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 pro
gram 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.
I knew it all along – I never woke up.
Whatever happened in that lab, whatever caused the artifact to react that way, blowing me across the M–vault, I was still dealing with it. I thought again about the conversation I had with Alice in my bed earlier. Maybe my body still lay unconscious in the lab, as EMS technicians furiously tried to keep blood pumping into my brain.
It became necessary at that point to mentally trace the steps from my house to here. I remember coming into existence in my bedroom, where Alice and I constructed the barricade, only to find the gun that I told her about was not in the closet – she must have grabbed it and decided to take her chances on the street. I went downstairs to find nearly every single zombie decapitated – hundreds upon hundreds of headless corpses could be seen in every direction. I remember deciding to follow the trail of dead bodies toward Socorro, which was only a few kilometers down the highway. And then new memories flooded my thoughts – memories of the faceless Lance that rescued me in a tomb, memories of giant savrataurs ripping Patrick in half…
So I followed the bodies.
There were never less than a dozen cracks in the sky at one time – and sometimes the plummeting chunks were obstructed by meteors that were burning up in the atmosphere.
This was Ragnorak.
This was New Testament, Book of Revelation stuff.
The end of the world as I knew it.
Rounding an overpass, I suddenly had a clear view of the two highway exits into Socorro, which were choked with piles of burning vehicles and hordes of shambling corpses. Downtown Socorro was stretching plumes of smoke and high rises toward the perforated sky.
I glanced behind me to see how the stragglers were fairing – scattered zombies that missed out on all the headless fun continued following me – there were still hundreds of them, but they were slow moving and far away enough not to pose any immediate threat.
I saw something roll in the distance. At first I thought it was just another chunk of the sky, but at second glance my brain froze.
I ducked down behind a guard rail, just as a monster the size of storage container slid off the roof of a building not far from where I hid, quickly moving away from me. I tried to see where it was going, but it was moving too fast.
Cold sweat ran down my chest and back. I did not want to come across one of those things in the open.
I heard the sound of concrete, brick, wood and mortar groan under pressure a few blocks away, and I turned in time to see another one, larger than what was perched on the house between the overpass. This one shoved a building aside like it was a child’s toy – large fragments of wood and stone exploded into a pyroclastic cloud, obscuring the thing from view. I could see by the mirage of its shadow bouncing around inside the dense cloud that it was massive.
I held my breath as the cloud of debris washed over me, very much not wanting to move.
I noticed that the pack of zombies was starting to catch up, as did the giant monster. Its head rotated toward the crowd of stumbling corpses, pulling currents of dust clouds in its wake as it moved. It ponderously, though deceptively fast, crawled over the two intervening buildings, smashing them flat until it was in the roadway with the zombies. It snatched the closest one, pulled its head off and then tossed the body over its massive shoulder – the headless corpse disappeared somewhere in the distance. The monster systematically ripped the heads off of the zombies one by one, popping them into its mouth.
I heard an earth shattering explosion, and at first I thought that a portion of the sky crashed close by, but I was able to turn in time to see another giant monster belting the loudest, most grotesque roar that I ever heard in my life, only a couple meters away from me. My hands instinctively went to my ears.
Time to go.
I stepped over the guard–rail and made my way down the steep slope to the street below. I made a beeline toward the closest structure, and as soon as I immersed myself in the shadow of the buildings, a pair of hands grabbed the back of my collar and pulled me into a doorway.
“Quiet–” A man’s voice hissed.
I stopped fighting immediately. As far as I knew, the zombies didn’t talk.
The shadow over the alleyway suddenly cleared, and I could hear the giant, leathery sound of crocodile skin slide away from us. I looked out of the doorway just as a massive tail the length of a city bus disappeared behind the roof, followed shortly by another earthshaking roar.
I turned to see another Lance, the little girl named Sarah and the woman Kate.
“I was expecting you,” I said.
“I know…”
“Did you guys get the generator going?”
“We did.”
“What now…?” I whispered.
