Artifact Read online

  “You don’t remember anything before the accident?”

  I shrugged. “Like I said, I remember random things. I remember the accident, but it’s all isolated, no context.”

  Patrick stared at the floor for a long time as Sarah nervously glanced down the hallway in both directions. She twisted her shirt so much that the bottom seam was threadbare.

  “You don’t remember what this place is?”

  “I know what this place is – we’re at the Center for Energetic Materials, where the artifact is kept. This is where I do my work–”

  “No,” he interrupted. “What this place really is. This logic interlaced reality gateway…”

  “I – I don’t know what that means.”

  Patrick settled into deep contemplation for a long time. He was quiet long enough for Sarah and I to become increasingly nervous about the scuttling in the walls.

  “Where is Alice?” He asked suddenly.

  “She’s upstairs in the Clean Room, prepping the artifact.”

  “Well,” he said finally. “I’m sorry to tell you that this isn’t a dream.”

  He stood and shouldered the rifle. “But neither are you entirely awake. Come on, let’s head to the vault and I’ll explain on the way.”

  I stayed seated.

  He stopped. “What?”

  “I’m sorry, Patrick.” I crossed my arms. “I’m not going anywhere until I know what’s going on.”

  “We don’t have time for this, Lance. Those things are going to come back – they have to come back – and they won’t stop until they have sucked out every morsel of your brain.”

  “I thought that was just hyperbole…”

  “No,” he said, quite seriously. “They will literally crack your skull open and eat your brains.”

  Sarah absentmindedly touched her forehead.

  “Why?”

  “They want access to the Lexicon.”

  I remembered the words cut into the floor of the mausoleum. Lexicon Sapientia, or something. “And what exactly is the Lexicon?”

  “It’s information,” Patrick said. “A tightly packed beam of data.”

  “What kind of data?”

  “Every kind of data.”

  I shook my head and started to laugh. Every fiber of my body wanted to strangle him to death. “Don’t do me any more favors,” I said, rising to my feet. “You can stop explaining yourself – I’ve got things pretty much figured out, anyway. The reason you can’t explain anything is because you don’t know anything. You don’t know anything because I don’t. I never woke up from the accident. You’re just another elaborate mirage leading me in what’s probably another wrong direction. So let’s just get this over with so Sarah and I can shift to the next place.” I started moving down the corridor and Patrick caught my arm in a grip that could crush bone.

  “This thing,” he said seriously. “Whatever it is, I think it piggy–backed onto the Lexicon’s frequency. There is no telling how far it will spread, and no way of knowing exactly how it functions. We’ve seen at least three different expressions of the same virus – the zombies, the savrataurs, and the uniformed agents.”

  “Wait,” I shook my head. “The savra what?”

  “Savrataurs,” he said slowly, emphasizing the V. “That’s what comes up when I run a query. I assumed that the suffix ‘taur had something to do with existing in a state that is only half human. Sávra is the Greek word for lizard, so it’s similar to centaurs in Greek mythology being described as half human, half horse. Or how a minotaur was described as a creature who was half human, and half bull–”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I interrupted, holding my hands up. “Back up. Run a query? What the hell does that mean?”

  He sighed and started to lead me down the hallway, “I’ll explain on the way–”

  I tried pulling my arm away again, but he held it tightly. I wouldn’t have been able to pry my arm loose with a pneumatic chisel. “My job is to keep you safe – to ensure that you make contact with the Lexicon. And if you are damaged beyond repair, then I need to know whether or not I should flip the relay that puts Alice in charge – assuming she’s still alive. And if she isn’t, then the responsibility of opening the artifact goes to me – and I am not ready for that.” He let my arm go and stepped into me, talking very quietly. “The best thing for us to do right now is get you quarantined so that these things can’t access you. We are going to the vault,” he said finally. “If I have to knock you out and drag you there, I’ll do it.”

  “I can’t trust you, Patrick.” I said, “You put a gun to my head–”

  “I know, I’m truly sorry. More reason to get you safe until I can figure out what the hell happened.”

  “What was supposed to happen?”

  He hefted his rifle, pulled back the slide lock and wiped some blood out of the sights. “You were supposed to decipher the artifact’s encryption and uplink with the Lexicon,” he said. “But for some reason you didn’t. Something happened – the uplink was never established, your memory was apparently fried, Joseph and I were hijacked and the world literally started falling apart.”

  I imagined the luminescent slide of ultraviolet light across the holographic image of the artifact. I remembered the humming start to click and change as we turned it with the light, quickly altering its trajectory across the surface. It rolled at point two five rotations per second, at an angular frequency of point two five radians per second until there was a temperature spike, and then it finally exploded. I saw the wall behind the Roller bulge, then my visor cracked and I lost consciousness.

  “Following the algorithm,” I said suddenly. “Opens the artifact and establishes the uplink…?”

  “Correct.”

