Artifact Read online

  Everyone fell silent for some time after that. None of us could think of anything to say.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kate.” She gave the little girl a squeeze, “This is Sarah.”

  “It’s nice to meet you both.”

  Sid slid to the floor and wiped his face. “I – I’m sorry.”

  She pulled Sarah a bit closer, and went back to staring at the floor. “We’re all sorry.”

  He turned to me. “It’s just – you were the only person who was making any sense since all this started. You promised that if I got you here, you could fix this. Then you disappear into thin air, and then you’re suddenly inside the same building that we were trying to break into, completely healthy? I agree, shit doesn’t add up – I’m not arguing that – but I know as sure as I’m sitting here right now that I am real. My wife was real,” he pointed at Sarah, “that little girl’s father was real. And if you’re telling me that things started to get strange immediately after some experiment you guys were running with an ancient alien artifact from Mars – which sounds batshit insane, by the way – then I have to seriously consider whether or not I need to stick around, or head to camp Ripley while I still can.”

  “I know what it sounds like, Sid. What do you want me to say?”

  “Look,” he said. “I’m not arguing that things aren’t nuts. They are. If this is some sort of hallucination, then it’s mutually exclusive. We’re sharing it. Somehow, I don’t know how, but somehow we’re in this together. To say that none of us are real, and that we’re all inside this asshole’s head is not only the most egocentric thing that I’ve ever heard, but it’s insulting.”

  We all sat in silence for a while, alone with our thoughts. The little girl Sarah hadn’t said anything since I met up with them. I noticed that when Sid brought up her father, she began biting her lower lip.

  “His name was Ethan,” Kate said, noticing that I was looking their direction. “Sarah’s dad.”

  I sat down beside Sarah and tried to imagine what she must have been feeling – how she must have been taking everything – and failed. Sid was right. It didn’t matter if she were real or not, did it? She was there, and she just watched her father sacrifice himself to save her life. The details shouldn’t have mattered. I promised myself that I would be a bit more careful with choosing what I said from then on. What I believed at that moment was irrelevant. Alice brought up the point earlier anyway, that this dream could be someone else’s as much as mine.

  “That was your father?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said quietly.

  “You and your dad rescued Kate?”

  “Yes…”

  “How old are you?”

  She hesitated, suddenly uncomfortable with all the attention. “Ten and a half.”

  “Well, Sarah.” I gently gave her knee a shake. “You’re very brave for a ten and a half year old.”

  She frowned, entirely too smart for pandering. I could tell she wanted me to get to the point or leave her alone.

  “You know that scary guy over there?” I pointed at Sid, “He picked me up, too. If he hadn’t I would have probably died out there.”

  Sid’s face suddenly flushed deep red. He slumped against the cabinet, looked down at his feet and took a drink from his water.

  “Your dad was a good person – the best kind of person. He saw someone in trouble and decided to help. That makes him one of the good guys.”

  She sat, stoic and silent, more interested in people leaving her alone than being the center of attention.

  “We’re going to figure this out,” I patted her knee again, not knowing what else to say. “Okay? Everything is going to be fine.” She nodded and started anxiously twisting the bottom of her shirt. Kate continued staring into space, absentmindedly caressing Sarah’s back.

  “I don’t know what’s happening.” I looked at Sid. “I just know that in order for this to end, I have to open the artifact. I have to decipher the sequence, and it’s coded with an algorithm that is,” I shrugged, “complex.”

  “Complex in what way?”

  I sighed, feeling better that the conversation veered back into a more productive area. It felt good to be strategizing again – less helpless, and more controlled. I felt like a suspended part of my personality, a good part, was kicking in now that I needed it the most.

  “Alice told me that when we found a hidden frequency within the hum’s carrier wave, we figured that the artifact was telling us to turn it the same direction as a strip of light that was moving across its surface.” I handed Sid a printout of what the hum looked like before I turned the object with the Roller, and then a picture of what it looked like after.

  “The sine wave changed, you see?” I pointed at the second photo. “I must have been messing around with it, and accidentally turned it in the appropriate direction. We saw tiny, jagged variations instantly form inside the sine wave, and when I stopped moving it, the variations disappeared. So I started turning it again, following the disruption, and then our spectrometer picked up a sudden burst of ultraviolet light. We zoomed in the time differential, and we found another frequency inside the hum. When I turned the object again, I must have accidentally modulated that hidden frequency. The light that followed was like an arrow that moved across the face of the object. We started matching the angular frequency with that light, and then it exploded. That’s as far as we got.” I looked at Alice, “Does that sound about right?”

  “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I just know that as soon as that thing hit point two five rips, the temperature spiked to around three hundred degrees Celsius, the lead flashing dropped over the observation tank, there was some sort of concussion, and then I blacked out.”

