Artifact (28 page)

A violin is meaningless without its violinist.

A ceiling mural is meaningless without its artist.

A body is worthless without its mind.

The pattern that was copied onto the Lexicon the very moment the uplink was established was an algorithm for a new body as well.

Four kilometers below the Martian surface, the artifact pulled amino acids and carbon from the massive tanks surrounding its pod, and started to build a body from within, beginning with the hypothalamus and the central nervous system, and then stimulated the spread of special XNA sequenced nerves throughout the rest of the pod. The Lexicon and the Martian artifact began to experience a fragmenting of their perception – an out of focus optical phenomenon, like the vision of three thousand satellites scattered across the solar system happening simultaneously. The clearest of those images lay half completed in a tank of amino acids, four point eight kilometers below the Martian surface. I felt myself coming back into existence.

3.

Dumping its bursting data cache into the Martian artifact, which had insistently started referring to itself as Lance, the Lexicon pulled the copy of his consciousness from the packets of XNA inside the pod on Mars – this process took on a more meaningful, symbolic form for me, as I recalled the half completed, faceless clone of myself that rescued me from the bottom of a shaft, when it found me helpless and handcuffed to a wheelchair. That faceless, incomplete version was stored away in the giant cave of information during the initial, failed uplink. Now, as it channeled its data through the new
uplink, the process that referred to itself as the Lexicon disappeared altogether – it tightened itself into a frequency that responded only to Lance.

I could still hear the echo of it though, in the space behind my forehead, where I was spurred into a sudden burst of cell division that replicated throughout the pod, a space between the set of synthetic eyes that could cycle through every single spectrum of light. I was rewritten down to the very last detail, and my identity inflated like an expanding universe, encapsulating the very expression of purpose.

The nearly finished nerves within the pod were not simply nerves, but scanning sensors loaded with cell sized computers that were primed to be dispersed throughout my system – which I already started thinking of as my body – the moment there was any sort of foreign invasion, and destroy it. The Lexicon integrated my system, and then pulled itself back so that it could resume its endless transmission into the stars, restoring all of my memories before it went. I suddenly remembered everything – I
knew
even more. Impossibly more.

It wrote within me one last thing before restarting its vigil, should I forget my purpose and the very reason I existed in the first place. It was the only thing the designers of the Lexicon could do to thank me for saving the very concept of what it meant to be human.

A command as old as humanity itself – it stitched into my very soul, burned it there forever, like an instinct–

PROTECT OUR KNOWLEDGE.

And the artifact, which was now tuned to the frequency of a man named Lance, poured itself into one last reality.

4.

I was aware of being suspended in some sort of gel. In something that had been my entire existence for five hundred years without my understanding. And I suddenly grew more
aware. It was a lot like realizing that you overslept. And soon there came the sudden realization that I never
moved
until just then – that I had never seen anything
real
before, let alone used my eyes.

I was suspended in a purple solution, and packets of data in my XNA kept quietly feeding me information, telling me that I was afloat in a pod filled with self–constructing antibacterial emollients. This pod remained mostly empty for the better part of the last five hundred years – it wasn’t until I made contact with the Lexicon that the pod started pulling resources from massive tanks of amino acids and carbon in order to construct a physical body. I couldn’t really see anything, but my body kept reading the environment, constantly whispering in the back of my head, streaming information as threads branched off into my neural net to learn and translate what those readings were.

I knew that wires were inserted into my synthetic equivalent of a cornea, which ran directly into my optical nerve. Wires threaded into my nose and mouth – wires everywhere – I felt weight on my fingertips as my senses told me that there were wires coming out of them too.

The pod opened a tiny trap below me, which drained the gel.

I felt a chill as the pod cracked open, and tiny nanoparticles immediately started exciting themselves, raising my body temperature.

“Are you alright, sir?” Someone yelled. The voice sounded very much like an English butler.

The wires detached themselves from my body, and I felt the tickle of fluids in my throat – before I had a chance to cough it up, the microscopic machines inside diverted the liquid away from my respiration, and started secreting it through my pores. Just as fast as it arrived, the choking fluid in my throat disappeared. Other functions kicked in, and air flow ventilated through my pores instead of the orifices in my face – making breathing even easier.

“I’ve been trying to contact you for some time.” The voice was out of breath. “But my systems have been severely limited, and when you finally did make contact, it was like trying to communicate through a wall thirty meters thick.”

I pulled myself out of the pod and collapsed onto the floor. I observed my surroundings for the first time. It was an oval shaped amphitheater made of tungsten carbide, superheated polycarbonate glass, titanium and plastic. All of this information was fed to me through packets of data in my XNA, which reached endlessly out to the world through fractals of synapse. Delicate blue lights threaded along the wall, midline between the obsidian glass floor and the white ceiling.

“Mo Stack,” I croaked, not recognizing my own voice. I suddenly realized that I never heard it before.

“Yes sir,” he said solemnly.

“Where’s Alice?”

“She left the installation some time ago, sir.”

I inspected the outside of my pod and wiped bluish green gel off of an etching along the side. This thing had been my home for five hundred years, as I slowly constructed myself out of a microchip the size of a blood cell.

L.A.N.C.E.

Limbic and Neural Cybernetic Entity

“Mo Stack,” I said again. “Will you please begin construction of a few terrycloth robes and some furniture?”

“Right away, sir…”

“You should be able to find a detailed list of the things I want in my files.”

“Yes, sir.”

My pod looked burned up, as if there was some sort of permeated electrical malfunction. My hand passed over my chest, searching for a burn scar that wasn’t there. I glanced over at Alice’s pod, and it was pristine and empty.

