Artifact

by Shane Lindemoen

  I couldn’t breathe, certain that they were going to roll me into the pit. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it.

  “Who are you?” I tried to stall, pulling at my handcuffs as hard as I could.

  “Oh, come now. Isn’t it obvious?”

  My whole world spiraled down a deep dark hole of which there was no end.

  “We,” they said. “Are you.”

  And then they pitched me into the hole, wheelchair and all.

  As I plummeted – as I knocked and tumbled and fell for what felt like forever, ripping strips of skin away with each contact against the shaft’s interior, approaching terminal velocity – the dream changed again–

  4.

  As a new plane of existence whisked away the deep shaft of darkness, I realized then that my understanding of time as a concept, as a relative progression of movements, made adjusting to those liminal temporal disruptions easier for me. The fact of the matter was that I seemed to be cutting to and from different points in time.

  As a physicist, I knew that time was as much of an abstract as it was an actual descriptive dimension. It was a singular thing, past, present and future – like how a whole book is itself a singular object, instead of just the collection of moments therein. The closest I ever came to describing the physicist’s concept of time in any coherent way was at a high school teach–in. I explained that we are capable of understanding time, and even experiencing it to a certain extent. Because the human mind is only limited to three dimensions, we can only perceive time in slices, and only in one direction. We need an array of instrumentation to even begin to visualize the shadow of anything further than that. To us, perceiving time is like something in the second dimension perceiving human beings as a stack of thinly cut slices – as if we were a deck of playing cards that could only be seen one card at a time, or a book that could only be seen one page at a time.

  It’s a static thing that only looks different because of where you’re standing. Time passes differently for an astronaut in orbit than it does for a science crew deep in the Marina Trench.

  If we were to have two people synchronize their watches at the same exact time on two different planets – one on Earth and one Mars – and if we measured time against a wayward Kuiper belt object, let’s say, as it passed between the two planets, then each person would perceive the same event as happening at different times. In other words, the same time on Mars would not be the same time on Earth. Each would experience time in their own way, on their own accord. The event is the same – it’s one, singular thing – but it’s not isolated to one moment or another. It just is.

  I think that’s why adjusting to these changing realities was easy for me, when I would be running with Sid toward the double–door entrance to the CEM, and be inside the CEM, in my office on the second level at the same time. This even reinforced the suspicion that I was dreaming – or at the very least that none of this was real. The sheer amount of impossible shit that has happened since the accident was just too much to ignore. At least that’s what I thought.

  Images of Goya and Dali occupied my thoughts. The portrait of Alice eating me was especially unsettling, but the Persistence of Memory was probably the most indicative thing I had seen so far. There were two certainties. One was that the presence of death in this dream was very real, and although the imagery may have been fantastic, like zombies for example, I knew that it symbolized something wholly tangible on the outside of wherever I was. If I died in there, I died in the real world as well. The second certainty was that what was unfolding – somewhere in the recesses of my mind – would have real life consequences.

  The fundamental issue was time. At least, I think it was starting to become the issue.

  There seemed to be several Me’s converging onto the same moment. What that moment was I couldn’t tell – it hadn’t happened yet.

  So when I fell down a hole into oblivion – shoved by some invisible art cult that claimed to be me – as a singularity collapsed into a deterministic universe of infinite possibilities – I was, at the same time, suddenly lying in my hospital bed again.

  “Do you need anything, Lance?”

  I could move, I realized, and made fists with my hands a few times. I noticed Alice’s pink stuffed animal on the sill. The nurse lowered her clipboard slightly and frowned. “Are we okay, Lance?” She asked. “Need anything – cup of ice, some water?”

  “Can you hear me?” I asked.

  She frowned and set the aluminum clipboard onto a shelf next to the wall–screen. “Of course…”

  I gently touched my chest and a sliver of pain touched back.

  I quickly sat up, ignoring the roaring flames under my skin and started ripping all of the tubes out of my body.

  “W–wait, what’s wrong?!” The nurse screamed. “Nurse Alex, I need you in here!”

  I ripped the intravenous–drip, feeding tube and catheter away and rolled onto my feet. The hospital gown bunched around my waist, and I felt a breeze.

  Two additional nurses came running into the room and tried helping me back onto the bed, but I shoved my way through them, snatching the aluminum clipboard from the shelf before stumbling into the hallway.

  It looked just as it did before, except there were people. The institutional beige felt a bit warmer, and the scent of chemicals was less punctuated. To my left was the perpendicular hallway that branched in opposite directions. To my right were the elevators and the emergency stairway – and the dark hospital room at the end of the hall, with the dying fluorescent lights. Only this time they weren’t dying – this time they were burning bright and true. I ran, ignoring the pain. I passed the elevator just as the doors opened, and–

  –Patrick’s heavily muscled frame stepped out, flanked by two men in suits. “Lance…”

  I kept going at a dead sprint while the balls of my bare feet screeched on the linoleum.

