Artifact (26 page)

I wanted to touch him, to somehow reassure the sense that he wasn’t alone, but I didn’t know what else to do. I ripped off my tattered shirt and pressed it into the largest exit wound on his chest, and he winced. There was just too much blood.

“You’re going to be okay,” I said distantly. “You – you’re going to be fine…”

He nodded slowly and then set his head on floor. His lids fluttered a bit before dropping like hammers.

I got to my feet and checked the cords running into the observation tank, making sure that everything was still connected. I stepped onto the platform and switched on the spectrometer. And there it was on the wall – a slow moving light on the surface of the artifact, arcing away from me.

I turned on the holographic control–panel and started manipulating the roller, following the light’s movement across the three dimensional image of the object. Two revolutions and the light suddenly changed directions. I stayed with it, keeping my eyes glued onto the wall–screen, ignoring the dark block of stone that was mirroring the image’s movement inside the Roller. Watching the actual artifact was pointless because the light was above the visible spectrum – so I used the spectrometer and the hologram to follow what I couldn’t see with the naked eye. Without the holographic screen, the artifact was simply a dusty old cube hovering in mid–air, spinning in the center of a set of large crescent shaped magnets.

I could tell that the frequency changed, because a clicking sound started to give the hum rhythm. That noise was the hidden frequency locked tightly away inside the sine wave. I was trying to modulate it – and if I had to guess what was happening – because it was just a guess at this point – the hum would continue increasing its frequency until it matched the artifact’s original resonance state, hopefully popping it open or, making it do whatever it’s supposed to do.

After that, I didn’t know.

Anything could happen.

The light was changing directions every two revolutions. I followed along until the clicking leveled out – I pulled back after several attempts, disappointed that nothing was happening.

I reluctantly collapsed the control interface and checked on Sid. He was still breathing, and I bundled my shirt into a makeshift pillow under his head. “Are you okay?”

He nodded softly.

I walked back into the observation tank, studying the waves of perfect blue light reflecting off the walls. There was a stack of folders in the corner and I decided to go through them one by one, and look for my notes.

Those notes meant everything. They would have had all the answers.

I leafed through the folders as best I could – each one about as thick as a dictionary. It was the needle haystack analogy writ large and shuffled into a dictionary sized stack of other analogies.

The eighth folder did it. Losing my patience, I picked up the stack and threw it into the wall, sending sheets of information sliding across the floor, across the desk–screen, out into the vault.

I pushed the hair out of my eyes and collapsed into the chair, ready to let the place fill me up until I burst. Maybe I wasn’t supposed
to figure this thing out – maybe it
was
a test. Maybe I failed. Was this even the sort of test that could
be passed? I thought again about the strange nature of my memory. How was it that I could recall things like childhood fears and relatives – things like numbers, formulas and feelings – but the moment I needed my memory for something, when it wasn’t serving as just an inconvenient trap of patterns and emotion, it was a fleeting thing. Memory decided where to go, what to do, how far I got and what kind of person I was.

And the world was somehow that impossible dream I had when I was young. This passing shade of a world wasn’t anywhere near the shape of those numbers that I grew to trust.

Those holy mathematical laws. Those landmarks we use to guide us into the unknown future. Where were their proofs now?

It was too big. Too unrealistic
.

The reverse was also true – the reoccurring nightmare that I had when I was a child – that the universe was impossibly large and unknowable, and I was a tiny speck in the span of observable time. I was a fragmented genius referent without the yardstick of precise memory. The world wasn’t real – I wasn’t real – the details of my life were probably not real. My mind wanted out. I wanted this to end, and I was inclined to let it.

I leaned back and stretched my neck, watching the light some more. I kicked my legs onto the desk–screen and something slid to the floor.

I looked and saw something interesting – A plastic sleeve with scorched, foggy notebook paper stuffed inside a cloud of condensation. I reached down and leafed the paper out. The first thing I saw was a string of variables for an angle of rotation. And a list of protocols. My eyes drifted down the paper to the last bullet, which told me to spin the artifact into the light. To follow it. And below that there was a faded yellow post–it note.