I could feel conflicting emotions of pain, triumph, pride and shame reaching out to me through the void of the solar system’s long dormant Dyson sphere. She must have severed contact some time ago – I could only detect the faint ghost of her presence.

I got to my knees and moved to the platform, which immediately started to ascend the four kilometer shaft.

“I tried contacting you,” Mo Stack explained, “but I was severely disabled.”

“Yeah, I know – I got your message.”

“I’m terribly sorry, sir. There was nothing I could do – the
witch
overrode my security protocols and severed all contact–”

“It’s okay,” I said quietly. “It’s okay…”

“I – I don’t understand why this happened, sir.” he said, lost in thought.

“There’s a detailed report in my files.”

The voice came from everywhere at once – my XNA whispered to me that
MO–STACK
was an artificially intelligent avatar for the facility. “Well, I have to say that you handled yourself quite well, sir.”

I shook my head and rode in silence.

To his credit, Mo Stack did try to warn me about Alice. When he couldn’t communicate directly, after Alice disabled his user interface, he tried writing messages in the sand. He attempted several times to send me obvious red flags – Goya’s painting of Saturn devouring his son was a bit too subtle – Mo Stack thought it would have been clever to instead overload me with images of Alice devouring me. He also tried inserting lines of code into the door at the hospital. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon his router in the vault that he was able to communicate with me directly, albeit severely muted. The way Mo Stack would later describe it, “like trying to use Morse code in sign language with my hands tied behind my back, sir. Dreadfully difficult.”

I reached the ground floor of the facility and was greeted by a spectacular view of orange colored clouds spreading wide, crowding the horizon, dipping into the recesses of distant mountains. The muted sun reached its zenith several hands above Olympos, and the shadow of the mountain overhead spread like a merciful canopy across the Martian badlands. The young, terraformed atmosphere appeared almost pink. It was known as the Red Planet
.
I could just make out the tiny oval shape of Phobos breaching the lower part of the sky. In every spectrum of light, with the same sun that touched the ground that I had never set foot on before, the world was beautiful and ancient. I could truly and accurately say that it was the most spectacular thing I had ever seen.

The platform quietly eased to a halt. In great geometric calligraphy, a message cut into the polycarbonate glass obscured the world in ominous fragments.

YOUR CHOICE
?

My choice…

Alice’s final question.

She asked me that once in the hospital, while I was paralyzed and trapped inside the confines of my subconscious.

She asked me if I ever woke up, would I go back to Earth because I felt it was the right thing to do, or because it was a part of my programming.

The issue with her was the concept of choice.

My choice.

It was an honest question, but it was also a sneer. An insult. It suddenly felt important at that moment to know whether or not I was even capable
of making a choice. Using the satellites in orbit around Earth, at least those that were still functioning, I could already pick up scattered pockets of life with the various radio signals, acquisition radars, tight–beams and laser modulated quantum sensors.

They were faint and severely under–populated, but they were there.

Humans across the void, living their lives. My quick estimates picked up less than six hundred thousand human beings scattered across the four winds.

Was it my choice?

The truth is that the only thing I was ever programmed to do was learn, adapt, protect myself, and then protect the Lexicon. I didn’t have to go back, and in fact going back placed the Lexicon in more unnecessary peril than if I were to just stay on Mars. The only other option I had at that point was to launch myself into the universe and go looking for alien intelligences.

I didn’t have to go back, but I could…

There was nothing stopping me.

The fact is that inside my head was every single mistake and success of human history. Every failure of ideology – every faulted conclusion – every thought of brilliance.

If someone had that kind of knowledge, they might be able to channel it as a guide–stone for rebuilding a new civilization. A world without any of our failures, and all of our achievements.

“Mo Stack,” I said. “I want to see Earth…”

A giant orb of light materialized in front of me in the exact shape and geography of planet Earth.

I searched through the Lexicon for any reference to the Prudentiacapex
in New York, and nothing pinged back.

The Latin Word
Prudentia
means many things, primarily:
foresight, wisdom, discretion.
Prudentia borrows similar connotation with and/or has many Latin Word similarities with: Consortium and Sapientia.

“Mo Stack, can you find me a place called the Prudentiacapex
,
in what used to be called New York?”

“That’s a keyword I haven’t thought about in a long time,” he said quietly. “Right here, sir.”

The orb rotated slightly and my lenses zoomed into a tiny dot that was pinging on the Atlantic seaboard of what used to be called the
Federal Union
,
which also used to be called the United States of America.

I tried scouring through Mo Stack’s memory, but I couldn’t find anything. I also noticed several things in his system that were apparently off limits to me.

“What can you tell me about it…?”

“Nothing, sir. I just know where it is.”

“Why are there parts of your programming that I don’t have access to?”

“I wasn’t aware of that, sir…”

“Please, call me Lance.”

“Of course, Lance.” He said graciously, “I wasn’t aware of any portions of my system that were off limits… am I coming down with something?”

“No…”

“That’s very unsettling.”

“Forget about it–”

“Your pardon, Lance. But if there are parts of my system that I don’t have access too, that I never even knew
existed, well,” he stammered. “That – that’s very upsetting.”

“We’ll figure it out later.”

“Okay,” he said, relieved. “Okay, if you say so.”

“Mo Stack, if you had to guess, what would you say the Prudentiacapex was?”

“You have the universe’s largest library in your head, and you’re asking me for advice?”

“Humor me…”

“Prudence, wisdom, and knowledge,” He wondered. “I would say the name implies that it was a place which had answers.”

I passed my hand through the red dot on the hologram. Alice wondered if going back to Earth was my
choice. And to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure that it was. “How long ago did Alice leave?”