Artifact Read online

  “Rest up, killer.” The man said, forcing a smile, “We need your butt back in the lab as soon as possible.”

  “What happened?” My words slurred through the pain–meds.

  “Something amazing.” He cracked open a bottle of water and filled my plastic cup, “But don’t worry about that now. Get plenty of sleep, and we’ll fill you in on the details when you get back.”

  “Alright…”

  The man patted me gently on the leg and rose to leave. “We have some of our people posted outside, should you need anything.”

  He studied me from the doorway, waiting for the fog to clear my eyes. “Lance,” he said seriously. “If anyone you don’t recognize tries wheeling you out of here, get the guard’s attention – no matter how official they seem, alright?”

  “Sure…”

  He smiled again and turned to leave.

  “Wait,” I said suddenly. “What’s your name?”

  The man stopped and stared at me for a few moments.

  “Joseph,” he said finally. “My name is Joseph. Now get some sleep, pal. And remember what I told you.”

  The last bit shook me. Not only were there men outside of my room, but the possibility at least existed that someone could have tried taking me away. It was a strange thought, lying in my hospital bed, mentally stumbling through the thick fog of my half reality, unable to differentiate between those I could trust and those I couldn’t. If what Joseph warned me about actually happened, I honestly didn’t know what I would do – I couldn’t recognize anybody.

  5.

  The first thing I forgot was how to measure the passage of time. Night was when it was dark outside. Day was when there was light. I was sustained with a feeding tube connected to a valve above my collarbone, which reduced solid waste, so I wasn’t even able to measure time by how often I used the bathroom. I had no way of knowing how long I had been there, and every square centimeter of my body ached. When I could finally open my eyes, reality seeped into focus.

  I recognized immediately that I was in a hospital – the room decor was for long term patient occupancy, with walls of institutional beige and comfortable furniture for visitors. There was a wall–screen above my bed, which was basically a hard padded mattress with wire–and–plastic straps tucked under the sheets, and on either side were cold cylindrical rails of collapsible stainless steel. There was another wall–screen by the door, next to a laser stylus used for cleaning. I could also see natural light coming from the large window to my right, and the shadow of the pink stuffed animal sitting on the sill, stretching across the floor and my bed. Beside the bed, there was a console with a screen connected to an IV stand with a few bags of morphine solution.

  It was hard at first to accept that I had in fact survived whatever happened in the Clean Room.

  It was a foggy realization but a serious one, because I knew then that I probably should have died. The shock was powerful enough – some kind of electrical nimiety that lit me up like a flash–bulb. But the voice in my head kept repeating, you survived. You survived. You survived, until I allowed myself to trust it.

  The room was warm and dim. Chemicals pricked my sinuses, and the sound of air–conditioning pulled me out of the warm depth of half–forgotten dreams. I lay on my side breathing slowly, contorted and stiff, and my head pulsated like milk spilling from a jug. Thinking came slow as everything blurred out of focus, and all endeavors to put together exactly what went wrong inflated my headache beyond reason. I remembered my visor cracking and–

  –Nothing. The concussion. I found that shapes eluded my train of thought, until reality pulled back like a hangman’s rope. I fought with consciousness, desperately holding that clouded space before the darkness could take me again. Sitting up didn’t feel right, so I tried rolling onto my back. But I couldn’t move. I tried again, and nothing.

  I was frozen in a rictus, unable to blink – unable to will my body into action. Paralyzed.

  Panicking, my mind raced to a ventilation duct that spilled the sound of boiling water into the room. As the vent hummed, something else was building behind the walls – a distant sound of super–heated alloy cooling too fast, faint but getting close. And then, like a switch, the physics in the room suddenly changed. There was a wooden thok, and my muscles instantly relaxed.

  I rolled over the guard-rails and sprawled onto the warm linoleum. I stayed there for a minute sucking air, naked except for a thin hospital gown that was open in the back – the IV and feeding tube pulled like a stitch. I got to my feet and peeled the tape off of my genitals, then gently removed the catheter. There was a slight resonance of pain in my chest, like healed sunburn, but it was fading fast. I picked up my IV stand and cautiously walked out of the room, my legs trembling through the atrophy.

  I felt my unease grow while moving into the hallway, noting that the entire hospital looked as if it had been recently abandoned. Papers were strewn across the floor. Vacant wheelchairs were carelessly pushed into corners, and there was a maintenance cart spilling rolls of toilet–paper down the hall. A stretcher propped open an elevator as it endlessly tried closing itself. Distant blue sunlight from the adjacent rooms cast the deserted hospital into a milieu of dark shadows.

  “Hello?” My vocal cords burned from lack of use. To my right, the hallway ended at a darker room with a single florescent bulb blinking itself asleep. To my left, the corridor forked in opposite directions. “Is anybody there…?”

  And out of the darkness, “In here, Lance.”

  I spun around, tracking the voice through the opposite hallway.

  A woman said, “You’re alive.” The voice drifted through the hall, leading to the room with the blinking light. “Come in here, please.”

  I dragged my stand along, moving carefully toward the half opened door. I wasn’t able to distinguish individual shapes inside that unsettling strobe, because everything seemed to melt together into a crawling veil of fog. After a moment’s hesitation, I continued forward.