It said:

Speed increases with the light

And then:

Change of direction must happen imme
–

And the rest ran onto the piece of paper it was stuck to:

–
diately
.

I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

Speed increases with the light. Change of direction must happen immediately
.

I frantically searched the tank for a pen until I remembered that nothing from the outside world made it through the airlock. Alice must have dragged all of those files in there, hoping to find the rest of the algorithm. I flicked the post–it note between my fingers, not entirely grasping the triumph of it yet.

I ran back into the outer room and ripped through drawers until I found my sterilized pen. I flipped the note around and wrote:

Speed increases with the light. Change of direction must happen immediately.

The handwriting matched.

This was me.

I wrote this.

I hurried back into the observation tank and fired up the holographic screen. I scanned the icons looking for anything that would–

–There. A folder inside the primary grid labeled
Roller Console
. I opened it, and the first icon inside was called
Sensor Chaser.

This was the administrative console for the spectral output sensors. This was a program Alice and I wrote so that the roller would automatically recognize the frequency of light that was moving across the artifact, and instantly adjust for the direction and speed of the artifact’s spin as soon as it changed.

I fired it up, and the hologram immediately reacted to the algorithm. I could see the ultraviolet image of the artifact turn faster, instantly altering its direction of spin the moment the light changed trajectory – there was of course some infinitesimal transmission delay between the Roller and the artifact, but that didn’t seem to matter very much. The light changed direction every two revolutions and the Roller instantly followed – the light moved faster, and the roller matched its speed.

I walked back into the vault, noticing again the waves of light breaking gently against the walls. It was beautiful. The clicking finally leveled out at a high pitched whistle, which harmonized the lower hum. The combination sounded similar to a rich dial tone.

“Where have you been…?”

I spun around and saw Alice standing in the air shower. Patrick’s silver gun hung loosely in her fingers. “Alice.”

“Where have you been?” She asked again.

I slowly pointed at the hallway, trying to think of an answer. I looked past her shoulder to see where Kate and Sarah were, but it was too dark.

“The vault,” I said finally. “And everywhere else you could imagine.”

She glanced past me and stared vacantly into the artifact’s interminable, lucent blue light. Her eyes strayed to the right until they saw Sid curled into himself near the corner. She pointed at him with the gun and said, “I had no choice, Lance – he somehow became infected.”

I stood motionless, not saying anything. I suddenly found it hard to swallow – I found it equally hard to look her in the eyes.

“You understand, don’t you?” Her lips quivered as tears gathered below her lashes.

I moved to the side of the platform, and put myself between Alice and Sid. “Is that why you shot him in the back?”

“I – what…?”

“Those zombie things don’t die, Alice.” I felt the heat build in my chest. “You’re lying.”

She cocked her head and frowned. “I’m lying? Oh, Lance–” She pulled up a holographic panel on the side of the observation tank and quickly glanced it over. “How screwed up are
you?” She punched in a command. “Why would I lie about something like that?”

“Why the bullshit, Alice?” I asked finally.

She tightened her grip around Patrick’s gun and leaned into the observation tank, scanning the floor to make sure that it was empty. “Where’s the girl and the woman?”

“They’re both dead,” I lied, hoping that they were close enough to hear. “Now answer the question.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why the stories – the bullshit about finding the artifact on Mars?”

She moved herself back in front of the air shower, blocking my only way out. “We did find it on Mars, Lance.” She said soothingly, “Trust
me. I’m telling you the truth. The God’s honest truth–”

“Tell me about the Deep Level Installation,” I said forcefully. “In the Amazonis quadrangle MC–8, near the Tharsis
bulge.”

Her face went blank and unreadable.

“
Purchased by the Center for Energetic Materials and the Human Knowledge Consortium in May of 2036.”

She frowned, confused. “What are you talking about?”

