused on the rest it gave him all somewhat familiar feel. They all looked still the same, just everyone looked weirdly like something he could grasp any second. He let his hand be guided by this feeling and pressed several buttons in sequence and the screen lit.

It was more like a hologram than a computer screen he knew from home, you could see from every angle, without any change. He saw writing in the characters familiar to him and some charts. He touched it, just so it changes, and now he saw the pattern on the ground and plans of big device.

"Ah..?"

"Ahva..."

"Ahvahlon?"

"Avalon?" he said surprised he could read a world, although he wasn't sure what it meant, it sounds like King Arthur legend. He continued with the words, he felt like he understood.

"Locus,"

"Contagia,"

"Place and sickness?" the words made him more scared, but he could not stop. He already was using the keyboard like it was nothing and scanned all the hologram screens. He slowly understood some words, but it took him four hours before he finally manages to translate the most important information. He was in a research satellite orbiting a planet that wasn't Earth. With this information, he stopped looking at the screen and start taking deep breaths to calm himself. He was thinking fast.

"Aliens!" he said and cold sweat appeared on his forehead.

"I can read the alien language!" more sweat appeared and his face was increasingly paler.

"I am not on Earth," was the last sentence he said as he sits on the floor and lied down. He didn't faint but was close to. He couldn't think, move, or do anything, but he did fall asleep thanks to all this stress and no possible answer on hand.

He woke up, several hours later with bad stomach pain and stood up. The hologram was still there, showing him his fate without any remorse.

"I need more information!"

It took him a lot of time trying to translate more of the text, but he was forced to do so. Not only he didn't see anything else he could do, but he also finds out some interesting stuff. Firstly this base is from a race of aliens who did the research for intergalactic transportation using teleportation, although the technology technically worked there were several issues, he only knew it had something to do with its power requirements and time.

He also found out the reason they try to build this thing, they were escaping from the plague from their home here, at least in their time, they had it as a backup possibility, but they didn't use this place for a long time.

The rest of the information talked about the science behind this device and even the first sentence didn't make any sense to the boy, so he went and look at the computers in the bigger room, only finding that this place is more than ten thousand years old and that several of the basic systems were damaged by power spikes, probably caused by the very device that brought him here.

"There is no food or water here! I will die in a few days If I stay!" he knew that all along, but now he could at least read all this text, giving him some chance. He found out the plan for this place, but several of the rooms were unreachable, giving him only the rooms he already found out.

He sat on one of the lit steps and takes his head into his hand, his eyes were tired from the none stop reading of this alien text, but he calmed down.

"I have several days until it's over, so calms down! First I need to check all the computers and found out what each room is for, after that, I will find out If I can somehow contact anybody or use the teleport again," he stood up and did as planned.

Finding that the planet under him was frozen by one big glazier since one room was dedicated to controlling the planet's status.

Finding that he had about sixty percent power, but most of it was stored in some kind of battery cell that was used to power the device and the rest of this place was only working on the basic level.

Finding that not only doors and windows shield were affected by this power glitch, but also his atmosphere.

Everything made him a little bit nervous, but the atmosphere problem wasn't that pressing, the planet was out of reach anyway and power needed to go to the teleport he used to get in here in the first place. He went back to the teleport room and begun trying to understand the device.