Divine Artifact in a Scientific World

Jack was getting ready to leave the library study room and head to his next class his phone beeped. He checked and found a message from Abigail asking him to call.

"Hey Jack. I wasn't expecting you to call back so soon," said Abigail when she answered the phone.

"I just got off the phone with Henry, so now's as good a time as any. So, what's up?"

"The security company completed their initial assessment. I e-mail you their report along with the 3D design files they provided that show their recommendations. When I looked through their report, something unusual caught my eye."

"Oh?"

"I was surprised to learn that they did both ground-penetrating radar and seismic scans of your property."

"Really? Why would they do that?"

"They claimed they were looking for hidden tunnels, bunkers, caves, and sinkholes. All of which could factor into an overall risk assessment."

"Caves and sinkholes? Damn, I never would have thought to look for that. Did they find anything?"

"Yes! They found what they believe is an old cold-war era bunker, buried under the garage. They could only see the entrance with ground-penetrating radar, and the seismic survey was only able to give an approximate size for the bunker."

"Wait. You're telling me they found a bunker under my garage?"

"Yes. As far as they could tell, it's completely sealed, but they recommend unsealing it and doing a thorough survey to make sure it's still structurally sound and doesn't have any unsealed entrances. Do you want me to give them the go-ahead to do that survey?"

"How deep is the entrance?"

It sounded like they'd have to dig a hole in his garage just to get to the bunker entrance.

"The report says the entrance is about three meters underground, and claims they'd have to tear up about half of the garage floor just to get to the bunker entrance. They claim that the presence of the bunker poses only a mild risk."

"If it's that deep, let's just leave it for now. I'd rather not have my garage floor torn up just to take a peek at a cold-war era relic."

He was going to investigate the bunker and see if he could restore it in secret. But he wasn't going to tell Abigail that.

"Okay, I'll let them know."

"Was there anything else?" he asked.

"Your friend Miranda's professor sent a preliminary interior design for me to forward to the owner." He could hear the smile in her voice when she said, "forward to the owner".

"Okay, e-mail that to me as well so I can give it a look."

They continued to chat briefly, then hung up.

As he headed to class, his soul space self took a snapshot, then zoomed in to locate the supposed bunker under his new mansion's garage.

When he located it, the size of it surprised him.

He'd done a little research on bunkers and, from what he'd read, most cold-war era bunkers were typically no larger than twenty-five square meters. About the size of a small to medium-size living room.

But this bunker was much larger. It had three floors, with each floor being approximately six meters by ten meters.

The bottom floor was half filled with equipment he didn't recognize, but the top two floors were laid out like a typical two-story house, but with the bedroom on the second floor and the living room and kitchen on the top floor.

The whole thing was encased in two-meter thick steel-reinforced concrete, and the only opening was sealed with a meter think steel vault door. There were no ventilation shafts, or cable ducts, or anything. It was a giant concrete vault.

On the outside of the vault door was a concrete tunnel angled up with stairs and a steel trapdoor covering the top.

When he scanned through the soil surrounding the top of the entrance tunnel, he found remnants of what looked like buried concrete walls.

If he had to guess, the bunker entrance tunnel had been connected to the floor of the basement of a previous house. And that previous house had likely been razed to make way for the construction of the mansion.

It was likely almost no one even knew it existed.

Because it was essentially a sealed box, it wasn't a suitable escape bunker just yet. He'd need to figure out how to refurbish it and get some sort of environmental system installed. All without anyone knowing.

He could templatize and link it into his soul space, so at worst, he and the girls could work on it slowly, exporting changes as they made them. Once it was ready though, they would be able to emergency teleport into it.

He hoped he would never need it.

Having satisfied himself that the bunker wasn't a risk, and was in fact just what he wanted, he turned his attention to the report from the security team.

Once he loaded their 3d file into his computer he reviewed it and was very impressed.

Besides full video surveillance coverage inside and out with overlapping coverage and no blind spots, they also recommended replacing the window with bulletproof glass, installing bullet proof blankets in the walls, steel interior bedroom doors, and a fire door at the end of the upstairs hallway.

Their design included a keypad-based entry system on all exterior doors and the master bedroom door. And the interior video surveillance only covered common areas and hallways. They did have an option of adding a separate surveillance system to the master bedroom.

There was also an option to upgrade the keypad system with the addition of biometric finger or palm readers.

The software used to view and modify the design file was fairly intuitive, so he modified it so there was a keypad entry system and biometric readers on all upstairs bedrooms, but not the two downstairs guest rooms.

He also added separate, independent surveillance systems to all the upstairs bedrooms. Each system was only accessible from within the bedroom. Once they moved in, he'd have Madison review or replace the software so the systems could be used by the girls to monitor their rooms while they were in his soul space.

He sent the file back to Abigail and told her to green-light the project and specified that he wanted the expedited option. He didn't care if it cost three times the normal price.

Finally, he took a look at the interior decoration design that Abigail had forwarded to him.

It looked clean and modern, without being pretensions. He liked the furniture and decoration choices and looked forward to actually moving into the mansion.

Happy with what he saw, he replied to Abigail that the design looked great and they had his approval to proceed to the next phase.

If everything went according to plan, he and his girls could move into his new mansion in the next few weeks.