“Now nothing,” he said quietly. “Just stay still.”
The woman and the little girl each placed a hand on one of his shoulders.
“Mo stack,” he said. “Take us to the labs.”
4.
The entire world suddenly felt like a singularity crunch – everything was imploding, crashing around us from all sides.
We moved through the hallway, trying our best to ignore the bloody streak of handprints that covered the entire length of the wall. There were puddles of blood everywhere, and we thankfully hadn’t encountered any savrataurs along our somber path. We carefully moved past gaping holes in the ceiling and walls, which appeared to have been left by something massive – knowing that at any second we could be ripped through the other side, dragged into a far, unseen corner where the monsters could have their way with us.
The M–vault was messing with this universe’s interpretation of Planck’s constant – the walls were simultaneously melting and solidifying – oscillating back and forth between different states – and I couldn’t even begin to imagine what that meant. I knew that it wasn’t good.
It seemed like the deeper we went into the facility, and the closer we got to the artifact, the more it seemed that energy was being drained out of the environment around us. Light was stretching – growing redder to the point that everything was slowly and incrementally going black. Sarah suddenly grew dizzy and collapsed. Kate and I stopped.
“W – what’s happening?” She rasped.
“I don’t know.” I gathered Sarah into my arms and started moving again. “Alice and Sid must be following the algorithm – they must have gotten the Roller going.”
Gravity seemed to change too, the center of which would briefly pull harder toward the artifact than the Earth, and then it would go back again. This pull would happen suddenly, several times almost knocking us off our feet.
I tried to focus on the here and now.
We turned down a new hallway and stopped in our tracks, finding it full of headless corpses. There was no other way around. The floodlights were working, but something was stretching their frequency thin, canceling what light there was out of our visible spectrum. It was darker here – almost pitch black – and we carefully picked our way over the corpses, trying our best not to think of them for what they were.
I glanced around the hall and picked my route through the darkness. I strafed my eyes back and forth, snatching what particles of light I could, hoping it would be enough to guide me through. I was also hoping that those corpses were indeed dead.
Reality was getting fuller. The walls closed in on us, and then instantly retracted. It was as if nature didn’t know how to handle itself anymore. Natural law and quantum theory proceeded to fail in this place, and I only hoped that it would hold on long enough for us to make it to the Clean Room.
There was a worst possible case scenario that I had to consider – what if the reason reality se
emed to be ripping apart was because the algorithm was wrong – what if by following the artifact’s instructions, we actually destroyed ourselves and this reality?
The artifact and I have waited a long time for this. A very long time. How I came to this conclusion, I wasn’t entirely sure. There was something about the process of gathering the other parts of me that made some things a bit clearer.
Kate and I reached the turn of the next hallway and made our way toward the Clean Room, finally clearing the pile of bodies.
Patrick said that the artifact was a schematic – a symbolic representation of a cryptographic test, which was designed to gauge whether or not we were ready to establish an uplink with the Lexicon. The reports I read in the vault, however, said that the artifact was designed to act as a component storage device for that very same worldwide Lexicon. Patrick went on to say that the whole purpose of opening the artifact was to seal an exchange with that Lexicon, which was basically a beam of light that continuously looped throughout a network of satellites that were in low Earth orbit.
I knew that none of it was real – but I knew that everything was still very functionally certain. I knew that MO–STACK was a type of operating system.
Million dollar question.
No lifelines.
If I had to guess, I would say that when Alice and I were initially trying to open the artifact, we created some sort of connection with this supposed Lexicon. But something unintended happened. There was an unforeseeable event – an electrical surge – and our minds, which were incidentally scrambled beyond conceivable repair, were suddenly uploaded into the device.
Everything thereafter had been one fragmented movement towards waking up again. The artifact was some sort of advanced computer that was designed by the CEM and subsequently placed on Mars shortly after its completion.
Final answer. Tell me what I won.
But that didn’t explain any ancient civilization. It didn’t explain the fact that this thing was built with technology that we weren’t capable of yet.
What was I missing?
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