  “Patrick,” I grabbed him by the shoulders. “What happens when I open the artifact? What happens when I establish this uplink with your Lexicon?”

  “I’m sorry, Lance. I just don’t know. We’re in uncharted territory at this point. You were the one who organized this whole project. If there is anyone qualified to assess what is supposed to happen, it’s you.”

  “You said that I wasn’t entirely awake,” I sighed, trying very hard to keep my patience. “What did you mean by that?”

  “It all depends on how you define wakefulness,” He frowned and looked at his feet. “As far as you or I can tell, this is as much awake as we have ever been.”

  I gritted my teeth and breathed deeply. I started to speak and then stopped.

  I lost my temper.

  I curled my fists into Patrick’s collar and shoved him into the wall. I leaned into his throat, completely ignoring the assault rifle dangling from his hand. He didn’t resist. He even looked almost apologetic. “Why does everything have to be so goddamn cryptic? Why can’t anyone give me a straight answer?”

  “I don’t even know where to start, Lance.” He shrugged, “There’s just too much…”

  “What is the artifact?”

  “It’s a schematic,” He said plainly. “A symbolic representation of a cryptographic test, which was designed to gauge whether or not we were ready to establish an uplink with the Lexicon.”

  “So Alice was right…”

  “Huh?”

  “She told me that this was a test.”

  “Well,” Patrick shrugged. “It is a test.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just do. We all did before the accident…”

  “And the ancient alien civilization on Mars?”

  He frowned and cocked his head. “Where?”

  I leaned a bit harder onto his throat. “Mars.”

  I felt a soft thud against my ribs. Then another. I looked down and saw Sarah punching my side. There were tears streaming down her face. “Stop it!” She screamed, “Leave him alone!”

  I released Patrick�
��s collar and bent down, just as Sarah connected a last time with my jaw. “Can’t you two just grow up?” She demanded quietly, her rage exhausted as suddenly as it arrived.

  She didn’t hug back – she simply leaned into my arms for a few seconds before pushing away from me. She wiped tear-laced mud from her eyes, and went back to surveying the halls for more savrataurs. With everything that had been happening, it became increasingly easy to forget that she was a little girl who was dealing with the terrifying truth of this reality. Sadly, that’s the malleable nature of children – they can seamlessly move through the horrors of life and take them at face value. They don’t really have a choice in the matter. When I was her age, I saw my parents as unchangeable parts of the landscape. They were always there – the idea of them being children at one point was such an alien concept to me, because they were always adults. As such, I was unable to recognize or even wonder about the moment when they stopped being children, and started being adults. I had no precedent for anything like that. I couldn’t even remember my own transitional moment. Like the vast movements of galaxies in space, what changes that do happen are stretched beyond perceivable time, so to us they remain the same as when we first observed them. I knelt and studied the tired, war torn lines around Sarah’s eyes, and tried to see the child in there, but I couldn’t. Like the universe narrative – she stopped being the same galaxy. I rubbed her shoulder and nodded. “I’m sorry, Sarah.” I said softly. “We’ll try better, okay?”

  We all sat in silence for a few moments, quietly alone with our thoughts.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Patrick said finally.

  I jumped at the sudden sound of his voice. “Huh…?”

  “An ancient civilization on Mars – I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Weren’t you in charge of security for the Mars Project?

  “Yes, but–” He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about any ancient alien civilization.”

  “Alice told me that we found this thing three miles below the Martian surface, in a chromite mine.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “In what way?”

  “She must have either been corrupted, or she’s just as damaged as you are.”

  “So,” I tried pinching my headache away – tried to smother it to death. “Nobody found anything on Mars? Then where did the artifact come from? Who built it? I remember seeing very strange x–rays of an assemblage of nancircuitry. Alice told me that radioactive decay put that thing nearly four hundred million years old, for chrissake!”

  “This is the first I have heard about it…”

  “The artifact?”

  “No,” he shook his head. “About finding it on Mars. About it being carbon dated at nearly four hundred million years.”

  “Are you sure that you’re not still all screwed up?”

  He absentmindedly reached behind his neck and scowled. “It’s possible…”

  “Forget about that for now,” I waved the issue aside. “The artifact opens an uplink with something called the Lexicon – where is the Lexicon?”

  “In Earth orbit.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It’s a quantum packet generator that continuously loops streams of data into space.”

  “Why?”

  “The Lexicon was designed to endlessly forward information into space, on the off chance it finds something else out there that may be listening – some sort of hypothetical router for a post singularity alien species.”

  “What…?”

  “It’s waiting for us, Lance.” Patrick said, settling against the wall. “Our only purpose since the day we were born has been to survive contact with this thing. It’s what gives our lives meaning.”

  “What,” I said through my teeth. “Are you talking about?”

  “We are here to fulfill a specific purpose, Lance. The only point of our existence was to prepare you for the uplink. Nothing else matters.”

