Artifact Read online

  “I can’t tell you, silly,” she said. “It’s much easier to just show you.”

  I moved into the dark room with my fists up, as the light flickered brighter and brighter, as it built itself into something else. The room was empty – Alice was gone. The sound of bending metal suddenly filled the room again, and then it invaded my head. I turned to leave, but like before the handle was missing. I took a step back, covered my ears, and tried kicking the door open. The vibrato made my hair stand on end. I kicked and kicked and kicked and–

  –I stopped. My last kick chipped away some of the paint at the base of the door. I could see a bright, glowing symbol. I dropped to my knees and clawed with my fingers until the paint peeled away. I ripped and pulled and clawed until I could eventually make out a letter.

  The sound of groaning metal intensified, and I could feel that my ears were bleeding again.

  I got to my feet, took a few steps back, and then threw all of my weight against the door, hoping to blow it off its hinges.

  The last thing I saw before the light enveloped me – skewed slightly beneath the peeled paint, was a bright, glowing letter M–

  3.

  The M stayed with me. The rest – the hospital room, the door, the bending metal – was replaced by rushing water.

  The lake began pouring through the driver side window, and quickly filled the inside of the car. Joseph’s body jostled in the driver’s seat, as the pressure in the cabin equalized with the lake. Patrick tried to push himself away from the dash, but he seemed disoriented, and a large gash split its way across his forehead. I thought about leaving him there to drown, but I realized that I needed answers. I reached down and pulled his muscular frame to the back seat by his collar.

  “Take a deep breath!” I yelled.

  “Is he dead?” Patrick mumbled, pointing at the other half of Joseph’s head.

  While the water was initially slow on impact, it was rushing exponentially faster. And then, in an instant, the inside of the car was completely submerged and pressurized. I pushed the door open, and pulled Patrick to the beach. It only took a few seconds before my chest started to burn, until my head breached the surface of the water.

  Rainbow swirls of oil, brake fluid, coolant and gasoline bloomed in the water several meters away from the dock. I could hear faint sirens in the distance.

  Patrick collapsed onto his back, dazed, and gingerly inspected a deep cut on his forehead.

  I took the gun from his hand, and pressed it against his head. “Explain.”

  “Put the gun down, Lance.”

  “What’s going on – why did you shoot Joseph?”

  “He was compromised…”

  “Compromised.” I echoed, “What does that mean?”

  He propped himself on his elbows. “You have to get out of here.”

  The sirens localized somewhere to the west, and then grew louder.

  “I don’t know what’s happening. Reality keeps skipping back and forth – nothing makes any sense!”

  “You have to go, Lance!” Patrick yelled.

  “Go where? How?”

  “I don’t know, but you have to go. You’re not safe here – and my job is to keep you safe.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Patrick, that’s a load of bullshit – are you insane?” I leaned the gun into his head and clenched my jaw. “You put this gun against my head, just like this. You remember?” It took every part of me not to pull the trigger. “Make me safe? Explain how that makes sense.”

  “Because I may have been compromised too,” He sighed, brushing the sand out of his collar. “Listen, I don’t have time to explain, they’re going to be here any minute. But you have to keep working, you understand?”

  “No, I don’t understand.”

  “Take the gun and go.”

  I stood looking into his eyes, searching for an answer that I knew wasn’t there.

  “Did I find something? Are they trying to cover something up? What, Patrick – what is it!?”

  “Did you find something?” He repeated, “What the hell happened, Lance? How damaged are you?”

  “What do they want? Did I find out something I wasn’t supposed to know?”

  He looked back at the sirens. “They want you, Lance. They want you in pieces.” He rolled to his knees. “I don’t know where they came from. I don’t know why. I just know that they’re here, and that they want you terminated. They could have been piggy backing on the artifact’s frequency, or they could have come from something else,” He took a deep breath. “Just keep working. Keep digging for answers. But you have to run now. You have to go.”

  He got to his feet. “I will try to hold them off for as long as I can, but you have to go – now!”

  I stepped into him, pulled the hammer, and pointed the gun at the back of his head. “Give me a reason why I shouldn’t. Two seconds.”

  He turned to answer, but something else in the water caught his eye. I looked to see what it was, and at the end of a trail of rainbow colored oil, the intact part of Joseph’s head rose out of the lake. His remaining eye locked onto mine. The other half of his head was a gaping flap of skin and empty space – he was obviously dead, but something was animating his body. Something was allowing the empty shell that was Joseph to wade through the water toward the beach.

  Patrick stepped between Joseph’s corpse and I, which suddenly lurched out of the water and reached for me.

  “Because I’m the only chance you have,” Patrick said, shoving me in the opposite direction.

  I stumbled back, trying to tear my eyes away from Joseph’s body as it staggered out of the water.

  “Go!” Patrick screamed, pulling a hooked blade out of his boot.

  Tires skidded to a halt in the roadway nearest the beach, and men in suits poured out of a series of black vehicles. They pulled guns out of hidden compartments in their clothing and began sprinting toward me.

