The Relics- The Keystone Trilogy - Part 1

by Michael K. Damron

  Jack walked with John to a back room on the second floor, where multiple screens lined a long table, each one hooked up to a physical online terminal.

  “So this is the one place, huh?” said Jack.

  “Yes, it’s the only place to go on the regular internet. The information and research data inside the facility is so sensitive and confidential that we take every precaution to insure none of it is stolen or smuggled out. You’re free to go wherever you want online with these encrypted computers, just don’t let anyone know where you are or talk about any intel you’ve been privy to. You’re smart enough to know what should and shouldn’t be talked about.”

  “Of course,” said Jack. “I’ll be sure to not say much of anything I’ve done or seen since being here.”

  “Good to know. I’ll leave you alone and the door will automatically lock behind you once you exit the room.”

  John left while Jack began searching for his mom’s presence online. When she didn’t answer on her usual devices or social networks, he sent additional messages and call requests to others. Over and over, Melissa didn’t pick up on any of her screens or show activity anywhere online. Jack thought it was strange he couldn’t get in contact with her, but he still left messages so she knew he was doing okay. He began to worry about the fact his mother couldn’t be reached. To try and take his mind off his concern, he checked to see if Hao or Cong was able to talk. Neither were online at the time, but he still left each of them a message wishing them well, whatever they were up to. He ventured to see if Robbin happened to be active, which, to his surprise, her status claimed she was. Feeling somewhat homesick and longing to connect with an old friend, he sent her a request to video chat.

  “My goodness, Jack, is that really you?” she said, smiling.

  “Yeah, I know it’s random, but I saw you were online and I just—”

  “No, thank you! It gives me a short break from the work I’m doing at Dr. Webb’s lab.”

  “Oh, right, how’s that going?” said Jack. “I’m sure people will be clawing at the opportunity to hire you after your internship is done.”

  “I’m happy to say it’s been going great. It has been everything I could have dreamed of and more. I contributed such a great deal on one project that my superiors already seem impressed.”

  “Ha, I can’t believe you had any doubts to begin with!”

  “C’mon, Jack, we all have doubts. Even the brightest innovators and scientists doubted themselves at some point.”

  “Well, they weren’t as smart or brilliant as—”

  “Oh, just shut it,” said Robbin, trying to hide her smile. “So how have you been, besides not being online? What kind of lab are you working in?”

  “Well,” Jack began to scratch his head, “I’m working at a private research lab that doesn’t have internet access, which explains my lack of communication with the outside world.”

  “Oh, how mysterious. So I’m assuming you can’t access the internet when you get to your apartment either.” she said, giving Jack an incredulous look.

  “Well, no, because . . . I also live where I work.”

  “You live there? In a lab? This is making me more and more curious by the second. You’re being very secretive, you know.”

  “I’m afraid it’ll have to stay that way,” said Jack, wishing he could say more.

  “Well who would have thought that you would be doing the most interesting thing after graduation?”

  “But you don’t even know what I’m doing.”

  “That’s why it’s so damn interesting!” she said, still seeming perplexed. “Anyway, Mystery Man, have you talked with Hao or Cong since graduation?”

  “I tried to contact them, but they didn’t answer.”

  “Well, Cong’s his usual self, but I’m a little worried about Hao.”

  “Why is that?” said Jack.

  “He just seems profoundly sad. He’s in a high-stress position at his family’s company and wants to quit, but feels like he can’t. He hasn’t been able to do any of his art or music and has no outlet for fulfilling his creative drive. You should really talk to him. He needs his friends’ support.”

  “I had no clue,” said Jack. “I’ve sent him a message already, but I’ll send him another one and try to talk with him the next time I’m online.”

  “Glad to hear it. Well, I have to get back to my work. There’s several vials back in the lab with my name on them that need my attention.”

  “Ha, nice. I’ll try to catch you on here again sometime.”

  “You better, Mr. Mysterious!” said Robbin, signing off.

  Before he forgot, Jack sent another message to Hao, saying that Robbin let him know about some of the doldrums he was going through. Jack told Hao to try and find more time for his art so his pent-up creativity had an outlet. Soon after finishing Hao’s message, Jack began thinking back on his conversation with Robbin. He missed the spark of her personality, but the resurgence of past feelings caused him to feel worse. In order to get his mind off the crash course it was on and prevent driving himself insane, he left the room and went for a walk to find John.

  Scanning from floor to floor of the Searcher facility, Jack was finding it difficult to track John down. He was eventually discovered in a back room on the second floor, adjacent to the conference room.

  “Hey, John, I wanted to let you know I couldn’t get in touch with my mom on the facility’s computers either.”

  “Did you have a poor connection?”

  “No, the connection was fine. She just didn’t answer my calls on any of her devices or social accounts.”

  “Hm, that seems somewhat concerning,” said John.

  “Yes, definitely. What’s stranger is that her online activity has been practically nothing for the past few days, which is atypical.”

  “Tell you what, I’ll have someone I trust from the AEB look into it for you so you don’t have to worry.”

  “Thank you. That would be great,” said Jack

  After leaving, he walked by the conference room and noticed Richard standing at the head of the table and making wild gesticulations with his hands, seemingly giving a presentation to no one. Curious, Jack opened the door to see what he was doing.

  “It looks like everyone missed the memo to be here for your performance,” said Jack, causing Richard to snap out of his routine.

