Artifact (4 page)

“Am I interrupting anything?” I asked, as she poured coffee into a set of permanently stained cups. “You looked like you were onto something.”

Alice shrugged. “No, no – just some supersymmetry. How are you feeling?”

“I… fine,” I sighed. “I don’t know.” I nodded at the files on her desk. “What’s this?”

“It’s some data from our accident,” she said, leaning back.

“Yeah?”

“We underestimated that thing, Lance. Badly.”

I evaded the comment, unable to look her in the eyes. Underestimated certainly summed thing up accurately. But I knew what she was getting at – whatever happened that day, however many ways I could rationalize it, was my fault and mine alone. She was right, and I ignored her – we should have stopped after the first temperature spike. The memory of the artifact exploding in my face was still simultaneously foggy, and extremely visceral.

“Whoever built this thing,” she continued, mercifully. “Engineered it all the way to the direction of particle spin – we’re talking some serious quantum computing power here. And the weirdest part? I can’t do anything
to disrupt the properties of these atoms.” She took a sip from her coffee and shook her head. “It’s like this thing has molecules that were designed to resist nearly every possible disruption. I have no idea how that’s possible. There is some pretty interesting atomic behavior here, but–” She stopped, noticing my blank expression. “Nobody’s told you.”

I shook my head.

She smiled and passed me her tablet. I studied it for a moment, glad to have the distraction.

It was readout of some magnetic dipole moments for atoms before and after a vibration. I smiled a bit, imagining Alice nuking the side of our tunneling microscope like a mad–scientist. It was interesting because before and after the vibration, the magnetic field of the artifact’s atoms remained exactly the same, perfectly maintaining their alignment. Alice was excited because the directions in which atoms spin are typically so delicate, that the tiniest disruptions from the outside world can screw up the sensitive dimensions of these atoms. For some reason, they were acting like the quantum equivalent of irrational. “That’s pretty weird.”

“Come on, Lance – that’s beyond weird. I mean, we need to start ripping this thing apart immediately–”

“Joseph picked me up from the hospital earlier,” I said suddenly.

“Joseph?” The grin on her face slipped away, replaced by a grim line of concern. I couldn’t pin the expression down, but it gave me pause. There was a hint of understanding, but it disappeared as soon as I noticed it.

“He told me that something happened after the accident – that the stone somehow regressed to its original state. He said something about needing an algorithm.” I accepted that bringing this up was a gamble. Up until that moment, I wasn’t sure that anything I knew about the artifact was entirely accurate, including my earlier meeting with Joseph and Patrick – especially the details leading up to our climactic departure. I had as much memory of the algorithm sitting with Alice as I did in the car. This was a litmus test, in a way, to gauge just exactly how screwed up I was by her response.

“Alice.” I leaned forward and set down the readout. “I need to know what happened in that room.”

“Yes…” She pulled her glasses off and tossed them onto the desk. “Lance, I want you to know that I’m sorry. I meant to be the one to pick you up when you were discharged. I knew you were being let out, but…” She leaned back in her chair and took another sip from her coffee. “Well, but nothing. I should have been there.”

I remembered her floating around my room like a ghost during those intermittent moments within that long dream.

“I don’t know.” The memory of Patrick blasting Joseph’s head through the side window was still very fresh. “Maybe you not being there was a good thing.”

She waited for me to continue, but I didn’t. I didn’t know where to start. So we both sat there, quietly sipping our coffee.

I couldn’t decide at what point in the conversation would be appropriate, so I just said it, “in a few moments something weird is going to happen.”

Alice frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure how to explain it – but I know that if we wait long enough, something very weird is going to happen. I don’t know if I’ll be the only one who notices it, so it might just seem weird to me.”

“Weird…?”

“Very weird.”

“I have to say that the direction this conversation has taken is pretty weird.”

“Yeah,” I sighed, leaning deeper into my chair. “I’m sorry…”

“I mean, can you give me an example?”

“Well, for example, I don’t know how I got here.”

“…To the lab?”

“Yeah, to the lab. I can’t remember. I don’t even remember deciding to come here. One moment I was in my bedroom, and the next I was here. There was no time between,” I sighed and studied the lines on the back of my hand. “Except a blackout of some sort.”

“A blackout…”

“Or something. It’s the only way I can explain it.” I tried concentrating as much as I could. “How the hell did I get here? Did I drive? I’m not sure I even own a vehicle.”

“How could you not know that, Lance?”