  “It’s okay,” she breathed. “I won’t bite.”

  “Where are you?”

  I moved toward the door just as the light finally went out for good. Her breath released slowly, as if she were letting go a deep pull of air. “Don’t be afraid.”

  I slid into the darkness, and the door closed behind me.

  A musical hum drifted from somewhere beyond a hospital bed that I could barely see, and I realized that the woman was laughing under her breath. I wasn’t certain at first, but then her voice separated from the mechanical ambience until it was loud and constant, until it was finally cruel and vehement. I backed away from the sound, feeling the sharp sting of adrenaline.

  Ripping the intravenous drip out of my vein and shoving the pole toward the voice, I turned to run, but the door handle was missing. Metal folded behind the walls again, only this time the sound formed a crescendo, unbearable and endless. I collapsed against the door and pressed my ears, biting against the cramp that rose up the back of my neck. After a few moments of paralyzing noise, there was another wooden thok, and everything faded like the final note of a song.

  Very slowly, I opened my eyes to a landscape that had changed – and I somehow found myself back inside the Clean Room at the labs. Still in my hospital gown, I rubbed the bloody crook of my elbow where the IV pulled free. I looked into the observation tank, but it was empty. The woman was gone. It was hard at first to grasp why everything seemed wrong. There wasn’t any light in the room, for example, when it should have been as bright as day. The observation tank was dark as well, save for the stark line of glowing wall–screens.

  There suddenly came a hum from the examination platform, and when I turned my head to look, the artifact rose out of the darkness. I watched as the platform spun, noticing again a darkening spot on the wall. Everything melted and bulged like before, like a giant bubble in a tar pit. The artifact thrummed
with intense blue light, like the pulsating heat of a jet engine. The sound grew, and I wiped a dark liquid away from my nose. My ears bled a tight line along my jaw before dripping onto the floor. The hum grew more sonorous until I couldn’t hear anything except a scream. It was my scream, and that sudden truth scared me more than anything. When the concussion finally stopped, everything once again went dark.

  6.

  –Sometime later, I was well enough to move around. I really didn’t feel any pain – more like the ghost of pain – like the faint memory of a bad burn, or a broken limb. I stepped out of the wheelchair, moving away from the hospital entrance, glad to be under the power of my own legs again. The strange weight of the gauze on my chest snagged the shirt above my beltline. I stood for a moment, blinking into the sunlight. Joseph gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder and nodded for me to follow. While he was wheeling me out, he wanted to know how I was feeling. I didn’t know what to tell him.

  I remembered indistinct tremors of the experiment, but then I would recoil. I figured the memories were still too raw to deal with. My problem was that not only couldn’t I remember anything before the hospital, but I was afraid to say anything about it. Whatever work I was into, I got the impression that the inconvenience of my recent memory loss would have upset a lot of people. I was hoping that things would have come back to me by then, but they hadn’t.

  We met up with a heavily built man that I didn’t recognize. Once we were inside the car, Joseph said, “You remember Patrick, Chief of Security Operations for the Mars Project.”

  “Hey,” I said, inclining my head.

  Patrick shifted his muscled frame inside the passenger seat, stealing worried glances from me.

  “You remember Patrick, right?”

  I had no clue who Patrick was. “Of course.”

  Every now and then Joseph would ask me something a bit more on point, as if he were panning the streambed of my memory, but he primarily wanted to know if I told anyone what we were attempting in the lab that day.

  “I – I don’t remember.” I said softly, closing my eyes.

  Joseph nodded. “I understand if things are a bit foggy–”

  “Is anyone going to explain what happened?”

  Joseph shifted uncomfortably in his seat and adjusted the rearview mirror. “Well, we’ll get to that.”

  I glanced at Patrick, who was tapping at his flex–phone. “Alright.”

  A flash of long black hair pulled suddenly, as an afterthought, “was the woman hurt?”

  “The woman?” Joseph asked, “You mean Alice?”

  “Yeah, Alice – is she okay?”

  “A little pissed,” he trailed off. “But she’s fine.”

  “Good,” I looked back and forth between the two men, wondering when they were going to arrive at the point. “Nobody knows why this thing blew?”

  “Well,” He shook his head. “Things have gotten a bit more complicated.”

  “In what way?”

  Joseph glanced at Patrick, who shook his head slightly. I sat back, feeling a slow gathering of dread – my instincts were pinging the entire spectrum of threat indicators. “What about my papers?”

  “Papers?”

  “The notes I brought with me into the Gray Room, just before the accident.”

  “The papers,” Joseph said thinly, thinking it over. “I’m not sure. We have people still working on it – that’s sort of why Patrick is here–”

  “We’re wasting time.” Patrick finally spoke.

  “Lance,” Joseph cleared his throat. “Something happened with the artifact, and that algorithm you had? We need it. It’s been humming since the accident, the same as when we found it.”

  I shook my head and tried massaging the cloudiness away. Perhaps I could mine some sort of sensible sequence of events from the bits and pieces that I did remember. I tried grasping that chain of memory but it pulled back, keeping itself out of reach. I couldn’t dam the wellspring of anxiety building inside me, until it eventually spilled over and I found myself breaking into a sweat.

