Truth is stranger than fiction... (Part V)

"Would you like to drink something?"
Michael was brought to reality by the same dark man's voice. He simply nodded. Once the man was away to get a drink, Michael turned towards Daniel, taking a good long look at him before he uttered anything. Daniel did not seem surprised, he was rather expecting that stare; one full of questions, many of them.
"What.. happened.. How have you been?" were the only words Michael was able to get out.
He was finding it difficult to keep his voice steady.
"Still the same inquisitive nature.." Daniel spoke for the first time face to face with his partner after two years.
After a deep sigh, Daniel began...
“I woke up in a hospital room, back then. The only thing I remembered was the two.. objects hitting me.”
He was choosing his words carefully.
“The nurse kept telling me that I was shot at, but that was not what I wanted to hear. The next day two men came; agents. They said I needed to know something; and now it’s time you should too. I was taken to an underground facility in the desert. It was big and obviously out of the public eye. Few people in the bureau even knew it existed.”
Just then the dark man came back to serve their drinks. Michael looked at him, then at Daniel, making his suspicion apparent.
“It’s okay” Daniel nodded very slightly before continuing.
“It was a research facility; for the most bizarre and highly secretive of projects. Some would call it the lab of the future; for almost all the research carried out here was years ahead of anything seen outside. By the time the technology of this research was “cutting edge”, it was simply nostalgic for the people involved here, since they had moved on to other projects. Project Firefly was different.”
“It was not about using savaged alien technology from a fallen UFO?”
“That is just the cover up, since it wouldn’t attract much attention that way. It was not entirely untrue though. Most people thought of it as simply pulling out an engine from a UFO and putting it into one of ours, and boom!”
Michael couldn’t help a smirk considering the fact that he hadn’t thought much different either!
“It’s not that way. To start with, there’s no UFO involved. However, the technology that we have – learnt – in this case can be attributed beyond doubt to intelligent beings from outside our world.”
“And this has something to do with those objects that hit you..” Michael took out the two bullet-like objects he had kept with him for two years.
“It has everything to do with them! These pellets, what you’re holding Michael, are huge stores of information; unfathomable information. The two that hit me are identical to these. They were held in a cylindrical tubular structure, and designed to be “shot out” once their containers reached a high temperature. I was simply unlucky to be standing near one of those. There were two such cylinders buried into the meteorite.”
Michael’s mind raced fast to explore all possible implications.
“Someone had “placed” these into the meteorite.”
“But meteorites are moving at crazy speeds, which would make it impossible to..”
“NASA has already landed a small probe on an asteroid. Moreover, simply “shooting” such small cylinders at a high velocity would be sufficient to bury them into the meteorite.”
“You’re saying, someone far outside our solar system placed a package of information inside a meteorite, for a free ride across the galaxy?!” The words echoed inside Michael’s head.
“The capsules were just the protective casing. They had a highly polished, flat surface inside, held in place vertically by a series of membranes. Using a fine laser beam and continuously scanning the interior like the body scan, the capsules were cut open, taking care not to damage the flat surface. The capsule’s hardness was out of our current range of hardness which ends at diamond. It was estimated from the energy required by the laser, that the hardness of the surface was about four times that of diamond!”
“And then what? Our intelligent alien friends write a letter to us in Chinese and you simply get an interpreter to read it out for you?!” Michael had lost it! Anyone in his place would have.
Once he stopped smiling Daniel continued.
“You got the first part right. When we saw the polished surface under very high magnification, it appeared to be a very thin, semi-transparent plate, having a crystalline structure. Upon studying it further, several hundred irregularities were observed, what appeared to be.. etchings – symbols! For a long time no one was able to decipher these. However, when that was finally achieved, only a fraction of their “letter” was truly understood; this led to Project Firefly. The rest is for you to see yourself.”
“Are we going to the facility?”
Daniel smiled.