“I’m not sure how to answer that question.” I shrugged helplessly. “I feel broken.”

“You have a massive burn on your chest, buddy. You’re not exactly tip top.”

I sighed again. “I can’t explain it.”

Alice leaned back and peered out of her window into the parking lot below. “Your car isn’t out there.”

“So did I walk here? That would have taken me hours.”

We sat in silence again, listening to the distant hum of vacuums. Alice was looking at me as if I were a malnourished puppy.

“They’re taking the artifact away from us.” She said suddenly. She rifled through some folders on her desk and then passed me a writ of intent. “They’re sending it to some hotshot cryptanalyst in Boston. I guess they figured they didn’t need physicists anymore.”

“That’s brilliant. We don’t even know what it is yet.”

“Well, it’s out of our hands now.”

“Good,” I shrugged, tossing the writ onto her desk. “Let it blow somebody else up.”

“No Lance,” she said, quite seriously, “Any chances we had of figuring out what it is and where it came from are gone. Our accident seems to have changed how the higher ups want to approach this thing. Six years, Lance. Six long years and what have we got to show for it? We have
maybe
a few days to find that hidden frequency in the artifact.” She waved at the stacks of paper, “After that…”She shrugged.

“Alright. What do you want me to do?”

She poured us each another cup of coffee. “You’re not the only one who has been seeing strange shit since the accident.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think you know exactly what I mean.” She said, “So. How long do you suspect it will take before something weird happens?”

“I don’t know.”

Alice smiled. “Alright then. We’ll just sit here, drink our coffee and wait.”

6.

The coffee was ice cold. It tasted like she spiked it with some sort of cleaning solvent, and there was a frothy build around the edge of the cup. It made the liquid somewhat thick, like a milkshake, and I have to say it was disgusting. I remembered that I never even liked the bitter swill in the first place, but even if I did, this didn’t taste anything like coffee – it tasted like rubbing alcohol. I got a little upset that she would give it to me. “What the hell is this?”

Alice frowned and looked into her own cup. Shocked, she carefully set it on the desk and checked her thermos. “This isn’t what I was drinking a few minutes ago…”

She pulled her desk–lamp over the cup and examined the liquid inside.

The more I thought about it, the more unusual everything seemed. It hit me suddenly that this – this whole event – was the weird thing I said would happen. The weird event already happened. It was unfolding before my eyes.

I wasn’t afraid this time – I was mostly interested. I hoped the weirdness of it all would have been as salient as bleeding to death or crashing into a lake. Next to that, as an example of such a peculiar event, the toxic sludge going unnoticed the first couple of sips seemed to stray on the side of nicety.

I said, “It was coffee before just now. I tasted it. You tasted it.”

Alice looked up from her cup. “What does it mean?”

I said, “Tell me everything you know about the artifact from Mars.”

“What could I tell you that you don’t already know?”

I dumped what used to be my coffee back into her thermos. “Everything.”

THREE

1.

I suddenly found myself walking with Alice past a separate row of cubicles. In a hallway beyond a sprawl of office space, we came upon the dull stainless steel parallelogram of a set of elevator doors. I tried figuring out where the intervening time went, as Alice continued mid–sentence. She punched floor–one and then sniffed her thermos.

“–so since the federal initiatives pretty much mapped out every possible risk assessment, and since the private industry sort of took over low orbit stuff anyway, a few companies were able to generate pretty reliable profit estimates for funding mining operations around Olympus Mons. They figured they’d just recruit a few frontier types to live on Mars for three year rotations and–”

“Wait,” I said.

We stepped off the elevator – Alice stopped and arched an eyebrow.

“This is what I’m talking about,” I waved around the hallway. “How did we get here?”

She frowned. “Well, we just–”

“We were at your desk talking about the coffee–”

She thought about it and looked back the way we had come. “And then we were walking to the elevator.”

She said, “I can’t remember.”

She became increasingly unsettled and moved through the series of events in her head. Finally, she looked at me with unyielding confusion and fear. “What’s going on Lance?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think you were taking me somewhere.”

She started moving again, watching her feet as she walked. “I was taking you to the filing department, but…”

We turned down a few more hallways.

“Forget it for now,” I said. “You were saying.”

