I couldn’t shake a dark feeling in the back of my mind that whispered – more like screamed from a distance – that there was something else happening here. Something far more intricate than our minds being trapped in a prism of various realities. Something that sent shivers up my spine.
I could feel it then – but the answers remained elusive. I felt as if I had been waiting for an infinity of infinities for that moment – to finally be able to open a gateway into the adjacent universe. What did those feelings mean? Where did they come from?
I looked around. We reached the cubicles near the door that had the white decal – the door itself was gone, which was fortunate because I no longer had my access card for the key–pad. We instantly recognized the shapes of a few pitiful corpses scattered around the shadows, and on the other side of the room was the desk where I first encountered Alice drinking coffee. There was no going back.
Behind us, there was a petrified jungle of shadows filled with nightmares. Somewhere in front of us was the artifact.
I lifted Sarah onto my shoulder – unable to continue carrying her in a cradle. We moved toward the opposite hallway, and suddenly disturbed a lone savrataur that was nesting in the corner. It screamed and scurried toward the vault.
My legs were tense and shaky – I was praying to whatever was listening that those giant savrataurs – the big ones – were somewhere else.
“Do you want me to take her?” Kate asked quietly.
“No, I’m okay,” I rasped. “You just keep an eye out for those things.”
Reality kept going dark then snapping back into focus, making me flinch. We were close. The Clean Room was at the end of the hall.
I set Sarah’s unconscious body onto the floor.
5.
“Wait here,” I whispered.
I made my way down the hallway, immediately noticing the flickering blue light spreading over the wall opposite the door. I moved into the Clean Room and my eyes were instantly drawn to the artifact, which was suspended inside the magnets, gently tumbling within the Roller’s fluctuating polarities.
I stepped through the airlock, which stopped working when Alice and Sid tore all the doors down and used them for barricades. I walked into the M–normal vault and finally heard the artifact’s low hum.
I approached the dais, flicking my eyes at the observation tank, noticing that it was empty. The light was off inside, but I could clearly see the glow of holographic screens play on the wall opposite the glass.
“Alice…?” I called into the darkness.
Nothing.
I approached the rotation platform and flipped the image relay, which allowed me to see the observation tank’s screens displayed on the wall behind the artifact.
I heard a soft hiss of breath escape something from behind the platform. My eyes drifted to the sound, falling on a crumpled form in the corner.
I approached it, and stopped. My heart fell, while the rhythmic blue light dropped his normally red hair to a deep brown. “Sid…”
A large pool of dark blood spread around his crumpled body. I waited, hoping to see some sign of life, hoping even more that he wasn’t a reanimated corpse. It was hard to tell whether or not he was moving because of the dim blue light that was blurring everything with shadow.
“Sid,” I ventured again.
He lifted his head. “Stay back.”
Relieved, I dropped to his side, not wanting to touch him, afraid that I would somehow upset the delicate thread by which he hung. He tried shoving me away, but he couldn’t summon the strength. I could see that he had been shot several times, and I counted at least six tiny holes scattered in a loose grouping between his shoulders.
“Hurts…” He coughed and spat blood onto the floor.
Shot six times.
“What happened?”
“Alice.” His voice was so quiet that I had to lean in to hear him. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I knew he said Alice, but I couldn’t attach her name to the number of holes scattered across his back. The connection didn’t make sense to me. “Alice did this?”
He nodded. “She asked me to see if the artifact was still in the case, and then she–” He coughed hard until his breath leveled out. “Thirsty… shoulda took my chances at camp Ripley.”
His voice trailed off, and the ghost of a smile passed his lips.
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 deceptive. 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?!”
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