  “Lance!” He screamed, scuffing his shoes on the floor, reaching out to grab me but missing.

  I careened into the room at the end of the hall and slammed the door closed, ignoring the blood that poured down the front of my body. I quickly grabbed one of the portable beds and wedged it between the door and the opposite wall. I dropped to my knees, and there it was–

  –A bright green, glowing letter M.

  I took the aluminum clipboard with both hands and hacked the door with its edge, trying to scrape away the paint.

  Someone crashed into the opposite side, and Patrick yelled, “Open up, Lance – you’re not safe!”

  I slammed the clipboard repeatedly until enough of the paint scraped away that I could see another glowing letter, like the numbers on an alarm clock:

  MO

  Patrick and the suits methodically rammed the door. “Lance, you don’t understand,” he said. “You’re at risk. I don’t know the extent of who or what has been compromised!”

  I kept scraping.

  MO–

  They were ramming so hard that the bed was beginning to shift, and soon it was going to vibrate away from the door just enough for one of them to work their way inside.

  MO–ST

  “There’s been a serious security breach, pal.” Patrick yelled, “This whole place is coming down. We need to get you out of here. You’re all that matters!”

  MO–STA

  “I know I screwed up,” he said. “I’m sorry, and I didn’t mean to scare you. But we’re trying to help, okay?”

  “Then why’d you kill Joseph?!”

  “I had no choice, Lance,” he said. “He was infected. He would have killed you, and then all of this–” He took a breath. “All of this would have been for nothing. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I understand. I understand you put a gun to my head–”

  The last two strikes with the clipboard did it, and the kicking on the door grew to suc
h intensity that I knew I finished at just the right time. I sank onto my haunches and stared blankly at the door. It didn’t make any sense.

  MO–STACK

  The door caught me on the forehead after the last kick, and I stumbled back. Patrick stepped into the room, head and shoulders rotating like a tank turret. His forehead was inflamed, and an angry red crust mottled his eyebrows around a large cut, still healing from when he smashed into the dash at the lake. The two suits followed him in and policed the room – looking into shelves, opening the bathroom door, and looking out of the window. Patrick knelt in front of me and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Lance. I wish things could have been different.”

  “Don’t apologize to me,” I replied, feeling a cold resolution settle in the pit of my stomach. “As soon as I can, Patrick, I intend to finish what I should have done at the lake.”

  “I was,” he frowned. “Confused. I apologize. I truly do…”

  He stood and nodded to one of the suits, who produced a pair of handcuffs and knelt behind me. “This place is about to blow,” Patrick said. “And not only do we have to get you out of here, but we have to get you safe, secure and secluded.”

  “Why, so you can torture the algorithm out of me?”

  “The what?”

  “The sequence you wanted. The algorithm that opens the artifact from Mars.”

  “If you’re safe, then I don’t need it,” he said. “You’re the only thing that matters.”

  “You keep saying that – what do you mean? And why the sudden change of heart?”

  The two suits lifted me by the arms. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the world start to halo out again. “What is it?” I demanded.

  “What is what?”

  “The artifact,” I said. “Is it a weapon?”

  He looked at me and arched his eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”

  “Why do you want this thing so bad?” I asked.

  He looked at his own feet, searching for the right answer. “Because we are lost without it. Without it, our lives are meaningless.”

  I thought about that until the universe started to collapse into itself again. For some reason I thought about the violin. “Where are you taking me?”

  “The only place I can be certain that you’ll be safe.” He said, “I’m taking you to the labs.”

  “You know,” I said. “I was planning on heading that way myself.”

  “Excellent.” He said, “We can ride together.”

  “I hope it’s a lot smoother than our last ride.”

  He nodded at one of the suits and said, “So do I.”

  Before I slipped into another dimension of experience, I saw Patrick kneel and touch the word at the base of the door.

  MO–STACK.

  I couldn’t figure out what that meant. The strange thing – the really strange thing was that, where I scraped all of the paint away, right where Patrick touched – it looked like a liquid crystal polymer forming an impression around the tip of his finger.

  Like my hand used to do when I was a kid, as I pressed it against my father’s computer monitor. The thoughts flooded my mind, and darkness quickly followed them.

  5.

  The M–normal vault was switched off. All of the doors had been removed from their hinges and reconstituted for barricades, including the two pressurized airlocks. Of course, the artifact would still function in Earth atmosphere – it was a piece of rock. The sterilization process was more for our protection than for the artifact, because frankly, we didn’t know what it was. Simply bringing it here was a risk – what if it was in fact a stellar bomb or something, and we had unwittingly imported the very instrument of our destruction? We didn’t have the money to build an installation like this on Mars, nor could we export the personnel that would have had to live there for an indeterminate amount of time. So we brought it here to us. We remained deadly cautious – hence the gray serialization room, air–shower and the Mars–normal atmospheric vault.

  It seemed a little late for caution under the circumstances.

