Artifact (29 page)

“Two years, three months, three days, seventeen hours, forty five minutes–”

“Thank you,” I took a minute to digest the reality that two years had passed since I opened the artifact back in the Clean Room – it felt as if it happened mere moments ago.

He left me alone for a while, staring idly across the rocky blanket of the Tharsis bulge. I watched the particles of photons shoot across the sky and crash into the water. I watched the molecules of hydrogen and oxygen jostle together, build connections, divorce each other and make new connections, and break apart into different states. I watched the sun move slowly into the sky, noting with my superhuman eyes the slight curve of the horizon. I thought about Kate and Sarah for bit. Sarah, who’s shining inner light burned away the arid, desolate universe of despair and hopelessness.

“Sir? Um, sorry.” Mo Stack said quietly, “Lance – would you like your robes now?”

“How many did you make?”

“Um…” he hesitated. “Three thousand.”

“Three
thousand
robes?”

“Yes, well, it’s been a while since I’ve actually had anything to do
around here…”

“But three thousand?

Mo Stack cleared his imaginary throat, and if he had a face with which to express himself, I imagined that it would have been flushed red. “Apologies, sir. I may have gotten a little carried away.”

I collapsed the hologram of Earth.

Behind the fading image of that blue pearl, as the marble clouds of convective movement faded from my lenses, I saw a pink stuffed animal take its place on the sill below Alice’s message.

EPILOGUE

I don’t remember ever being dead. The last thing I do remember was Kate pulling me into the corner, obscuring us inside shadow as the monsters slid toward us through the hallway. She covered my mouth and whispered to stay quiet. I must have passed out before that, because I don’t remember walking into the Clean Room
.
We were hiding, and I remember desperately wanting to get Lance’s attention, but he was so absorbed with what he was doing that we couldn’t. More and more of them started flooding into the corridor, sniffing around and making that strange sucking sound.

Alice materialized inside the airlock – I remember her pulling back her pistol’s slide lock, chambering a round. We thought that was it, game over. Those things were going to hear Alice and rush us. My stomach dropped, and I tried keeping my eyes closed, not wanting to see the things up close as they tore me apart.

Kate grabbed me then, suddenly forcing me toward the airlock. We crawled slowly, I remember that. And I also remember how loud the sound of Sid’s baseball bat was when I accidentally bumped it with my knee – but it was so dark, and the thing in the other room – the artifact – was so loud that the monsters in the hallway must not have heard it.

We kept crawling, inching our way toward the M–vault, and I saw out of the corner of my eye as Kate wrapped her hand around the bat, clenching it in the middle so that she wouldn’t drop it.

We reached the airlock in time to hear Lance say that Kate and I were dead – that’s when he accused Alice of cutting up all the hoses and wires on the generator.

Kate quickly pulled me against the wall when Alice pointed her gun at Lance. I didn’t really understand what was happening – I thought Lance was infected, or something.

Kate craned her head around the corner and scanned the M–vault. She dug her nails into my arm when she saw Sid on the far side of the room, lying in a puddle of his own blood. When I looked, I could see that he was beneath the artifact, which was gradually getting bigger and brighter.

Alice walked toward Lance with the gun raised, pointing it at his head. Kate grabbed my shoulder and shoved me into the observation tank, and that’s when one of those things in the corridor noticed us.

She shoved me hard, and I scattered piles of folders across the floor when I fell into the room. I got to my feet, not really sure what was happening, and I saw Alice pull the hammer back on the gun. Lance was standing in front of the artifact with his hands in the air. She was going to shoot him, and I screamed for her to stop, but the artifact was so loud that nobody in the other room could hear me. The monsters did, though – they heard me. One of them let out a tight scream and then rushed the observation tank, whipping its tail into tight spirals, gracefully leaping onto the ceiling behind the airlock – that’s when Alice started shooting. Kate dove inside screaming something, but I couldn’t hear anything after that. The monster that was rushing the tank was suddenly distracted by the sound of Alice’s gun – we slammed the door shut and–

Bits and pieces.

We were holding the door closed and those things were breaking through the glass.

That thing – the artifact – got so bright that I couldn’t see anything, not even my own hand.

The last thing I remember seeing was a giant monster holding Lance in the air, as he wrapped himself around a ball of light.

Years later, I still have a hard time thinking about it.

