Artifact (10 page)

“Yeah, I understand. I understand you put a gun to my head–”

The last two strikes with the clipboard did it, and the kicking on the door grew to such intensity that I knew I finished at just the right time. I sank onto my haunches and stared blankly at the door. It didn’t make any sense.

MO–STACK

The door caught me on the forehead after the last kick, and I stumbled back. Patrick stepped into the room, head and shoulders rotating like a tank turret. His forehead was inflamed, and an angry red crust mottled his eyebrows around a large cut, still healing from when he smashed into the dash at the lake. The two suits followed him in and policed the room – looking into shelves, opening the bathroom door, and looking out of the window. Patrick knelt in front of me and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Lance. I wish things could have been different.”

“Don’t apologize to me,” I replied, feeling a cold resolution settle in the pit of my stomach. “As soon as I can, Patrick, I intend to finish what I should have done at the lake.”

“I was,” he frowned. “Confused. I apologize. I truly do…”

He stood and nodded to one of the suits, who produced a pair of handcuffs and knelt behind me. “This place is about to blow,” Patrick said. “And not only do we have to get you out of here, but we have to get you safe, secure and secluded.”

“Why, so you can torture the algorithm out of me?”

“The what?”

“The sequence you wanted. The algorithm that opens the artifact from Mars.”

“If you’re safe, then I don’t need it,” he said. “You’re the only thing that matters.”

“You keep saying that – what do you mean? And why the sudden change of heart?”

The two suits lifted me by the arms. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the world start to halo out again. “What is it?” I demanded.

“What is what?”

“The artifact,” I said. “Is it a weapon?”

He looked at me and arched his eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”

“Why do you want this thing so bad?” I asked.

He looked at his own feet, searching for the right answer. “Because we are lost without it. Without it, our lives are meaningless.”

I thought about that until the universe started to collapse into itself again. For some reason I thought about the violin. “Where are you taking me?”

“The only place I can be certain that you’ll be safe.” He said, “I’m taking you to the labs.”

“You know,” I said. “I was planning on heading that way myself.”

“Excellent.” He said, “We can ride together.”

“I hope it’s a lot smoother than our last ride.”

He nodded at one of the suits and said, “So do I.”

Before I slipped into another dimension of experience, I saw Patrick kneel and touch the word at the base of the door.

MO–STACK
.

I couldn’t figure out what that meant. The strange thing – the
really
strange thing was that, where I scraped all of the paint away, right where Patrick touched – it looked like a liquid crystal polymer forming an impression around the tip of his finger.

Like my hand used to do when I was a kid, as I pressed it against my father’s computer monitor. The thoughts flooded my mind, and darkness quickly followed them.

5.

The M–normal vault was switched off. All of the doors had been removed from their hinges and reconstituted for barricades, including the two pressurized airlocks. Of course, the artifact would still function in Earth atmosphere – it was a piece of rock. The sterilization process was more for our protection than for the artifact, because frankly, we didn’t know what it was. Simply bringing it here was a risk – what if it was in fact a stellar bomb or something, and we had unwittingly imported the very instrument of our destruction? We didn’t have the money to build an installation like this on Mars, nor could we export the personnel that would have had to live
there for an indeterminate amount of time. So we brought it here to us. We remained deadly cautious – hence the gray serialization room, air–shower and the Mars–normal atmospheric vault.

It seemed a little late for caution under the circumstances
.

Not many options at that point – we either figured out how to open the artifact, or we ended up as lunch for a couple hundred thousand zombies.

Or driven insane by that schizophrenic’s definition of time differential
.

Everything was open and exposed – the various barriers of safety had been removed, and the Martian artifact was just sitting
there in the open.

The emergency floodlights were still on throughout the facility. It was still dark outside, and the clocks on the wall seemed to have stopped at 2:10. There was no way of knowing what time it was.

If I had things right – and there was a good chance that I didn’t – Alice, Sid, the woman and her little girl were somewhere in the facility – that’s if the woman and the little girl hadn’t plummeted to their deaths after I shifted away.

Since I just arrived, I wasn’t exactly sure where I was in this timeline. But that was the farthest thing from my mind.

