Artifact (25 page)

I knew it all along – I never woke up.

Whatever happened in that lab, whatever caused the artifact to react that way, blowing me across the M–vault, I was still dealing with it. I thought again about the conversation I had with Alice in my bed earlier. Maybe my body still lay unconscious in the lab, as EMS technicians furiously tried to keep blood pumping into my brain.

It became necessary at that point to mentally trace the steps from my house to here. I remember coming into existence in my bedroom, where Alice and I constructed the barricade, only to find the gun that I told her about was not in the closet – she must have grabbed it and decided to take her chances on the street. I went downstairs to find nearly every single zombie decapitated – hundreds upon hundreds of headless corpses could be seen in every direction. I remember deciding to follow the trail of dead bodies toward Socorro, which was only a few kilometers down the highway. And then new memories flooded my thoughts – memories of the faceless Lance that rescued me in a tomb, memories of giant savrataurs ripping Patrick in half…

So I followed the bodies.

There were never less than a dozen cracks in the sky at one time – and sometimes the plummeting chunks were obstructed by meteors that were burning up in the atmosphere.

This was Ragnorak.

This was New Testament, Book of Revelation stuff.

The end of the world as I knew it.

Rounding an overpass, I suddenly had a clear view of the two highway exits into Socorro, which were choked with piles of burning vehicles and hordes of shambling corpses. Downtown Socorro was stretching plumes of smoke and high rises toward the perforated sky.

I glanced behind me to see how the stragglers were fairing – scattered zombies that missed out on all the headless fun continued following me – there were still hundreds of them, but they were slow moving and far away enough not to pose any immediate threat.

I saw something roll in the distance. At first I thought it was just another chunk of the sky, but at second glance my brain froze.

I ducked down behind a guard rail, just as a monster the size of storage container slid off the roof of a building not far from where I hid, quickly moving away from me. I tried to see where it was going, but it was moving too fast.

Cold sweat ran down my chest and back. I did not
want
to come across one of those things in the open.

I heard the sound of concrete, brick, wood and mortar groan under pressure a few blocks away, and I turned in time to see another one, larger than what was perched on the house between the overpass. This one shoved a building aside like it was a child’s toy – large fragments of wood and stone exploded into a pyroclastic cloud, obscuring the thing from view. I could see by the mirage of its shadow bouncing around inside the dense cloud that it was massive.

I held my breath as the cloud of debris washed over me, very much not wanting to move.

I noticed that the pack of zombies was starting to catch up, as did the giant monster. Its head rotated toward the crowd of stumbling corpses, pulling currents of dust clouds in its wake as it moved. It ponderously, though deceptively fast, crawled over the two intervening buildings, smashing them flat until it was in the roadway with the zombies. It snatched the closest one, pulled its head off and then tossed the body over its massive shoulder – the headless corpse disappeared somewhere in the distance. The monster systematically ripped the heads off of the zombies one by one, popping them into its mouth.

I heard an earth shattering explosion, and at first I thought that a portion of the sky crashed close by, but I was able to turn in time to see another giant monster belting the loudest, most grotesque roar that I ever heard in my life, only a couple meters away from me. My hands instinctively went to my ears.

Time to go.

I stepped over the guard–rail and made my way down the steep slope to the street below. I made a beeline toward the closest structure, and as soon as I immersed myself in the shadow of the buildings, a pair of hands grabbed the back of my collar and pulled me into a doorway.

“Quiet–” A man’s voice hissed.

I stopped fighting immediately. As far as I knew, the zombies didn’t talk.

The shadow over the alleyway suddenly cleared, and I could hear the giant, leathery sound of crocodile skin slide away from us. I looked out of the doorway just as a massive tail the length of a city bus disappeared behind the roof, followed shortly by another earthshaking roar.

I turned to see another Lance, the little girl named Sarah and the woman Kate.

“I was expecting you,” I said.

“I know…”

“Did you guys get the generator going?”

“We did.”

“What now…?” I whispered.

“Now nothing,” he said quietly. “Just stay still.”

The woman and the little girl each placed a hand on one of his shoulders.

“Mo stack,” he said. “Take us to the labs.”

4.

The entire world suddenly felt like a singularity crunch – everything was imploding, crashing around us from all sides.

We moved through the hallway, trying our best to ignore the bloody streak of handprints that covered the entire length of the wall. There were puddles of blood everywhere, and we thankfully hadn’t encountered any savrataurs along our somber path. We carefully moved past gaping holes in the ceiling and walls, which appeared to have been left by something massive – knowing that at any second we could be ripped through the other side, dragged into a far, unseen corner where the monsters could have their way with us.

The M–vault was messing with this universe’s interpretation of Planck’s constant – the walls were simultaneously melting and solidifying – oscillating back and forth between different states – and I couldn’t even begin to imagine what that meant. I knew that it wasn’t good.

It seemed like the deeper we went into the facility, and the closer we got to the artifact, the more it seemed that energy was being drained out of the environment around us. Light was stretching – growing redder to the point that everything was slowly and incrementally going black. Sarah suddenly grew dizzy and collapsed. Kate and I stopped.

“W – what’s happening?” She rasped.

“I don’t know.” I gathered Sarah into my arms and started moving again. “Alice and Sid must be following the algorithm – they must have gotten the Roller going.”

Gravity seemed to change too, the center of which would briefly pull harder toward the artifact than the Earth, and then it would go back again. This pull would happen suddenly, several times almost knocking us off our feet.

I tried to focus on the here and now.

We turned down a new hallway and stopped in our tracks, finding it full of headless corpses. There was no other way around. The floodlights were working, but something was stretching their frequency thin, canceling what light there was out of our visible spectrum. It was darker here – almost pitch black – and we carefully picked our way over the corpses, trying our best not to think of them for what they were.