  “The algorithm–” I said, turning back toward Sid. “The process that we’ll follow to trace our steps back to that hidden frequency inside the artifact could be anything, you understand? I must have written the initial angle of rotation down somewhere, and I remember handling my notes shortly before the accident. Somewhere in here is the key–” I waved at all of the filing cabinets, “a set of instructions that we need to follow in order to get to the next step – and I have no idea where to even start once we do find it. It could be anything.”

  “Well, wouldn’t the artifact simply tell you what it wants you to do next?”

  “Hopefully,” Alice chimed in. “It depends on whether or not it contains a message, if it’s administering a test, or if whatever information contained inside the artifact is something the engineers intended to share.”

  “A test…?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Like, if the thing is gauging whether or not we are smart enough to even receive any sort of message.”

  “What would be the difference – I mean, how would you be able to tell if it’s one or the other?”

  “If the artifact contains a message that it wants to convey, then it’s reasonable to think that whoever coded the algorithm would have made it simple. It would want us to eventually receive the message and perhaps respond without too much trouble.”

  “And if it’s the other thing?”

  “And if it’s something else, like a test or a secret,” she leaned forward. “The encryption is going to be hard. It would have either been designed to probe our intelligence, or to make certain that nobody would ever be able to access it. There might not even be a message at all. This all depends on who or what created the artifact and coded the algorithms, and why. For example, what may seem simple to them may be too advanced for us – or vice versa. And we may confuse a message with a test. It also depends on how more or less advanced they were technologically than us. I think it’s the latter. I think they were very advanced.”

  “Were, or are?”

  “The artifact is over three hundred million years old. Whoever made the thing is gone. They either technological
ly outgrew this solar system and moved on, or went extinct. If they would have advanced beyond a certain point, there would be more evidence of their existence – they would have exhausted all of the resources in this solar–system, including Earth, but they didn’t.”

  “If they were so advanced,” Sid asked. “Then why didn’t they come here?”

  “Maybe they did.”

  “I’m sorry,” he shook his head. “You’re going to have to speak a bit more slowly.”

  Alice took a pull from her water and continued, “The nano–engineering that was used to pack these tiny molecular semiconductors into the artifact isn’t that far beyond what we are capable of doing today, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to recognize what we were dealing with – but one of the reasons we haven’t been able to do anything similar is because Moore’s Law – the process by which each generation of technology gets smaller and smaller – ended about two decades ago, when transistors shrunk slightly smaller than five nanometers. Whenever we try engineering switches smaller than four nanometers, the electrons leak and cause the transistors to short circuit. Transistors are like switches – they flip on or off, and this controls the flow of energy. The point is, there was absolutely no way that transistors could have gotten any smaller unless we found a reliable, easily malleable replacement for something called carbon nanotubing. The only next possible step was to figure out a way to create single atomic switches, but we haven’t done it yet. As things are today, our current socioeconomic paradigm cannot allow the construction of such things, because we don’t have the resources at this point. Simply put, we can’t afford it,” she shrugged. “If Moore’s Law hadn’t ended – if technology kept shrinking – then we would have eventually reached a point when even the smallest transistors became easy and cheap to make. This means that the computing power for super computers the size of an entire room could one day fit into a device about the size of a blood cell. But Moore’s Law did end, which made small, cell sized bio–organic semiconductors a scarce and thus expensive resource.”

  “Just to make sure that I’m following,” Sid interrupted. “This thing is packed with tiny computers the size of individual atoms – it’s full of these molecular somethings?”

  “Semiconductors, right.”

  “And this kind of technology is beyond our ability at this point.”

  “That’s right. Like I said, the smallest transistor we have ever created is four nanometers in length, slightly larger than a molecule of hemoglobin. It stopped after that – I mean, people kept trying to make them smaller, but nobody could get it to work. A lot of people believed that it wasn’t possible.” She leaned forward. “Not only is this thing from Mars ancient, but it’s packed with transistors about as small as one nanometer in length.” She turned to me and smiled. “I think whoever built the artifact got past all of those things that are currently holding humanity back.” She sat back again. “But not that much farther past.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well,” she shrugged. “They’re extinct.”

  Sid leaned back and scratched his chin. Alice started chewing a fingernail.

  “I know Lance worked here before all this – but how were you involved with this project?”

  “I’m with SETI. I was asked to help Doctor Kattar.”

  “Seti, refresh my memory–”

  “The Search for Extraterrestrial–”

  “Intelligence,” Sid snapped his fingers. “Right, right. And why were you involved again?”

  “We’re pretty certain that this thing was designed as a quantum cryptographic test, by an alien intelligence – we find the key and use it, which could be any physical interaction with the artifact at this point, like turning it a specific number of times per second, and its whole molecular structure changes. Like I said, this isn’t much more advanced than what we are capable of, but it’s pretty darn close. Whatever did this rivals our intelligence, perhaps even surpasses it. Imagine what we could learn from such a species.”