There it was softly humming in the dark. The artifact.

I walked into the M–normal vault and looked at the alien stone for a long time. I studied the deliberate grooves of its nontextual surface. The usual feeling of awe was absent. It was sitting atop the rotating platform that was switched off, which was surrounded by an impressive spectrum of monitoring equipment. The dais was positioned in the center of the vault, and besides the oscilloscopes, spectrometers, transceivers, microscopes, photo tachometers, infrared and ultraviolet cameras, the artifact was surrounded by three antennas at equal spacing. There were thick gnarls of black cord running from the bottom of the rotational dais to a terminal block of vacuum–sealed apertures, which distributed to an impressive set holographic screens in the observation tank. That’s where Alice was working when this thing did what it did.

The platform was retrofitted with a remote controlled shell of four crescent shaped electromagnetic coil packs that we called The Roller. This device allowed us to rotate the artifact in midair, on any axis we wanted. The object itself was currently nestled inside a foam case beside the Roller, which ceased to function after the power went out.

I knew the first step. I knew that I had to turn it point two five rotations per second at the designated axis in order to receive the next key. That was one of the last things I remember doing before I was blown across the room.

“Lance.” Alice stood in the hallway outside of the Gray Room, holding a flashlight. “Where have you been?”

I looked at the artifact a last time before leaving the vault.

“I don’t even know how to explain it anymore,” I said. “Suffice to say, I wasn’t here. I was somewhere else. Or some
time
else, I’m not quite sure.”

“You just ran away?” She asked through her teeth, “Left us?”

“Alice, it’s not like that. I was in some art history hellhole, then back at the hospital again.” I shrugged, “I’m presently in Patrick’s custody and on my way here.”

She shook her head. “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound?”

“Yeah Alice, I do–”

“We needed
you.” She said, “They almost died
.
”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

“You’re sorry,” she didn’t bother concealing the sneer in her voice. She shook her head and pulled some of the tension out of her neck.

“I told you – one minute I’ll be here, the next I’ll be–”

“Yeah, like the lake thing.”

“Yes…”

“Well, is it going to happen again?”

“Probably, yeah.” I said, “It doesn’t seem to be something I can control.”

She looked around the vault until her eyes settled onto mine. “I don’t remember coming here.” She said flatly, “I mean, I remember coming here with Sid when we were ripping all of the doors down for barricade material,” Her eyes closed for a moment, and the fatigue almost seemed to be winning. She was on the verge of breaking, barely holding things together. “This time I don’t remember coming here. I was with Sid nailing the doors up, and then I was here–” She pointed at the vault with Patrick’s gun. “And you were there…”

“I know,” I said, and gently squeezed her shoulder.

She covered my hand with hers and squeezed back. “What do we do?”

I pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes this time, and thought about it. “Is the building secure? Can those things get in here?”

“It’s about as secure as we can make it.”

“Then let’s get back to the filing department, pull everything we have about the artifact and figure out how to find that frequency again.”

6.

The little girl and the woman with the shaved head clung to each other in the hallway across from the filing room. Alice grabbed a few bottles of water from the lunchroom before we headed back upstairs, and passed one to Sid, who was leaning against a document trolley with his arms crossed. When I followed Alice into the room, he clenched his jaw and shook his head. After he finally got around to pressing me about where I went, I told him everything.

“This isn’t real,” he said, arching an eyebrow.

“I don’t know.”

“And we’re just figments of your imagination?”

“I don’t know…”

“What does your imagination have to say about my wife?” He looked at Alice. “What about that little girl’s father? He was just some fantasy?”

“Relax.” Alice said. “He’s not saying anything like that.”

“That’s exactly
what he’s saying.”

Alice crossed her arms and looked away.

Sid turned to the woman from the truck, “How does that make you
feel? Was your boyfriend some sort of nothing–?”

“That’s enough,” I said.

“I want to know. I want you to hear her say it–”

“He wasn’t my boyfriend,” She said suddenly. A few tears rolled down her cheek before she could catch them, and she glared at Sid with naked judgment. After a few beats, she wiped her eyes, rubbed the stubble on her head and shrugged. “He was just some guy who saw me running and picked me up.”

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.