  This was about the Martian artifact.

  I remembered the hum – like a rhythm of soft percussion. It must have been some mathematical sequence, because it endlessly repeated itself, as if it were stuck in some sort of infinite feedback loop.

  “Lance,” Joseph said. “Do you remember how you got it to light up?”

  I glanced at Patrick, who was still staring at his phone. “Give me a break, guys.” I sighed, trying to convince myself that the looming cloud of malice was simply my imagination, “A large percentage of my chest is still smoldering, here…”

  “Time has become sort of an issue.” Patrick said, rolling up his phone and tucking it into his breast pocket.

  “Just, let me get back to the lab.” I took a deep breath and laid my head back, ready to let the gentle rumbling of the highway rock me to sleep. “If I were following some sort of operation, there’ll be a copy of it lying around somewhere.”

  Patrick turned around to face me. “A copy?” He looked at Joseph. “Is he serious?”

  Joseph’s eyes lost all semblance of kindness, and Patrick stared at me, unblinking.

  “I mean,” I said. “Relax, there has to be one.”

  Patrick looked at Joseph a final time. “You told me this would work,” He said. “Joseph, you said this was going to work.”

  “Wait–”

  “Lance,” Patrick turned to face me again. “There were to be no copies of that procedure. You know this.”

  I blinked a few times, trying to figure out if we were all on the same page, suspecting that we weren’t even in the same book. “What…?”

  Patrick arched his eyebrow.

  “You’re telling me,” I said slowly, leaning forward. “That we were dicking around with some encrypted alien device, and we didn’t bother documenting how much of the algorithm we figured out? Nothing written down?” I frowned. “What if something happened to me?” I looked at both men, seriously regretting the direction this conversation had taken us. “And what about the woman – uh, Alice? Wasn’t she monitoring a bank of holographic screens just before the thing blew?”

  Patrick reached into the small of his back and pulled out a silver handgun.

  “Jesus, Patrick,” said Joseph. “What are you doing?”

  “Keep driving.” He pulled the hammer and pointed the gun at my head.

  What little understandings I made since the hospital seemed to fall away. I couldn’t put anything back together. My whole world spiraled down the barrel of Patrick’s gun, and I froze. “Wait,” I said. “Wait a second…”

  “Are you telling me that you have backups somewhere? Of the algorithm?” Patrick asked.

  “Put the goddamn gun away,” Joseph yelled.

  “Shut up. What’s he talking about with Alice? She knows the cypher text?”

  “Wait, wait, wait – wait a second,” I said. “I don’t have any copies.”

  Joseph accelerated. The world outside of the car melted into a collage of relative objects, and the only constants in the backdrop were the shadows of trees as they flickered before the sun.

  “Where is it?” Patrick demanded, “Where is the copy?”

  “I don’t know. I – I don’t know what I’m talking about–”

  “Then why would you say that? Why would you lie to me?”

  “Christ, Patrick – I’m screwed up. I’m – I don’t know what I’m talking about–”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Joseph said. “Just tell him–”

  “There’s nothing – I swear, nothing.”

  Joseph practically stood on the gas pedal, and I could see a lake fast approaching ahead of us. Car horns wailed as we sped by and trees whipped together like the blades of a helicopter.

  “Listen, you either have a copy of th
e event sequence, or you know it.” Patrick said, “And if it’s neither, then you’re useless to us. You said that Alice might know the procedure? Is that – Lance, pay attention – is that right? Alice knows it?”

  “I don’t know.” I said, “I – I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

  The lake disappeared below a hill, and then it rose again before us, fast. Joseph kept nervously glancing at Patrick, making sure that he hadn’t noticed. I reached for my seat belt.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Patrick pressed the gun against my head. “Don’t do that. Keep your hands up.”

  “Please–”

  “Shut up.” Patrick said through his teeth, “Which is it? You either have a copy of the algorithm, or you have it memorized. Which one? And let me tell you something, there better be documented chain of custody for every single copy out there–”

  “I have it memorized,” I said.

  The lake enveloped the entire windshield, save for a slight margin of beach. The car lurched forward, and we all momentarily lifted out of our seats. Patrick still hadn’t realized what was happening.

  “Lance,” Patrick said. “You’re very special to us – you know that, right?” He gritted his teeth and stabbed the gun into my forehead. “We have to protect that valuable head of yours–”

  “If I’m so special,” I clenched my eyes shut. “Then why are you pointing a gun at my head?”

  Patrick suddenly looked confused. Like he was suddenly roused from a very deep sleep – like he couldn’t believe what he was about to do. He pulled the gun away from my forehead and stared at his hand as if it were a dead insect.

  “Last warning,” Joseph said. “Put the gun down.”

  Patrick turned around just as we reached the dock. Realizing what was about to happen, he furiously swung the gun toward Joseph and pulled the trigger. Joseph’s brains went through the side window, but it was too late.

  We hit the dock at ninety miles per hour, and after a moment of sailing through the open air, the car crashed into the lake –