Artifact (24 page)

Sarah was worriedly looking back and forth between me and the wall–screen. I tried for the millionth time to put the pieces back together. A sudden thought occurred to me, and my childhood anxieties spilled forth, afresh with new dimensions of horror, as the possibility burst into my thoughts to the extent that I could no longer shut them out. The truth was there, always
there
, immediately out of reach. I told myself that the various worlds I was falling through were not real. Real. Reality. Knowledge and experience. Zombies and monsters. Nonlinear time. Guns that never ran out of bullets. Faceless copies of myself. A cave of cultural artifacts. Blackouts…

“Mo Stack,” I said quietly. “Are we inside the artifact?”

STIPULATE

Sarah arched her eyebrow and settled into the bed a bit more.

“The accident,” I leaned forward, cradling my head in my hands. “Was my consciousness somehow uploaded into the artifact? Is that what happened?”

STIPULATE

“Is this some sort of computer program? A type of virtual reality? Some sort of elaborate anti–lotus eater that I can’t escape?”

STIPULATE

“We didn’t find anything on Mars, did we?”

STIPULATE

“We put something there–”

The combination dials started frantically spinning again. Sarah and I snapped our heads toward the door. Outside, we could hear an earsplitting shriek penetrate the thick interior of the vault. Sarah sprung to her feet and backed herself into the far corner. The dials suddenly stopped, and then started again, only this time the movements were deliberate. They were moving in the right to left pattern that indicated whatever was on the other side at least knew how a combination dial worked.

“Can it get inside?!” Sarah screamed.

The lock on the right suddenly popped open, while the other dial continued snapping through strings of digits.

“Mo Stack, get us out of here.”

STIPULATE

The lock on the left suddenly popped open and the door jolted inside of its thick, permasteel frame – there remained only a single lock below the torsion assembly, and it was clicking furiously. The massive savrataur on the other side was screaming with blind rage. Sarah flung herself into my side and wrapped her arms around my waist.

“Mo Stack,” I screamed. “Get us out of here!”

The final lock popped open.

STIPULATE

“How do we get out of the vault!?”

DESTINATION?

“Anywhere!”

PLEASE SPECIFY DESTINATION

The first thing that popped into my head was Sarah hugging me in the generator room, right before we phased out of reality together.

“Take us to Kate,” I said as clear as possible. “Take us to the generator room
.
”

The door ripped open and the giant savrataur forced its head into the vault – earsplitting decibels bounced around inside the room as the monster howled its triumph. Its massive, arachnid arms pulled it in, and the last thing I saw were deadly hooks on the tips of its fingers as it reached for me, and then the world blasted into starlight–

TEN

1.

Reality pushed the atoms away from us, then away from each other until the world conflated into pitch nothingness. The smell of diesel was instantly recognizable. I could hear the savrataurs still trying to rip through the door. Sarah stayed clung to me until our eyes adjusted to the darkness, and we could make out a tiny beam of light coming from the farthest corner of the room. It was Kate’s flashlight.

I followed the beam until it rested on the door, which was hanging from the jam – the hinges were ripping off of the frame, and I counted four humanoid arms forcing their way into the generator room. The hallway outside must have been filled with them – they were rasping and hissing into the breach. We had mere minutes before they gained entry. My eyes went to the floor and I traced the puddle of fuel until I found Kate in the far corner on her knees, with tears running down her face, drenched from head to toe in fuel. She was trying desperately to strike a match. I glanced at the generator and saw that it was still functioning. This meant that the fuel on the floor was from the Clean Room generator, and that it must have seeped in from the hallway.

“Kate!” Sarah yelled.

Kate spun around and fell to the floor, laughing and weeping at the same time.

“Kate…” Sarah collapsed at her side. She reeked like diesel.

“You – you came back,” She wept.

“I – I lost your coat.” Sarah said.

Kate embraced her, relieved to see that she was alive and okay. The box of matches lay forgotten at her side. She caught me looking at the burnt matches scattered around her knees and took a deep, shuddery breath. “I’m not letting those things have me.”

I nodded, and bent down.

She suddenly and violently snatched my collar. She pushed me to the ground and pounded my chest with her fists, not bothering to wipe the tears of both rage and happiness from her eyes.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” she rasped. “Where did you two go?”

“Long story.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she pushed herself roughly to her feet, she stared hopelessly at the serpentine limbs thrusting into the door. “We’re dead anyway.”

I glanced back at the door and nodded. I sat up and gently wiped the diesel out of her eyes. Already I could see chemical burns raising the skin on her shaven scalp. “I think I can get us out of here.”

“What…?”

I nodded.

“How?”

“Here,” I offered my hand. “Take it.”