I remember some of the nightmares that passed in and out of my mind as I woke. Nightmares of monsters and demons. Of grotesque things with sharp teeth and unending hunger. What I do remember about waking up seemed to be about drowning – about suddenly losing myself one piece at a time to a purpose or cause that was far too heavy to deal with. I dreamt of my mom and dad. And my grandparents. And my little brother…

Kate would later tell me that we were all programs that Lance created on the fly in order to get himself through certain obstacles. Sid, for example, picked Lance up with his car when he was about to get infected with the virus, and transported him to the artifact. My dad saved Kate from the virus, so that Lance could use her later for abridging the two generators in the basement. Patrick protected him, so there’s that.

The one thing I couldn’t figure out was what he needed me for.

I’ve asked him several times, and he’s never given me a straight answer. Part of me wonders if I wasn’t some sort of accident – some random manifestation in his source code – some meaningless point mutation that was the leftover byproduct of some other, more important function.

It took me a while to reconcile that all of my memories before the outbreak were mathematical abstracts – blanks, which were unconsciously filled in by Lance so that he could better understand our roles in his odyssey.

I was depressed for a long time. I couldn’t figure out why I was here. He tried to explain that when all hope was lost, I gave him a reason to press on – that he was convinced he wouldn’t have survived the ordeal without me. But I’m not convinced. I remember being more of a burden than anything.

He would often remind me that I saved him in the vault when the monster tore Patrick in half and ate him. He also pointed out how I cut him loose when he was strapped to the desk in the lobby, right before the Head Agent was going to start sawing open his skull. That I helped him hold the door shut in the basement corridor, as the Cronos–virus hurled itself against us. That I found the extension cord that connected the dead terminal block with the functioning generator. He would tell me that I was the one who ripped the virus out of Patrick’s neck, freeing him from its influence so that he could in turn rescue us and make sure that we made it into the vault.

He would tell me to take my pick.

To choose which reason was good enough to live for.

Lance always says that just because we don’t understand the purpose of something, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

Even today, I’m not convinced. Maybe even less convinced.

I sometimes catch myself wondering if life isn’t just some elaborate simulation – that the universe was unwittingly programmed thirteen or so billion years ago by a computer that didn’t realize it was a computer at the time, and life in all its bizarre improbability is the universe’s attempt at waking up – if life isn’t itself just a metaphor, or a symbol for the universe trying to wake up from its own hallucination. That the harsh, untamed nature of purpose isn’t just the mausoleum for reality – a cave of forgotten monuments, attempting to wake up from life. That when the universe has finally learned its purpose, it will awaken, take a deep breath and marvel at its imagination, which created such an unbelievable fantasy.

I could write an entire book about when I woke up to reality the very first time. I could recall for the record withering minutia about the purple soup of amino acids and bacta–gel, the feeling of that terrycloth robe which Kate draped over my shoulders when I detached myself from Lance’s pod – the warm, comforting dream I had that night, snuggled between Kate and my dad, listening to Lance and Joseph bicker about mapping the memory schematic for Patrick – the same thing Lance did with us when he reconstructed our identities from strings of his XNA – seeing my dad alive and healthy when I reached the top of the platform, running and jumping into his arms, losing myself in the blur of happy days that followed. The urge to write page after page about these things is strong. Having realized that I never really existed before suddenly made every sensation, every feeling infinitely important. If I could, I would write an entire book on my account of seeing Lance for the first time.

But I won’t.

When I first tried to approach the subject of Alice, nobody really wanted to talk about it. I knew that she was still around, I just didn’t know where. Patrick would just shrug his massive shoulders. “I’d like to tell you, kid.” He would say, “But I’m not sure if even I really understand what happened.”

“Well, you knew her.” I would say back, “Why didn’t you see it coming?”

“I didn’t see it, because I wasn’t supposed to.”

“What were you supposed to do?”

He sighed. “My job – the job that I was programmed to do – was to protect Lance. To make sure that he established an uplink with the Lexicon, and if he failed, to make sure that Alice did, and if she failed, to do it myself…”

“And then?”

“Well,” he said. “Then the responsibility fell to Joseph. I didn’t count on everything getting that far out of hand. You have to realize that before this happened, the extent of my duties were primarily the weather, seismic issues around the facility, and the occasional surge. Before I even knew what the hell was going on, Joseph was infected, Lance and Alice were AWOL, and creepy crawlies were coming out of the woodwork, eating up every system on the network.”