  “And what makes you think this artifact has anything to do with what’s been happening out there?”

  Alice arched her eyebrows and nodded toward me.

  “Him? That’s it?”

  “Not just him,” she set her water down and stood. “You can’t tell me that things haven’t been making a whole lot of sense. I mean, we’ve suddenly appeared in places with no memory of how we got there. There are gaps in our memory, like the cities in which we live, our age, and what day it is. The world is literally falling apart around us and zombies – things that had up until a few hours ago only existed in fiction – are trying to kick down the front door as we speak. How could each one of us be experiencing the same phenomena and not have it be related somehow? As much as I don’t want to admit it, I have to acknowledge that things began failing to make sense the moment Lance walked into the lab this morning.”

  Sid frowned and looked at me. “So, what happens next? How do we open this thing and find that frequency?”

  I got to my feet and stretched my back. “Alice said that the next key is an angle of rotation. Even if this is the case, we’re screwed. Even though we know the ordinary frequency in hertz, we have no idea what the angle is, nor the tangential velocity. We don’t know the radius in meters,” I shrugged. “We can’t plug in any of these variables until we can measure how the artifact is moving, and we can’t move it in any meaningful way until we have the variables. It’s a paradox.”

  “You need to know how to turn the thing,” Sid nodded along. “So that it could then tell you how it’s turning?”

  Alice crossed her arms. “You’re making this out to be way more difficult than it is. We already know that we have to turn the artifact at point two five radians per second, and then all we have to do is follow the light. The only thing we have to do at this point is fire up the Roller and rotate the artifact. We have the initial axis point. It should give us another instruction.” She shrugged. “We should start there.”

  “And blow ourselves up again?” I shook my head, “We tried that, and we ended up here – whatever here is. It didn’t work. We either interpreted the speed or the axis wrong, or both.”

  “I say we move forward. Repeat the algorithm and see where this goes. You have any better ideas?”

  “We did something wrong, Alice. If we repeat the same process as before, we might make things worse–”

  “It wasn’t we who did something wrong, Lance.” Alice clenched her jaw. “It was you.”

  The silence that came after that declaration was deafening. I wanted to run – I wanted to hide from her, knowing that she was right, that I was selfish and wrong. “I know,” I said softly, feeling my face fill with blood. “I’m sorry, Alice.”

  “I told you it was too hot, that we needed to shut it down. But you cared more about your pride than the science. You wanted your sense of accomplishment, your name in the history books – well, you got it. How’s it feel?” The venom in her voice was almost physically painful.

  “I can apologize only so many times–”

  “Yeah.” She said, breathing hard through her nose, taking another drink from her water. “Doesn’t change anything, though – does it?”

  Sid cleared his throat. “I don’t know what you guys are talking about, and I honestly don’t care – you’re just going to have to deal with it. Let’s – let’s try to focus, okay?”

  “People are dead, Lance!” Alice interrupted him, cutting the air with the blade of her hand. “You understand that?”

  “Alice,” I started, calmly raising my hands. “I’m not entirely sure if that’s true–”

  “Okay,” Sid cut in. “Whatever this is, it has to stop. We need to focus on the task at hand before things get worse – those barricades aren’t going to hold forever.”

  Alice set her water bottle on the floor and went back to chewing her fingernail,
focusing on everything else in the room but me. Kate and Sarah stared uncomfortably at the floor, and Sid stood with his arms open, trying to guide us back to the problem. I wanted nothing more than to collapse into a self–deprecating framework of regret, self–pity and failure. I opened my mouth and hesitated, thinking about what Sid said. I wondered very seriously about how things could have gotten worse. If there were such a thing as worse in this place, I didn’t want to know about it. Alice and Sid were right. The only way to get out of this was to push forward.

  “Besides, you don’t know if we screwed up or not.” Alice frowned, mercifully changing the subject. “Maybe it worked perfectly and that’s why all of this is happening. Maybe it was a weapon – like an old land mine left behind to take out anyone who happened along.”

  “Why would they do that?” Sid asked, relieved that things were steering back on track.

  “Maybe whoever designed the artifact figured that if there was anyone out there in the universe that could figure it out, they could potentially provide a serious threat to their civilization.”

  I waved that aside, “That’s beside the point. Pure speculation and we won’t know anything for certain until we open it. Besides,” I said, pointing at the lights. “We have bigger problems.”

  “Oh…”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We don’t have any power.”

  “So…” Sid said.

  “So we need the power back on before we can even think about starting up the roller.”

  Sid leaned back and scratched his chin again. It must have helped him think.

  Alice picked up a folder and flipped through the papers therein. “You know,” She said. “I think we’ll be okay. Maybe we just need enough power to get the spectrometer and the remote for the magnetic roller going. I’m telling you, Lance, we should continue trying to turn the object in the same direction as the path of the light.”