After a few more steps, she shook her head and continued. “It’s a long story. A lot of politics and rabble rousing, that sort of thing. NASA made a few more trips to Mars, but for the most part, there wasn’t anything left to do there. Terraforming, atmosphere building, mining, geology and all that, but this wasn’t anything anybody else couldn’t do. That’s what the politicians were at least beginning to understand – you couldn’t put the responsibility of space exploration on market forces. You can’t make money unless you can assess all the risks, and space exploration is
all
risk. NASA had their eyes on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, not to mention some of those giant asteroids zipping around out there. After the International Space Initiative
finished mapping out the various ore deposits around Mars, the private sector had a pretty good idea what they were looking for anyway.”

I studied my new surroundings, waiting for the next weird signal that reality was going to slip away again.

“That’s how it has always worked,” she continued. “Government funded operations have always manifested the frontier of the unknown, and it’s only after that happens, private businesses can follow. Columbus and Magellan; Lewis and Clark; the moon race; the earliest Mars probes – this is how things have always been.”

We stopped by her office and she pulled out a document trolley stacked with different sized folders. I noticed my name on the office two down from hers.

“But they didn’t count on finding anything like that. By the time they knew what they had their hands on, the government was all over it. Lawsuits, coups, power grabs, arrests, shit fits – it turned into media frenzy, and that’s when we came into the picture. But one thing is certain, when the diggers found the artifact in a chromite mine three miles below the Martian surface, it sparked a whole new kind of space race. It was almost like another cold war – Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Sweden, Norway, China, Germany, Japan and America suddenly dumped trillions of dollars into their space–programs, paranoid about who was going to make first–contact. Nobody knew what was going on, except you.”

I stopped to look at her.

“And this is strange, because you’re telling me that you can’t remember anything before the accident. It’s strange because out of everyone that has been involved until this point, you were our best bet at cracking this thing. And now you’re all messed up.”

I thought about that. I felt the weight of everything hinging on my participation, but I still found it hard to believe that something this important rested on the responsibilities of one guy. Patrick said something similar in the car. “That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, Alice. Why was I your best bet?”

She started walking again. “It was an accident, to be honest. When they found some sort of hum
coming from the cube, when the biggest and baddest engineers, physicists, and cryptographers were assembled to take a look at this thing, you stumbled onto a hidden packet of data within a separate, extremely high–pitched frequency, which was piggy–backing on the hum’s carrier wave. All you did was twist the thing in your hands a few times and stumbled onto these tiny, jagged variations inside the sine wave.” She shook her head, “Simple, right? We were too busy looking for advanced quantum encrypted switches that we failed to notice the tiny variations inside of a hum. We were too busy looking at the trees that we didn’t see the forest.”

She walked in silence for a few steps, shaking her head. “We figured that whoever built this thing would have had to be unimaginably more advanced than using simple radio waves as a modus of communication. When you turned the artifact in the same direction that altered the hum, the spectrometer picked up a sudden burst of ultraviolet light. It was a landing strip – an
arrow
, of sorts – and we decided to keep turning the object in the same direction that the light was moving. What came next was pretty clear message.”

“Which was?”

“That the modulated frequency was a cipher, and that one of the keys was an angle of rotation.”

2.

A cipher for what
?

I didn’t exactly remember it – it wasn’t like that. I still had limited memory before the accident, but I realized it, as if I had suddenly turned up the volume to something that I always knew, and that it simply took someone like Alice to shake it loose. I felt a little less convoluted – more like I was getting closer to at least placing another piece of the puzzle.

“And when we started rotating the object,” she continued. “That barely detectable landing strip of electromagnetic radiation clued you in to the axis it wanted us to continue spinning it.”

“We hit point two five rotations per second, and then–”

“And then bye–bye, eyebrows,” she walked ahead, pushing her trolley.

I slowed down a bit to think, and I studied the intricate fractals in the carpet. “And then it exploded.”

The memory enticed me for a moment, and then immediately went flat. The artifact spun with the light, and then–

“Why?”

“What’s that?” She called back.

“And then what? Why did it explode?”

“You tell me. You’re the one who did it. All I can tell you right now is that when you ignored me and decided to follow the light, the rotation modulated the frequency, and then we got another message. A very explosive message.”

I immediately thought of my notes. Before the accident, I remembered scratching in last minute corrections, slipping my notes into a plastic sealed sleeve and setting it down in the Gray Room.

“Alice, were you able to recover my notes after the accident?”

I looked up just as she disappeared around the corner. I jogged to catch up, and when I rounded the bend, I suddenly found myself back at the hospital. Alice was nowhere in sight. I spun around, trying to understand this complete change of landscape, and the constraints of reality slowly began to melt away into undifferentiated experience.