  Not many options at that point – we either figured out how to open the artifact, or we ended up as lunch for a couple hundred thousand zombies.

  Or driven insane by that schizophrenic’s definition of time differential.

  Everything was open and exposed – the various barriers of safety had been removed, and the Martian artifact was just sitting there in the open.

  The emergency floodlights were still on throughout the facility. It was still dark outside, and the clocks on the wall seemed to have stopped at 2:10. There was no way of knowing what time it was.

  If I had things right – and there was a good chance that I didn’t – Alice, Sid, the woman and her little girl were somewhere in the facility – that’s if the woman and the little girl hadn’t plummeted to their deaths after I shifted away.

  Since I just arrived, I wasn’t exactly sure where I was in this timeline. But that was the farthest thing from my mind.

  There it was softly humming in the dark. The artifact.

  I walked into the M–normal vault and looked at the alien stone for a long time. I studied the deliberate grooves of its nontextual surface. The usual feeling of awe was absent. It was sitting atop the rotating platform that was switched off, which was surrounded by an impressive spectrum of monitoring equipment. The dais was positioned in the center of the vault, and besides the oscilloscopes, spectrometers, transceivers, microscopes, photo tachometers, infrared and ultraviolet cameras, the artifact was surrounded by three antennas at equal spacing. There were thick gnarls of black cord running from the bottom of the rotational dais to a terminal block of vacuum–sealed apertures, which distributed to an impressive set holographic screens in the observation tank. That’s where Alice was working when this thing did what it did.

  The platform was retrofitted with a remote controlled shell of four crescent shaped electromagnetic coil packs that we called The Roller. This device allowed us to rotate the artifact in midair, on any axis we wanted. The object itself was currently nestled inside a foam case beside the Roller, which ceased to function after the power went out.

  I knew the first step. I knew that I had to turn it point two five rotations per second at the designated axis in order to receive the next key. That was one of the last things I remember doing before I was blown across the room.

  “Lance.” Alice stood in the hallway outside of the Gray Room, holding a flashlight. “Where have you been?”

  I looked at the artifact a last time before leaving the vault.

  “I don’t even know how to explain it anymore,” I said. “Suffice to say, I wasn’t here. I was somewhere else. Or some time else, I’m not quite sure.”

  “You just ran away?” She asked through her teeth, “Left us?”

  “Alice, it’s not like that. I was in some art history hellhole, then back at the hospital again.” I shrugged, “I’m presently in Patrick’s custody and on my way here.”

  She shook her head. “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound?”

  “Yeah Alice, I do–”

  “We needed you.” She said, “They almost died.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “You’re sorry,” she didn’t bother concealing the sneer in her voice. She shook her head and pulled some of the tension out of her neck.

  “I told you – one minute I’ll be here, the next I’ll be–”

  “Yeah, like the lake thing.”

  “Yes…”

  “Well, is it going to happen again?”

  “Probably, yeah.” I said, “It doesn’t seem to be something I can control.”

  She looked around the vault until her eyes settled onto mine. “I don’t remember coming here.” She said flatly, “I mean, I remember coming here with Sid when we were ripping all
of the doors down for barricade material,” Her eyes closed for a moment, and the fatigue almost seemed to be winning. She was on the verge of breaking, barely holding things together. “This time I don’t remember coming here. I was with Sid nailing the doors up, and then I was here–” She pointed at the vault with Patrick’s gun. “And you were there…”

  “I know,” I said, and gently squeezed her shoulder.

  She covered my hand with hers and squeezed back. “What do we do?”

  I pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes this time, and thought about it. “Is the building secure? Can those things get in here?”

  “It’s about as secure as we can make it.”

  “Then let’s get back to the filing department, pull everything we have about the artifact and figure out how to find that frequency again.”

  6.

  The little girl and the woman with the shaved head clung to each other in the hallway across from the filing room. Alice grabbed a few bottles of water from the lunchroom before we headed back upstairs, and passed one to Sid, who was leaning against a document trolley with his arms crossed. When I followed Alice into the room, he clenched his jaw and shook his head. After he finally got around to pressing me about where I went, I told him everything.

  “This isn’t real,” he said, arching an eyebrow.

  “I don’t know.”

  “And we’re just figments of your imagination?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “What does your imagination have to say about my wife?” He looked at Alice. “What about that little girl’s father? He was just some fantasy?”

  “Relax.” Alice said. “He’s not saying anything like that.”

  “That’s exactly what he’s saying.”

  Alice crossed her arms and looked away.

  Sid turned to the woman from the truck, “How does that make you feel? Was your boyfriend some sort of nothing–?”

  “That’s enough,” I said.

  “I want to know. I want you to hear her say it–”

  “He wasn’t my boyfriend,” She said suddenly. A few tears rolled down her cheek before she could catch them, and she glared at Sid with naked judgment. After a few beats, she wiped her eyes, rubbed the stubble on her head and shrugged. “He was just some guy who saw me running and picked me up.”