  The last thing I saw before I turned to run was Patrick grappling with Joseph’s headless corpse in the oily surf.

  I couldn’t think. I couldn’t do anything but run.

  4.

  I crashed into a stainless steel wall with handles. The lake was gone, replaced by a cramped walkway that was stacked floor to ceiling with alphabetized filing cabinets. Alice flicked through a cabinet, occasionally pausing to pull out a folder and toss it onto her trolley.

  I was soaked, and in my right hand was a silver handgun.

  I collapsed against the filing cabinets and let myself slide to the floor.

  “Three antennas at equal spacing around the platform,” Alice said, finishing a sentence that I didn’t hear. She looked at where I was standing, and then traced the wet streak on the cabinets to the floor. “Lance!”

  She dropped the files and collapsed at my side, reaching out to me. After taking in my wet clothes, my heavy breathing, she pulled her hand back, confused.

  “What happened?” She saw the gun in my hand and stumbled back onto her haunches. Her eyes grew wide and serious, fixed on what I had clenched in my fist. “Why do you have a gun, Lance?”

  I couldn’t do anything except breathe. It was too much – all of it. All of it was just too much.

  “Something is… is wrong,” I stammered, out of breath. “I’ve been hallucinating… or something. It’s all backwards, Alice. Nothing makes any sense.”

  “What, Lance? What doesn’t make sense?” She cautiously knelt at my side again and allowed herself to brush a strand of hair out of my eyes. “Is this the weird thing that was supposed to happen? Seeing things?”

  “I – I don’t know,” I sighed.

  “That sounds,” She thought for a moment, “pretty weird.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, and I saw her eyes move again to the gun in my hand.

  “It’s Patrick’s.” I corrected myself, �
��was Patrick’s gun.”

  “Who’s Patrick?”

  “Chief of Security Operations on Mars, Patrick.”

  She stared, waiting for me to elaborate.

  I set the gun down on the floor and stumbled to her trolley. I tried collecting what I was going to say in a way that would make sense, but I couldn’t. I flicked through some folders, choosing my words. “He and Joseph picked me up from the hospital today,” I said slowly. “At least I think it was today.”

  I turned toward Alice and leaned against the trolley. I rolled my eyes, resigning myself to sounding like a lunatic, failing for the millionth time to organize sense. “Patrick shot Joseph when I started asking too many questions about the artifact. He wanted an algorithm of some kind.” I studied her, trying to see how she was taking it all.

  “Patrick shot Joseph?”

  I nodded. “In the head.”

  “How did you get his gun?”

  I shrugged, “I took it from him.” I started breathing heavily, pacing back and forth, and grabbing the air for understanding and control. “His head was gone, Alice. Patrick blew his head clean off. His head, Alice – it was just gone, but he was still walking around–” I stopped, trying as hard as I could to concentrate, studying the random folders on Alice’s trolley. “Patrick told me that Joseph was compromised – whatever that means – that he may have been compromised too. Black cars pulled up. Men in suits got out and started running after me,” I shrugged, still breathing heavily. “Then I was here.”

  “So,” she said, opening her hands. “Between our walk from my desk and here – within the span of time it took us to ride the elevator, make a pit stop at my office, without me noticing, you were somehow transported to another time, where you watched Patrick shoot Joseph in the head, crashed into a lake, picked up Patrick’s gun, and then got chased by government spooks?”

  “Alice, please–”

  “And the conversation we had about the coffee?”

  “That happened before–”

  “This morning?” She said, “We had that conversation like, fifteen minutes ago!”

  “Yesterday morning,” I shook my head impatiently. “Listen, everything is fragmented. I was talking to you about the coffee, we were walking to the filing department, and then I was pulling Patrick out of Joseph’s car in the lake!” I brushed leftover bits of sand out of my hair. “I keep bouncing between moments. One moment I’ll be here talking with you, the next I’ll be somewhere else, and then I’ll be back here again.”

  She stared at me, without emotion – without fear, terror, or any other expression within that gradient of extremes. No accusations of insanity. No nothing. She pursed her lips and started looking very seriously at the gun lying next to her feet. I knew what she was thinking, and maybe she was right – perhaps it would be better if she had that gun in her hand than me.

  I crossed my arms. “If you have any ideas, please tell me. Because I don’t know what’s happening. Since I woke up paralyzed in the hospital this morning – or whenever – I’ve been on this hyper vigilant roller coaster of one fucked up situation after another. It’s like I died and ended up in some epistemological hell.” I shrugged and closed my eyes. “I don’t know if I’ve lost my mind, if I’m dead, if I’m dreaming…”

  I reopened them, and Alice had the gun pointed at my chest.

  “I just – I just want your help, Alice.” I raised my hands, hearing an edge in my voice. “If you want to call the police, if you want to – to shoot me, then go ahead. But I’m scared, and I don’t know what to do.”

  She finally said, “You think this has something to do with the accident in the lab?”

  I kept my hands up, and nodded slowly. “Definitely.”

  “Well,” she shifted her balance and readjusted her grip on the gun. “Are you hallucinating now?”