She hesitated. Sarah gave her one last squeeze and then grabbed my other hand.

“What’s happening?” She asked.

“We’re getting out of here.”

The door behind us finally gave way, and the chitinous wall of monsters flooded into the generator room, screaming that horrible, wounded animal sound.

Kate reached out and took my hand–

2.

[…] I found the gun somewhere along the way. There was a pile of firearms from different eras on one of the granite entresols – muskets and single shot muzzle loaders, canons, ancient siege batteries and slingshots. I grabbed one that looked familiar enough to use – it was a revolver of some kind. The black smoke was thicker near the top, and still no sign of an exit.

I tucked the jigsaw puzzle under my arm, determined to keep moving. The smoke was so noxious that bubbles of thick liquid smoke collected below my nostrils and around my mouth. Several times I thought about turning around and making my way back – to make my way below the smoke, where there was a bit more air left – but the oily flames spread so far that the only thing below me was an ocean of burning silicon, steel, iron, and concrete. There was no turning back. This was it – I would either find a way out, or I was dead.

Every giant brazier that was suspended above the endless cave broke free from their moorings and spilled fathoms of oil onto the various cultural monuments. I heard the most dreadful sound a while back, and I looked toward the center of the mausoleum just in time to see the Burj Khalifa buckle at its foundation, then majestically crash into the solemn faces of Mount Rushmore. Both structures were now a single molten pile of meaningless nothing.

Giant sheets of ash blew around the mausoleum like an abhorrent, abominable snowstorm. There was no way out.

I held the gun to my forehead for only a few moments. Even as my finger threaded the trigger, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to do it. Hope, that selfish, piece of shit feeling would not allow it. The more I thought about it, the more I felt like a coward. I snapped the loader open and dumped the bullets onto the ground – I wasn’t surprised to find that they were merely empty shells, completely useless. I was disturbed at how hilarious I thought that was. No matter how terrified I felt about death, which was coming pretty quickly here in the next few minutes, I still felt that it was important not to finish as a coward.

I pitched the gun over the side of the mezzanine just as my knees gave out, watching the chrome object spin away into the distance below. I dropped the jigsaw, and puzzle pieces spilled across the ground. I tried cleaning it up – to gather all of the pieces together again – hoping that the act of keeping together the only thing that seemed complete in this place would both focus and sublimate my anger and disgust at the mistakes of my own species. As I looked around at the evidence of our genius, it reminded me of so much wasted potential.

My burned clothes peeled off easily. I tried casting them over the side of the mezzanine as well, but I couldn’t get to my feet. No matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn’t draw enough breath. I wasn’t deluded enough to believe that I was going to survive. My breath came slow, as particles of excited wood and silicon shredded the blood vessels inside my lungs. My eyes got heavy, and the final moment was building in me like some oppressive evocation. So I lay on the cool granite, staring up at the opening folds of black and white smoke shedding glowing feathers of cinder, as it all rose toward the cave ceiling, and thought about what it meant to die.

I found myself thinking about my role in this mess, about how I screwed up the experiment with the artifact so badly – I spent some time trying to figure out why I hadn’t listened to Alice when she told me to kill the operation – and why I ended up in this place. In this tomb. And then my thoughts circled back to the
other
me that gave me my face – that helped me put together the jigsaw – who was the only other person I encountered in this place. What was his role in all of this? Where was he now?

After some time passed, I realized that my lungs kept pumping oxygen into my brain, despite the terrible wind that blew my eyes shut – that blew so loud I could barely hear anything. I thought again about death. My own, I knew, was only moments away, maybe even seconds away. I never really thought about it before – so immersed in my little world of the life of particles and mathematics, death was always something I didn’t have to think about until later.

Well, it was now later.

I suppose that death, the fear of death, the desire to triumph over death, and the fascination about death – had been the primary urge of nearly all scientific, religious and philosophical pursuits throughout the span of recorded human history. The religious parts always turned me off, because they seemed primarily motivated by judgment and censorship – my parents were not religious, and so neither was I. I had no context for the metaphysical, spiritual world of abstracts that I couldn’t articulate with numbers. The farthest I ever got was hearing a religious person’s rationalization of human suffering as a part of God’s plan. I always saw a lusting behind their eyes, a manner of speaking perhaps, that was willing to believe in something simply because it offered sureness – any sureness – that our identities continued after our lives had certainly left. I remembered those who didn’t care so much about living in some paradise forever after death, but that their families and friends were going to be okay – that there existed a chance they would be united again, perhaps in another life. I suddenly found myself thinking about the various concepts of the afterlife – Heaven, Elysium, the Happy Hunting Grounds, Valhalla
,
and every other place in the hereafter that so many of us are in such a hurry to enter – or that other
kind of afterlife, the feeling of living a good life so that we could live on in the memories of those we love. There was reincarnation, too. All of these hopes and dreams about a kind of life that never ends, I have to admit, are beautiful. But they are as beautiful, ephemeral and transparent as a dream, no more real than a pleasant work of art.