“You must have suspected something.”

“Well, I did.” He nodded. “I thought Lance was infected. I didn’t realize that his memory was all fried–”

“I meant about Alice…”

He grew silent and took a sip from his beer. “I didn’t see Alice at all. Not one time since the Big Surge.”

He shook his head and suddenly snatched my wrists in his giant hands, twirling me around in a circle. “But I helped,” he said, tossing me onto a giant cushion. “At least
I was able to help. Even if it was just a little…”

“You got torn in half and eaten!”

He threw a pillow at me and went into the hallway. He stopped, smiling. “Nobody’s perfect, Sarah.”

When I tried pushing Lance about it, he always deflected my efforts with menial tasks that often occupied his time – he ignored me, basically. And he got especially sad whenever he heard me say things along the lines of hating her. The truth was that I didn’t really know Alice. The one thing Lance would tell me was that all of us – Patrick, Sid, Joseph, Alice, Kate, my father and I – were really just extensions of his primary code. He created each one of us to carry out specific functions. We were essentially all one – we were all separate expressions of the same thing. Lance would even go as far as saying that he was part of a larger process – an avatar of it – that he called the Lexicon.

“So,” I said one day. “I don’t buy it. If you created Alice from components of your own programming, then there is absolutely no possible way you wouldn’t have learned why she did what she did the moment you established uplink with the Lexicon.”

“Leave it alone, Sarah.” My dad said, “He obviously doesn’t want to talk about it.”

Sid nudged me with his hip, “yeah, what’s it matter? We’re here aren’t we…?”

Yeah, I guess.

Not all of us.

I never brought it up, because when it was explained to me that all of us were just abstracts – programs created by some elaborate, biological circuit board – I supposed that my mom and brother were never really
real
in the first place. I know now that my memories of that life collapsed into a wave of reality the moment Lance wrote my function, but I remembered being happy. I remember having a really good life, even if those memories never happened.

“It’s okay,” Lance said finally. “It’s about time I told you guys, anyway.”

Patrick and Kate exchanged glances, and Sid all of a sudden grew very interested in the obsidian floor. My dad set down the diagnostic pad, and for some reason one of the most detailed images I have of that moment was the hologram of Jupiter’s moons spinning around in my lenses.

“Are you sure about this?” Joseph cautioned Lance, nodding at Patrick, “Think about it, before you say anything…”

“I have.”

Patrick crossed his massive arms and leaned against the tablescreen, and when Lance was sure he had everyone’s attention, he told us the truth.

“The reason she did what she did,” He explained. “Was because she was programmed to do what she did.”

We took it pretty well. I did, anyway.

Patrick got upset and left the room.

Lance went on to explain that Alice’s job in all this was to make sure that he could in fact do what he designed himself to do. Before the Lexicon was going to allow Lance to download it, he first had to demonstrate that he could cognitively handle the load. This is why he designed the artifact for himself, which was basically a cryptographic test. He had to also demonstrate that he could protect the Lexicon once it was downloaded. If Lance couldn’t download and protect the endless stream of data inside the Lexicon’s tight–beam, then he was of no use to it. This mission that Alice had was kept secret from everybody – including the aspect of the Martian artifact that was Lance. He didn’t learn of this until after he established a link with the Lexicon.

Through her actions, Alice proved that Lance could withstand a physical attack – which in this case took the form of an electrical surge that was magnitudes greater than what any metallic alloy should have been able to handle – and that he could survive a foreign attack on the integrity of his digital system. Before the Mars project, a computer was only as functional as its off button. The artifact on Mars had to demonstrate that it could survive in harsh and constantly changing environments. It had to prove to itself that it had no off button.

“So why did she leave…?”

“She didn’t agree with what she was programmed to do,” Lance said quietly. “She didn’t think it was right.”

I remembered the look of betrayal on Lance’s face in the Clean Room – the absolute expression of disgust when he figured out what Alice was up to. It must have crushed her.

An aspect of Lance constructed a physical vessel for Alice’s program long before he ever attempted to establish a link with the Lexicon. She did what she was supposed to do, and then she left.

Lance says that he can occasionally feel her reach out to him from someplace within the solar system.

“Why don’t you ask her to come back?” I asked one day.

“I can’t,” he shrugged. “She severed all communication with me.”

I studied the negative reflection of myself in the obsidian floor.

“Well,” I said finally. “Can’t you just
make
her come back?”