Artifact Read online

  TWO

  1.

  The gun blasted Joseph’s head into a thousand fragments, and some unimaginable time later – afloat, helplessly unmoving, shadows danced before my eyes and television voices drifted – lightly, trickling in from the transcendent, immaterial universe beyond the ache that became all that I was, I somehow ended up inside of a house. Awareness gathered within me, coming together with a surge of sensory perception that built as though I had reached out and turned up the volume of reality. A soft discomfort, of the kind that I may have felt if I stayed too long sitting in one place.

  I wasn’t sure if it was my house or not, so I kept quiet. I was lying on a soft nubuck leather couch, and as I sat up, pain jolted through my chest all the way to my toes. My hand instinctively grabbed the spot at which I believed the pain had originated, and an even more intense pain shot through my body. When my vision cleared, I looked down to see my torso taped crosswise with bandages – I could see wet parts where pus and blood seeped through. The blood ran like pins and needles down my side, and I tried damming it with my hand. The bandages covered my entire torso, and gray patches of roasted skin around the perimeter clashed with the white medical tape. When I held my hand an inch over the gauze, I could still feel the heat. I glanced at the end–table near my head and there was a bottle of Vicodin, a half used bottle of Silvadene and a glass of water – standard at–home treatment for burns.

  The wall–screen flickered infomercials into the rest of the house, which was dark. It was either early morning or late night, and the streetlight covered everything in a blanket of tired amber.

  I sat up and winced, feeling as if molten chains of filament still twisted beneath my skin.

  As I sipped the water, I thought about narrowing down what type of burn I had. I knew that it wasn’t electrical, given the type of medication I was using. If it were an electrical burn, I would have been on some sort of diuretic. This meant that it was either from a chemical exposure or direct flame. Which surprised me, because what little I did remember of the accident, I would have thought that it was an electrical event.

  The accident.

  Which accident? I suddenly remembered the encounter with Joseph and Patrick in the car. Something was very, very wrong.

  How did end up on the couch?

  We crashed into the lake, and then–

  –I was in this house.

  I remember watching the news earlier that night, but I had no memory of how I got from the back of Joseph’s car to the couch. I was trying to remember the headlines and lead stories when I noticed a pile of letters at the mail slot.

  I slowly worked myself off the couch and moved toward the front door. Every inch of my chest felt tight and on the verge of splitting.

  The first letter was from a bank. I still wasn’t sure if this were my home or not, but the receiving address said,

  Lance Kattar, 222 Calliope Street, New Mexico, 87081

  Joseph and Patrick called me Lance. I stepped outside and the numbers above the garage read, 222.

  I checked the envelope again, and confirmed that there wasn’t a city listed. Just a random address in New Mexico.

  I walked back inside and dumped the letters onto the couch. I methodically went through each one, greedily searching for any substance to my life – bits and pieces of who I could have been, fragments of trait–adjectives that I could piece together from what banks I owe, which organizations I belonged to, which subscriptions I held, or what sort of cards I received from relatives. Anything, really, that would jar loose the obstructed flow of identity and self. The first envelope contained information about my 401K contributions at the Center for Energetic Materials in Socorro, New Mexico.

  Which meant that I could have lived in Socorro, or any number of neighboring hamlets.

  I studied the letterhead. The Center for Energetic Materials.

  The next letter was from another bank. And the third was addressed to a place called the Prudentiacapex in New York – which didn’t have a return address.

  While moving as slowly as I could, I opened the envelope, but it was empty – Just a blank piece of paper neatly folded in thirds. There were at least a half dozen more envelopes, but they were all addressed to the same place in New York, with a blank piece of paper inside. I pushed the pile onto the floor and laid back, trying to gather some strength for a walk to the bathroom. My chest still smoldered, and the tight outer edges kept catching on the loose, fibrous curtilage of my bandage.

  Time passed. I held my chest, not wanting to upset the grafts on which the skin decided to heal, and when I came out of my reverie, the wall–screen flickered Bible passages above an address to a place that I was supposed to send donations. I flipped it off, grabbed my ointment and pain–killers, and made the arduous journey upstairs in hopes of finding a bed.

  There were three rooms – two of which seemed entirely unused, and the third was a mess, with what appeared to be my wardrobe scattered all over the floor; the bed was unmade, just as I probably left it the morning before the experiment.

  I was warm, so I opened the window to let the air in. Then I pulled off my clothes and lay down, settling into a nice, deep groove in the mattress, and the inflamed sensation around my burn eventually mellowed. The curtains were open, so the full moon spilled into the window. I wasn’t very tired. And like my mind normally does before sleep, it started racing through the events after waking up in the hospital. I couldn’t remember how I instantly ended up on my couch the moment Joseph’s car hit the water. The last thing I saw was Patrick covering his face as we were pulled toward the windshield, just before the water flooded the passenger cabin, and then–

  –I was there, on my couch.

  It should seem that my home would have evoked senses of comfort and memory, as I reinserted myself into a normal flow of things. I figured that artifacts from my life would spark some sort of familiarity, when the hospital and even the faces of people that I apparently knew would not.