It didn’t make sense.

When I was there the last time, I noticed a perpendicular branching of hallways on the left, and a long hallway leading to a dark hospital room on my right. I rubbed the space above my collarbone, feeling for a feeding tube that wasn’t there. Everything was backwards.

Somehow, within the space of time between the walk from cubicle–row and Alice’s office, I ended up back in the hospital, in the perpendicular hallway that branched off in both directions. Directly ahead was the darker room where I encountered that strange laugh.

Everything was the same, minus a few small differences.

The hospital wasn’t in disarray, like the first time I saw it. There weren’t papers strewn about. There weren’t any rolls of toilet–paper spilling across the floor. There wasn’t any gurney propping open the elevator. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I could hear the telltale signs of life. And the more I concentrated, I was able to distinguish individual voices; I heard the clicking of keyboards; I heard the gentle hum of instrumentation; I heard a wall–screen somewhere broadcasting the news – but the hospital remained essentially deserted. I could hear all these things, but see none of it. Certain sounds would happen right beside me, as if there was somebody typing not a meter from where I stood – but nothing. No sight of anyone.

“Alice…!”

I felt my face blush, hearing the sound of my own desperation. She was gone.

This was the first time since running into Alice that I noticed my burn, which started to itch furiously.

An immediate and intense feeling of hopelessness settled heavily onto my shoulders. I was alone again. All of those feelings of comfort I had around Alice, however slight, were gone.

I recognized that feeling. I could remember suffering a brief period of panic–attacks when I was a child. They always seemed to have something to do with the immeasurable vastness of things – as a tiny particle on the planet, I would feel overcome by a sense of the fantastically immense, and the unendurably minuscule.

I wrestled with the idea that I was in fact microscopically small, while the universe was unimaginably limitless and vast. Or it would be the other way around – I would be unimaginably, indescribably enormous, and the constraints of space and time would be stifling and cramped. On rare occasions, I would imagine myself existing in both states simultaneously, which I knew was impossible, but this still added to my overall feelings of panic and despair.

A large terrestrial planet might have just the right conditions to sustain life. As an enormous
thing
, I might be a giant blue star, much bigger than the planet I longed to be a part of. I would feel precarious edges of buildings or monuments, or the polar opposite, the smooth, never ending nuclear furnace of another enormous star. My entire life, I have always thought in terms of integers. Everything was digital. I saw things in terms of physics, geometry, fractals and calculus – and at first the universe appeared beautiful, balanced, and perfect. Now all of these proofs were somehow disturbing, and I couldn’t understand why.

It’s hard to think about why I found these concepts upsetting. But it went farther than that – something that, to the mind of a child, was especially frightening. When I was a kid, I also had an overwhelming sense that the universe itself wasn’t real – nor was I for that matter. What is more, that the universe of numbers, codes, laws and formulas was indicative of the only real landscape that I could ever know. That all other realities were illusions and thus mathematically false.

“I’m in here, Lance.” Alice called. I jumped at the sudden sound of her voice. I could just make out her outline in that far room, as the last florescent bulb began sputtering out.

Everything happened the same as before.

I reluctantly moved forward, remembering the horribleness I found there the first time. “I don’t want to play this game anymore, Alice. Come out of there please.”

“What are you talking about – I thought you wanted to know everything.”

“I do, it’s just–”

“So get in here. I won’t bite.”

The light finally stopped blinking and died.

I hesitated outside of my former hospital room. The bed was made and the wall–screen was deactivated. The sheets were clean and folded. All of the furniture was in order. The extendable table was gone. The intravenous stand was gone. The trashcan was empty. The hand sanitizer was full. There weren’t any signs that anything had seen any use.

I looked down the hall.

“Alice,” I said quietly. “I think I may be having a problem.”

Her shadow moved deeper into the room. “The last time you had a problem,” she said dryly. “You ended up in a hospital.”

“The last time I had a problem, I
woke up
in a hospital. This hospital,” I waved at the room on my left. “In this room.”

She moved deeper into the darkness, disappearing altogether. “How does it look?” Something cold and metallic settled into her tone, like a sneer.

“The room? It doesn’t look good, Alice.”

Her voice grew distant. The light flickered again, as if it were desperately trying to fight for life.

“Come in here, please,” she beckoned.

“I just want to know what’s happening.” I said, “Please, just tell me what’s happening.”

“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.