I don’t know how long I was wandering this place without a face, before stumbling upon the other me who was handcuffed to a wheelchair, but I had the opportunity to see several artistic expressions of death during my wandering – which seemed to me as a kind of refusal to fear death as a principal of bravery, instead of a reward for faith.

I started to cry, but not in the self–pity kind of way. I wept because I was not as brave as those visionaries, those artists who defied the natural fear of death because they believed that one shot, one chance at life made it mean something more than a life that never ends. And they knew it. I wept because I was proud of that nature of us. I was proud to have come from a species that was capable of doing something like that. It nearly made up for those among us who conceived of ways to create suffering, division, greed and war.

I heard something in the distance.

It was an echo – a disembodied voice – Like my name softly being carried across the sound of ambient destruction.

Something moved in front of the heat that was blasting across the entresol. I looked up. For a moment, my mind couldn’t figure out what it was seeing. Something walked into my line of sight and blocked the firestorm that was coming to consume me.

I pushed myself into a seated position against the cave. I propped my elbow onto the lowest step of the granite staircase that led to the next level, and waited.

Something was standing at the stairway that led to the lower mezzanine. It must have come up the staircase to escape the raging infernos below.

It looked like a child.

I squinted and saw two other figures come up behind the first. The first shadow looked very much like a little girl. She was real.

The three shadows made their way toward me, and I tried wiping the fog of imminent death out of my eyes so that I could see who they were.

And out of the smoke came the other me who helped put together the jigsaw. He was with a young, short–haired woman and a little girl. The other Lance’s shirt was ripped to shreds on his left side, and streaks of old blood dried around several holes in his shoulder. His left eye was badly bruised and nearly swollen closed. The little girl and the woman looked like they had equally been through several levels of hell.

They stepped closer until the other Lance bent down and started scooping up puzzle pieces.

“Did you figure it out yet?” I rasped.

The other me smiled and dropped handfuls of puzzle pieces into the box. “Not really.”

“Who are your friends?” I coughed up black sludge, and spat. I tried to wipe away the dense clouds of smoke that encircled us, but my arm just ended up flailing in no particular direction.

“This is Kate and Sarah,” he nodded at each one.

“Well Kate, Sarah and the other me – I have some bad news.” I said, “There’s no way out of here. I’ve been up and down this damned place, and the only thing I can find are more piles of junk. There isn’t anything here but the inside of this cave wall.”

“I found a way out,” he passed me the puzzle.

Sarah and Kate pulled their shirts over their faces, and bent down where there was a bit more air.

“I don’t think I can make it,” I said, nearly bursting into tears.

“All you have to do is take my hand again…”

I thought about it for a moment. “Occam’s Razor, eh?”

“Something like that.”

“You know that’s bullshit most of the time, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve heard.”

The other me extended his hand and I grabbed it.

“Mo Stack,” he said.

I didn’t catch the rest because the burning mausoleum suddenly dropped away from underneath me, and I was delighted to find that I could once again breathe. I sucked in the air like it was water, as the world shimmered away like the elusive position of an electron–

3.

–The sky continued to fall in great monolithic chunks until the sun started rising. I gave up trying to wrap my mind around the mechanics of a sun rising in a sky that was crumbling to pieces. The city sagged under the weight of apocalypse. Its fire–blackened walls gave back none of the light from the low horizon sun: empty, somewhat lopsided rectangles, they towered against an overcast morning, a doorway into limbo. I followed the breadcrumb trail of headless zombies over the cracked pavement, staring down into an alley in front of an overpass not from the CEM. I picked up some sort of signal, or something, I couldn’t really explain it – that another
me
was on the other side of this system attempting to organize the contents of our consciousness into the smallest number of adjacent fragments.

I had no idea what that meant – it was like somebody else’s memories were suddenly popping into my head – something about creating whole regions of free space using densification, which was something the other me had to do after some massive surge that apparently blew our mind into a million little pieces. That’s why our experiences were seemingly separate and scattered all over the place. Linear time sort of loses its meaning when a substantial chunk of your brain is on the other side of the planet.

Two things became apparent to me at that moment, as lightening permanently streaked across the sky, as sonic explosions collided and re–collided across the side streets and highways – one, there was a fragment of myself that was currently with Sarah and Kate. Two, that I was probably inside a virtual reality program of some sort. I don’t know how this happened – like I said, this information suddenly popped into my head – but I’m not dense enough to believe that it didn’t have something to do with the artifact.