Snippet: Battle Computer

Snippet 

from an up and coming book. 

(I just which one yet)

Battle Computer.

Many, many years ago before the present time.  A hundred or more MILLION years ago...things were different.

The atmosphere for one.  It was very dense.  VERY dense.  By present day standards it would be along the lines of eighty BAR.  Eighty times more dense than today’s air.   The composition was different also.  The partial pressure of oxygen was higher.  Fires were common.  It was pretty much our definition of Hell.

Yet there was a race of....beings’.  Old Old.  They co-existed with the dinosaurs. In fact they may have domesticated if not genetically engineered the dinosaurs.

The race was much more advanced than we are in many ways...but due to the environment they were much different.  Their Technology  was NOT what we would recognize as being an advanced technology., but it was.  

However there were similarities to today.  The law of supply and demand still operated in a Free market and governments were always trying to distort the market for their own purposes.  Consequently there was war. Their war was very destructive. Their last one effectively destroyed their world.

The weapons were...odd.  Up until the late twentieth century they were inconceivable.  Cybernetic battle computers grown from the atomic level....and other things.

The computers didn’t look impressive.  Stripped of their input/output devices they looked like a not particularly interesting pebble.  Dull, not shiny.

Dull but damn near indestructible.

Indestructible enough to survive the end of the world....

Millions and millions of years later one was found in a Celtic mine.  It didn't look like much but the miner who uncovered it kind of liked it so he kept it. He lived to be incredibly old.  

Down thru the years  the odd stone got passed on from one person to another, sometimes in the same family, sometimes not.  There for a while it was even on the Pommel of a Sword.  Some guy name of King Arthur.

And it got lost, found, lost and refound again and again.  No one ever had the faintest idea of what it was or could be...