“The installation on Mars
,
Alice.” I hissed, “Four point eight kilometers deep. A mine shaft redesigned as a self–sustaining, self–contained storage facility for the artifact upon its completion in 2042. Upon its completion, Alice. For the artifact.”

She angled her head in a way that I thought was decep
tive. Something in her eyes – her posture maybe. Perhaps the way her mouth rested half opened, the truth of which hung there, wanting to get out but she wouldn’t let it. I suddenly noticed that the tears were gone, and her lips were steady. I saw this look before – when I found her at a desk drinking coffee, when I brought up Joseph and Patrick picking me up from the hospital – a spark of understanding that seemed to briefly weigh her down. The heat in my chest finally stoked into a roaring inferno. I was just so tired of being lost in this place. I wanted it to end. I wanted it to end immediately.

“Lance, please–”

“Cut the bullshit, Alice!” I screamed.

She went very still and settled onto the balls of her feet.

“I know,” I said softly. “Okay? I know…”

“And what do you know?”

“I know enough.”

“You know shit,” she raised the gun to my chest. “You
think
you know.”

I slowly lifted my hands, showing her my palms. “I know that we never found anything in a chromite mine on Mars. I know that we put something there, though. Some sort of super computer that could presumably think and feel, like a human–”

The high pitched whistle increased, screeching briefly until it disappeared altogether. It was still there, we just couldn’t hear it – the frequency tightened into a wavelength that was above our auditory perception. I could see out of the corner of my eye that the artifact was increasing speed until it took on a spherical shape – it spun so fast that it no longer resembled a cube of stone at all, but a ball of dim blue light.

“Step away,” she said quietly.

“Tell me it wasn’t you, Alice…”

She arched an eyebrow.

“Tell me you didn’t cause the surge. Tell me that you didn’t try to kill me during the initial experiment.”

Her face went cold and unreadable.

“Please, Alice – tell me that it wasn’t you who sabotaged the uplink, causing my memory loss, fragmenting my mind into a million separate pieces!”

I shook my head, trying to fight back tears that welled in my vision. “You tell me right now Alice, that it wasn’t you who infected Joseph with the Cronos virus and dismantled the generators.”

She frowned and clenched her jaw – muscles bunched up along her temples and she threaded her finger into the trigger guard.

“Why?” I asked helplessly. “Why are you doing this?”

“It’s,” She shrugged, looking for the right word. “Complicated.” She moved closer and repositioned her gun sights between my eyes. “Now step away from the artifact.”

I slowly moved aside with my hands still raised. “Can I ask you something?”

“No–”

“When I found you putting up that barricade in the lobby,” I continued. “When you and I rescued Sid – you didn’t give a shit about keeping the zombies out, did you?”

She didn’t speak. Her eyes reverted back into her skull, beady and full of death. Her lips flattened into a grim line.

“That barricade was for me, wasn’t it?”

I saw a shadow slide into the vault behind her.

Alice glanced at the artifact, mesmerized by its rich soothing light.

“You said it was my fault, Alice.” I searched her face through the tears, fighting to keep my breath. “You put that weight on me, when the truth is the temperature spike had nothing to do with it. Why didn’t you just shoot me then,” I demanded. “Why draw it out? Why the games?!”

She locked eyes with me, pressing the gun against my forehead. I clenched them tightly, listening to the rush of blood leaving my temples, waiting for the hot feeling of lead that would split my skull in half, and then–

–Gravity suddenly pulled toward the artifact, and we both lurched off of our feet. The shadow behind Alice rose impossibly long at the end of an aluminum baseball bat, and then it came down hard on the back of her head. I heard a wet
thok
as air escaped her lungs, and she stumbled into the roller. She spun around, blindly firing into the shadows near the airlock.

Kate dropped Sid’s baseball bat and dove into the observation tank, and I could see on the other end of the airlock, pouring into the outer room
from the hallway, a horde of savrataurs breaking away from each other in every direction. The observation tank slammed shut, and I could see Kate and Sarah pressing their weight against the door, trying to hold it closed.