I glanced around the hall and picked my route through the darkness. I strafed my eyes back and forth, snatching what particles of light I could, hoping it would be enough to guide me through. I was also hoping that those corpses were indeed dead.

Reality was getting fuller. The walls closed in on us, and then instantly retracted. It was as if nature didn’t know how to handle itself anymore. Natural law and quantum theory proceeded to fail in this place, and I only hoped that it would hold on long enough for us to make it to the Clean Room.

There was a worst possible case scenario that I had to consider – what if the reason reality seemed to be ripping apart was because the algorithm was wrong – what if by following the artifact’s instructions, we actually destroyed ourselves and this reality?

The artifact and I have waited a long time for this. A very long time. How I came to this conclusion, I wasn’t entirely sure. There was something about the process of gathering the other parts of me that made some things a bit clearer.

Kate and I reached the turn of the next hallway and made our way toward the Clean Room, finally clearing the pile of bodies.

Patrick said that the artifact was a schematic – 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. The reports I read in the vault, however, said that the artifact was designed to act as a component storage device for that very same worldwide Lexicon. Patrick went on to say that the whole purpose of opening the artifact was to seal an exchange with that Lexicon, which was basically a beam of light that continuously looped throughout a network of satellites that were in low Earth orbit.

I knew that none of it was real – but I knew that everything was still very functionally certain. I knew that
MO–STACK
was a type of operating system.

Million dollar question.

No lifelines.

If I had to guess, I would say that when Alice and I were initially trying to open the artifact, we created some sort of connection with this supposed Lexicon. But something unintended happened. There was an unforeseeable event – an electrical surge – and our minds
,
which were incidentally scrambled beyond conceivable repair
,
were suddenly uploaded into the device.

Everything thereafter had been one fragmented movement towards waking up again. The artifact was some sort of advanced computer that was designed by the CEM and subsequently placed on Mars shortly after its completion.

Final answer. Tell me what I won.

But that didn’t explain any ancient civilization. It didn’t explain the fact that this thing was built with technology that we weren’t capable of yet.

What was I missing?

I couldn’t shake a dark feeling in the back of my mind that whispered – more like screamed from a distance – that there was something else happening here. Something far more intricate than our minds being trapped in a prism of various realities. Something that sent shivers up my spine.

I could feel it then – but the answers remained elusive. I felt as if I had been waiting for an infinity of infinities for that moment – to finally be able to open a gateway into the adjacent universe. What did those feelings mean? Where did they come from?

I looked around. We reached the cubicles near the door that had the white decal – the door itself was gone, which was fortunate because I no longer had my access card for the key–pad. We instantly recognized the shapes of a few pitiful corpses scattered around the shadows, and on the other side of the room was the desk where I first encountered Alice drinking coffee. There was no going back.

Behind us, there was a petrified jungle of shadows filled with nightmares. Somewhere in front of us was the artifact.

I lifted Sarah onto my shoulder – unable to continue carrying her in a cradle. We moved toward the opposite hallway, and suddenly disturbed a lone savrataur that was nesting in the corner. It screamed and scurried toward the vault.

My legs were tense and shaky – I was praying to whatever was listening that those
giant
savrataurs – the big ones – were somewhere else.

“Do you want me to take her?” Kate asked quietly.

“No, I’m okay,” I rasped. “You just keep an eye out for those things.”

Reality kept going dark then snapping back into focus, making me flinch. We were close. The Clean Room was at the end of the hall.

I set Sarah’s unconscious body onto the floor.

5.

“Wait here,” I whispered.

I made my way down the hallway, immediately noticing the flickering blue light spreading over the wall opposite the door. I moved into the Clean Room and my eyes were instantly drawn to the artifact, which was suspended inside the magnets, gently tumbling within the Roller’s fluctuating polarities.

I stepped through the airlock, which stopped working when Alice and Sid tore all the doors down and used them for barricades. I walked into the M–normal vault and finally heard the artifact’s low hum.

I approached the dais, flicking my eyes at the observation tank, noticing that it was empty. The light was off inside, but I could clearly see the glow of holographic screens play on the wall opposite the glass.

“Alice…?” I called into the darkness.

Nothing.

I approached the rotation platform and flipped the image relay, which allowed me to see the observation tank’s screens displayed on the wall behind the artifact.

I heard a soft hiss of breath escape something from behind the platform. My eyes drifted to the sound, falling on a crumpled form in the corner.

I approached it, and stopped. My heart fell, while the rhythmic blue light dropped his normally red hair to a deep brown. “Sid…”

A large pool of dark blood spread around his crumpled body. I waited, hoping to see some sign of life, hoping even more that he wasn’t a reanimated corpse. It was hard to tell whether or not he was moving because of the dim blue light that was blurring everything with shadow.

“Sid,” I ventured again.

He lifted his head. “Stay back.”

Relieved, I dropped to his side, not wanting to touch him, afraid that I would somehow upset the delicate thread by which he hung. He tried shoving me away, but he couldn’t summon the strength. I could see that he had been shot several times, and I counted at least six tiny holes scattered in a loose grouping between his shoulders.

“Hurts…” He coughed and spat blood onto the floor.

Shot six times.

“What happened?”

“Alice.” His voice was so quiet that I had to lean in to hear him. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I knew he said
Alice
, but I couldn’t attach her name to the number of holes scattered across his back. The connection didn’t make sense to me. “Alice did this?”

He nodded. “She asked me to see if the artifact was still in the case, and then she–” He coughed hard until his breath leveled out. “Thirsty… shoulda took my chances at camp Ripley.”

His voice trailed off, and the ghost of a smile passed his lips.