  I thought about the fundamental structure of nightmares. I thought about the spinning artifact, the sounds of groaning metal, the dark milieu of flickering lights, and melting walls. Those memories were the clearest.

  The influx of questions wouldn’t stop until it reached the point when there were a thousand voices of the same man screaming over each other, competing for my attention. I couldn’t sleep. Some part of me kept endlessly repeating: You’ve slept enough. You’ve slept enough. You’ve slept enough. You’ve slept enough. You’ve slept enough. You’ve slept enough–

  2.

  Even though the room was fairly lit by the moon, I didn’t notice the puddle of transparent fluid leaking through my bandages until after the pain completely subsided. My burn was still irritated, but I was determined to put it out of my mind as much as I could. I absentmindedly scratched at the healthy spots around my chest, and to my horror, a chunk of skin peeled away with some of the gauze. I tried to press it back into place, but thin lines of blood seeped down my ribs onto the bed. Dismayed, I eased myself to the holo–mirror above my dresser and turned on the light. I could see that my skin became inflamed around the bandage, and a pink torrent of platelets poured out of the wound, directly through the layers of fabric. I took a few Vicodin before trying to catch some sleep, so I must have disrupted the thin film of freshly knit skin without noticing – when I removed the soiled bandages so that I could replace them with fresh ones, my skin came off with them in sheets. Up until that point, I had no real clue to the extent of the burn; the skin was pulling off, making wet Velcro sounds as I unwound myself.

  Surveying myself more carefully, my skin continued shedding, and I could see sinew and muscle which had tenderized since the hospital, purple hues which faded to the point where I wasn’t sure if I was seeing abstract layers of epidermis, glands or fennel pockets of fat, or simply shadows cast by my lamp.

  As I turned to a
ssess the damage, reconciling the fact that this horrible event was taking place without being able to register an inkling of pain, the marks that looked like fat seemed to transform, and if I pinched the skin around my love–handle, everything seemed entirely transparent. I initially thought that the holographic imager was malfunctioning.

  The whole time, dissected pommels of bone glistened with streaks of red, old horn lumped with yellow lipids, and dark red sinew stretched over an exposed segment of ribs. I frantically rewound the bandages back into place and added a layer of fresh ones. The only other thing I could think to do was call emergency paramedics. Hemorrhaging liters of oxygen more than I could spare, the blood ominously pooled around my feet, and the room spun away from me. My lower torso soaked through, and a giant paintbrush strip of red below my dresser abided me to the bed. And as I pressed the last strip of rust colored gauze back into place, I realized that I was in a very dismal state. The room finally lurched to the side, and I fell to the floor beside my bed, pulling a substantial amount of blanket with me as I tried to catch myself. The fresh gauze bounced on the floor and unrolled itself underneath the bed like a red carpet. I choked with panic. As the world began to slip away, I tried pressing the blanket into my chest to staunch the flow of blood. I looked around the room for something – anything – that could offer any sort of option, and then–

  –I saw myself standing at the holo–mirror, inspecting the three dimensional image of himself. It was as if I were looking back in time a few moments, as if reality were replaying itself, and the other me was unwinding his bandages, fumbling toward the horror that I just experienced.

  “Wait,” the words gurgled in my throat. “Don’t–”

  But I didn’t hear myself.

  I could see the whole moment play out again, just as it had a minute before.

  “Wait,” I choked, “Call the paramedics–”

  I still wasn’t paying any attention to myself. My face froze, looking at my third projection in the holo–mirror, as the exposed muscle writhed and twitched. “Listen to me!”

  But the other me carefully continued removing the bandages, and as he turned around, the burn on his chest was almost completely healed – there was no exposed muscle. No blood. No pus.

  I clutched at my own chest, which was torn in ragged patches – the light gradually dimmed, and I knew that I was going to die.

  The other me carefully picked up the roll of gauze and returned to the mirror, where he wrapped himself back up again.

  The room continued to darken, and the other me walked out of view toward the bathroom, completely oblivious to the wasted husk of himself that was bleeding to death beside the bed–

  3.

  –I pushed myself away from the bathroom faucet. Water spiraled into focus and then slipped down the drain, and I watched this happen through a refracted lens of memory. I studied my face in the mirror, and its reflection wore a mask of utter terror and confusion. Flinging the damp towel into the washtub, I frantically ripped the fresh bandages away from my chest, waiting to see once again the torn, shredded remains of that horrible wound, but it was fine – gnarled, pink, new scar–tissue tipped with white callous – only small patches of scabbed and unhealed skin.

  The memory of bleeding to death on the floor struck me, like falling from a great height. Everything came back the same way as smacking my skull onto something solid – the hollow thud of uncertainty about whether or not you were going to make it through the next few moments without brain damage – the moments just after that pulsating migraine sets, just before your tear filled rush toward the warm and comforting embrace of an adult – this time, though, before rushing back into the bedroom to find the empty shell of yourself lying in a pool of blood with your chest ripped open and cauterized, only–

  –I wasn’t there. Another me wasn’t by the bed, and there wasn’t a bloody trail to the dresser.