  “Like the violins.” I closed my eyes. “Like all of the acres of random, worthless, meaningless art, literature, architecture and feats of engineering below ground…”

  Patrick leaned forward and shook his head. “I’m not following you.”

  “One of those visions I was talking about,” I said. “I was dropped down a shaft miles below ground and I found a giant, city–sized mausoleum – a gigantic cave. There was stuff down there – millions of cultural artifacts. Every imaginable object, monument, writing, and idea that has ever existed could be found scattered around the place.”

  Patrick frowned and studied his hands, slowly turning things over in his mind.

  “It was all incomplete, though.” I continued, “The books I found, for example, were only written halfway through. The buildings seemed hollowed out, and there was even a version of myself in there that was incomplete.”

  “How so?”

  “He also lost his memory, and he didn’t have a face.”

  “That sounds like the Lexicon,” Patrick said quietly, taking in this new information. “The accident must have happened mid uplink – you were probably only able to download bits and pieces of information from the tight–beam.”

  “Download?”

  “It sounds like you nearly made it…”

  “Now I’m not following you–”

  “The fundamental issue here is the concept of purpose,” Patrick said. “You understand?”

  I thought about it for a bit. I thought about the significance of what those people were showing me in the white room with all of that art, before they rolled me strapped to a wheelchair into the deep dark pit – the Goya, Da Vinci and Dali paintings, and the violin…

  “A violin’s purpose is to make music.” I intoned, hoping that saying it aloud would give me some context and meaning. “That’s what they were talking about before they dropped me down the shaft.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know who they were – I couldn’t see them, but–” I leaned back and rubbed my forehead, thinking. “Our purpose is to do something with the Lexicon.” I shook my head and started laughing, exhausted.

  Sarah kept looking out for more of those savrataurs.

  “What is the function of a violin?” Patrick asked suddenly, rhetorically.

  I looked at him for some time, fantasizing about taking his gun away and beating him to death with it.

  “It’s meant to be played.” He said softly, answering his own question as if he pitied me. “If nobody’s playing it, it’s meaningless. It’s worthless.”

  “My function is to open the artifact…”

  “Yeah,” He touched my shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  Sarah was looking at me now.

  “And if I don’t open it?”

  Patrick shrugged. “Then you are meaningless. None of this–” He looked around at the walls, Sarah, his gun, me and him. “All of this would have been for nothing. You would have been for nothing. Everything would be meaningless.”

  “I don’t understand,” I shook my head.

  “When the human species is dead and gone,” Patrick said. “When all life on Earth has been blasted away by the expanding red giant that our sun will inevitably become, what would be the point of a violin? A piece of art? A sonata? A book? A skyscraper? A mathematical theorem? The periodic table?”

  “Nothing, I suppose.” I shrugged helplessly. “Humans will be gone. None of that stuff will matter anymore.”

  “Exactly,” he nodded. “As far as we know our species is the universe’s best attempt at becoming self–aware. If we are gone, then the entire Ivory Tower of human knowledge – everything we’ve ever learned and uncovered about the natural law of the cosmos – will be lost. Every artifact of human culture will be just like a hall of forgotten violins, encased behind rows upon rows of glass containers
, separated from their chosen purpose, and the very thing that gives them meaning. Nothing we ever did while we were alive will matter. We’ll be gone – reduced to swirling clouds of space dust in the nebulas of dead star systems, scattered across event horizons of indeterminable, expanding nothingness.”

  “That’s very poetic,” I said wearily. “But I still don’t know what any of that has to do with my amnesia, the zombie plague, savrataurs, government spooks, a giant mausoleum in the center of the Earth, cryptographic algorithms, and ancient technologies from Mars …”

  Patrick stood and nodded.

  “Open the artifact,” He said. “And you will.”

  6.

  We made our way through the dark halls, moving cautiously amidst the sound of savrataurs scuttling around the facility. Wherever we went, they seemed to move away. The big one must have still been somewhere in the vicinity.

  Patrick moved us through a network of hallways until the beige paint turned to austere white. Offices became sparse. What light we did have came solely from exit signs and floodlights far behind us.

  When we reached the end of the hallway, we found a large door made of steel reinforced concrete – it was ajar and we couldn’t see anything beyond the thick curtain of darkness inside. On the backside of the open door I could make out at least three linked lock mechanisms for the dual combination dials. I could also see the time–lock for at least four movements – A vault.

  “I’m not getting into that,” I said, as Sarah squeezed my arm.

  “It’s not up for discussion,” Patrick inspected the inside. “Why is this open…?”

  “We go in and then what?” I asked through my teeth. “We just sit there?”

  “You wait until I get back.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  “I’m serious, Lance,” He turned and put a hand on my shoulder – I shrugged it off and took a step back. “You’re going in there – we can’t afford you being compromised any further.”

  “I don’t have a say in this?”

  “No.”

  “What if we come with you–?”

  Patrick held up his hand and shook his head. “That’s not possible.”