  “I don’t know, probably. Would you be able to tell me if you were a hallucination or not?”

  “As far as I know, yes.”

  “Alright,” I said. “If I can trust that you would tell me if you were a hallucination or not, I guess that I’m not hallucinating.”

  Alice nodded, but she didn’t take the gun off my chest. “Other than Patrick shooting Joseph, and Joseph’s headless corpse trying to grab you – what, uh, else have you been seeing?”

  I told her about the burn on my chest, bleeding to death by the bed, about the blackouts, and the sudden shift of different realities.

  “Do you have a burn on your chest right now?”

  I lifted my shirt, and nothing. Not even pink scar–tissue. It was healed. Alice slowly lowered the gun.

  “I saw your chest at the hospital.” She took a tentative step forward and lightly brushed my skin, looking for any sign of previous trauma or injury, and finding nothing. “This isn’t possible.”

  “Neither is the fact that I’m dripping wet and suddenly carrying Patrick’s gun.”

  “Yeah.” She nodded slightly. She lifted the gun and said, “I’m going to hold onto this”

  I didn’t mind.

  Alice opened her mouth, but hesitated.

  “If you have something to say then say it.”

  “If I’m a hallucination,” she rolled her eyes. “Have you considered neurological damage?”

  “Yeah, Alice… I have.”

  “You were blown clear across the room – your visor was completely smashed and we had to put you out with a fire extinguisher. You were in a very, very bad state.”

  “I know I was,” I said impatiently. “I know.”

  “It could be brain damage. I technically may not even be real, but in the context of your hallucination, how the hell would I be able to know the difference? As far as I know, I’m real.” She waved at the filing cabinets, the floor, the gun, me and her. “I’m right here, fully aware.”

  “Brain damage,” I said. It seemed so self–evident and so obvious that I don’t know why I hadn’t considered it a bit more seriously. It crossed my mind, but I had been off balanced with everything since waking in the hospital, that I failed to give it more thought.

  “I apologize,” Alice said. “I don’t mean to be so frank, but you said it yourself – you’re hallucinating. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that something is obviously wrong.”

  “No,” I replied quietly. “It’s okay.”

  “We technically would have shared at least two spells now. The coffee changing into whatever the hell it was, and then suddenly appearing together in the hallway by the elevator.” She looked at the filing cabinets. “Come to think of it, I can’t remember walking into this room. We were just suddenly here.”

  We stood in silence for a few moments. “What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I should probably go back to the hospital – talk to a doctor.”

  “You think that’s a good idea?”

  “No,” I said. “But I don’t know what else to do. If it’s brain damage, I have to take care of it, right?”

  “That would probably be the smartest thing to do.”

  “I just,” I hesitated. “I don’t want to go back there…”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been there twice already. Both times, you were with me. You led me into one of the rooms and then proceeded to melt the world away.”

  “What…?”

  “Both times, you just… tricked me. Suckered me into a trap, where you could bombard me with disturbing imagery and loud noises until my ears bled and I blacked out.”

  “That sounds… extreme,” She said, absolutely lost. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.” I said. “Like you said, I could be experiencing the result of some serious brain–trauma.” I thought about it, feeling completely foolish that I hadn’t come to that conclusion earlier. “In fact,” I said
. “I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  5.

  I couldn’t say how, but Alice and I found ourselves walking back through the double doors near cubical–row, heading back toward the elevators.

  “Want me to go with?” Alice asked, matching my pace. When we reached the elevator, she punched the up arrow.

  “How long do we have until someone comes to collect the artifact?”

  “A couple of days,” she said. “Maybe a week.”

  “I want you to find those notes. I know it was an algorithm, but I don’t remember what kind. If I had to guess, I would say it had something to do with rotation, angular–frequency, spectral output frequency… stuff like that.”

  She pulled a strand of hair behind her ear. “I will.”

  I waited a moment, imagining what type of person she would have been to me if I could simply remember what she was like before the accident. I really hadn’t given much thought to the extent of our friendship. Were we just friends? Colleagues? Was there something more to it? Would I have simply liked it to be something more?

  “Good luck, Lance.” She gave me a few dollars, and a set of car keys.

  “Thanks.” I looked at the keys for a few seconds, a bit embarrassed. “Which one is yours?”

  She turned to leave. “The only car in the lot.”

  “There is one thing that’s been bothering me,” I said.

  “And what is that?”

  “Patrick.” I stuffed the keys into my pocket. “When he and Joseph picked me up from the hospital, I mentioned something about there being copies of the algorithm.”

  I searched her face, looking for that spark of understanding or comprehension, but it wasn’t there.

  “He said we had direct orders from the top that I was the only person authorized to have access to that process,” I continued. “That the data from the artifact was too important to risk losing to the wrong people.”

  She arched her eyebrow. “We do have backups of the algorithm. We have tons of documentation, audio and video – even the data from our accident was recorded. We’re just missing the last minute corrections you scribbled into your notes. Is that what you think he meant? Your notes?”