  I looked into the holo–mirror, hoping and at the same time dreading to see what I saw before. To my relief, I was fine – no nightmarish vision – no exposed muscles or organs. I looked back at the spot on the floor where I bled out, and then I rubbed my healed chest, remembering the other me seeing myself. The vertigo was dazzling.

  My thoughts were scattered. My understanding of the previous moments was gutted and fragmented.

  I kept skipping moments, seamlessly transferring from one experience to the next, when I was in the hospital, then I was crashing into the lake, then I was on the couch, and then I was in the bed, and then I was bleeding to death, and then I was in the bathroom, and then, and then, and then…

  As I looked between the spot next to the bed and the holo–mirror, where I could clearly envision the thick trail of blood, I began to speculate very seriously about how my psychological trauma may have been graver than I expected–

  4.

  I swiped the security–card and scanned my thumbprint. It was well before sunrise and the cleaning crew was still swapping out trash–bags in cubicle–row. When I walked into the lab, Alice was sitting at a desk in the corner pouring over an impressive stack of files. She was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and her dark hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail – eyeglasses hung precariously from her ears, beneath her chin. She looked up and said, “Lance.” Then again, “Jesus Christ, Lance – what the hell are you doing here? Are you alright?”

  “Maybe,” I replied. “I – I’m not sure. You have a minute?”

  “Of course, of course,” she quickly wiped the screen in her hands. “You should be at home in bed, resting.”

  She moved to the front of her desk and relocated several dictionary-sized stacks of paperwork from a chair onto the floor. I collapsed into my seat and let the anxiety of the past couple of hours retreat in her presence.

  5.

  My eyes drifted over the mess she called a desk, scanning the stacks of readout, memos and inner office mail that formed the landscape of her attention.

  “Am I interrupting anything?” I asked, as she poured coffee into a set of permanently stained cups. “You looked like you were onto something.”

  Alice shrugged. “No, no – just some supersymmetry. How are you feeling?”

  “I… fine,” I sighed. “I don’t know.” I nodded at the files on her desk. “What’s this?”

  “It’s some data from our accident,” she said, leaning back.

  “Yeah?”

  “We underestimated that thing, Lance. Badly.”

  I evaded the comment, unable to look her in the eyes. Underestimated certainly summed thing up accurately. But I knew what she was getting at – whatever happened that day, however many ways I could rationalize it, was my fault and mine alone. She was right, and I ignored her – we should have stopped after the first temperature spike. The memory of the artifact exploding in my face was still simultaneously foggy, and extremely visceral.

  “Whoever built this thing,” she continued, mercifully. “Engineered it all the way to the direction of particle spin – we’re talking some serious quantum computing power here. And the weirdest part? I can’t do anything to disrupt the properties of these atoms.” She took a sip from her coffee and shook her head. “It’s like this thing has molecules that were designed to resist nearly every possible disruption. I have no idea how that’s possible. There is some pretty interesting atomic behavior here, but–” She stopped, noticing my blank expression. “Nobody’s told you.”

  I shook my head.

  She smiled and passed me her tablet. I studied it for a moment, glad to have the distraction.

  It was readout of some magnetic dipole moments for atoms before and after a vibration. I smiled a bit, imagining Alice nuking the side of our tunneling microscope like a mad–scientist. It was interesting because before and after the vibration, the magnetic field of the artifact’s atoms remained exactly the same, perfectly maintaining their alignment. Alice was exci
ted because the directions in which atoms spin are typically so delicate, that the tiniest disruptions from the outside world can screw up the sensitive dimensions of these atoms. For some reason, they were acting like the quantum equivalent of irrational. “That’s pretty weird.”

  “Come on, Lance – that’s beyond weird. I mean, we need to start ripping this thing apart immediately–”

  “Joseph picked me up from the hospital earlier,” I said suddenly.

  “Joseph?” The grin on her face slipped away, replaced by a grim line of concern. I couldn’t pin the expression down, but it gave me pause. There was a hint of understanding, but it disappeared as soon as I noticed it.

  “He told me that something happened after the accident – that the stone somehow regressed to its original state. He said something about needing an algorithm.” I accepted that bringing this up was a gamble. Up until that moment, I wasn’t sure that anything I knew about the artifact was entirely accurate, including my earlier meeting with Joseph and Patrick – especially the details leading up to our climactic departure. I had as much memory of the algorithm sitting with Alice as I did in the car. This was a litmus test, in a way, to gauge just exactly how screwed up I was by her response.

  “Alice.” I leaned forward and set down the readout. “I need to know what happened in that room.”

  “Yes…” She pulled her glasses off and tossed them onto the desk. “Lance, I want you to know that I’m sorry. I meant to be the one to pick you up when you were discharged. I knew you were being let out, but…” She leaned back in her chair and took another sip from her coffee. “Well, but nothing. I should have been there.”

  I remembered her floating around my room like a ghost during those intermittent moments within that long dream.

  “I don’t know.” The memory of Patrick blasting Joseph’s head through the side window was still very fresh. “Maybe you not being there was a good thing.”

  She waited for me to continue, but I didn’t. I didn’t know where to start. So we both sat there, quietly sipping our coffee.