  “Goodness, Jack, you shouldn’t sneak up on someone!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Practicing for my presentation later today, before you interrupted me.”

  “Oh, at the meeting?” said Jack.

  “That’s right. As you’ve heard, on top of the work I do as a Searcher, I also happen to be one of the scientists here that helps with researching the morphacite warp crystals.”

  “So that’s why I don’t see you around as much after morning training.”

  “You got it,” said Richard. “I’m usually off to do testing in the lab. John asked me to share my research findings over the past few months and . . . I can get a bit nervous in front of people, so I like to practice.”

  “Well, in that case, I’ll leave you to it. I’m sure you’ll do fine at the meeting later.”

  “Thanks,” said Richard, waiting for Jack to exit the room before he continued rehearsing.

  It wasn’t long before the meeting began. As the Searchers piled in, Richard straightened his posture to seem less daunted by the small crowd. Jack had been so successful at avoiding Marcel in and around the facility that he forgot about having to see him at the meeting. It was Jack’s desire to sit as far away from him as possible, which happened to be in a seat beside Alexie.

  “Still avoiding a certain someone, I see,” she said.

  “As much as I’d love to sit near him, I think it would give me automatic indigestion.”

  Alexie responded with an almost imperceptible snort of laughter.

  “All right everyone,” John began, “Richard will have the floor for t
his meeting so he can discuss his and his assistants’ findings in regards to morphacite warp crystals. Richard, if you will.”

  “Right, um, I’ll be flashing some images and charts on the wall behind me. They’ll be used to aid with my talk. As many of you know, I’ve been researching the amazing warp crystals we use for traveling to any anchor point around the globe in an instant. A team of engineers and I have been experimenting with algorithms to analyze all the different anchor points the crystals in our possession warp to. We then used the dataset to help us predict the location of more warp crystals, relics, and artifacts for us to discover. If you turn your attention to the map behind me, you’ll see the locations we’ve already obtained warp crystals from.”

  The map began to sprout small blue dots in multiple locations around the world, displaying several that clustered around northern Egypt, Turkey, Syria, eastern Australia, and a few in New Zealand.

  “And now, these are the potential locations of additional relics and other artifacts we’re searching for.”

  The map began to accumulate green dots this time, first on top of the areas where blue ones previously appeared, then larger groups in unexplored areas of Iraq and France.

  “You’ll see that there are new areas we’ve yet to explore that could yield great findings. Using the points at which the warp crystals are anchored—that is, where they allow us to travel to—the algorithm predicts many more potential artifacts further into Iraq, somewhere along the Euphrates River. As far as France goes, there’s a couple dots that center over the Montparnasse Cemetery.”

  “And how confident are you of these leads?” said John.

  “Well, the algorithm is fairly sophisticated, so I think they are excellent leads. I have the utmost confidence.”

  “Great work, Richard. Now, I want to pass down some intel Rakiten gave me from the founder himself,” said John. “The main mission of the Searchers has been to find more relics and artifacts. These typically come in the guise of morphacite, exos, and warp crystals. However, as some of you know, a short while back we opened a morphacite container with both a warp crystal and a manuscript with ancient writing on it. The text has recently been deciphered and determined to be that of an educational nature that tells some of the history of the relics. Because of the importance of such documents, from this point forward, the finding of further manuscripts and tablets are on the same priority level as that of exos and other relics. Sorry for the interruption, Richard, you may continue.”

  “Ah, yes, thank you for that information, John. I’d like to go over something again, since Jack is both new to the team and has the ability to control morphacite. As you may already know, your exo can work as a sort of antenna for picking up the frequency of morphacite. That’s why you can sense its presence as you get closer to it. Naturally, the stronger your ability for controlling morphacite, the easier it is for you to detect its presence. However, if it’s buried deep underground, it can be hard to detect. Because of this, a thorough search of each location we travel to is necessary. Now, sometimes we get lucky and the morphacite is all in a single location. But, of course, that’s not always the case and it can be spread out over a large distance. To further catch you up, Jack, Mark and his two rogues stole many of the warp crystals when they fled the facility. The loss was a devastating hit to our research and the places we could warp to. However, right before you came here, we discovered a windfall of new warp crystals in the north of Egypt. Those crystals, along with the data we had on the stolen ones, is what’s been used with my algorithm to predict where we’ll find more relics.”

  “I’m going to want us to begin travelling to these new locations as soon as possible,” said John, addressing the room. “We’ll do the missions in two groups. I’ll let everyone know the members in each group later on. Since Alexie and Marcel are the only Searchers who can currently activate the warp crystals, they’ll be the leaders again for their respective team. That being said, this meeting is now adjourned. Great job, Richard.”

  Everyone applauded to signify Richard’s excellent research and presentation. Jack felt a knot in his stomach knowing there was a chance he could be assigned to Marcel’s group.

  As the Searchers left the conference room, Jack joined Bridgett, Garnet, and Ferra, who were all ravenous and ready to grab a bite to eat.

  “So Jack, how have things been going?” said Bridgett.

  “It’s been good so far. Just training and meditating to get better at my abilities.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I meant how have things been going with a certain You-Know-Who?”

  “Now who’s this you’re talking about?” said Garnet.

  “It’s no one,” said Jack.

  “C’mon! I know it’s someone! Who is it? Marcel? It has to be him. I can see why you’d want to call him You-Know-Who. It’s got a more ominous, yet playful tone to it.”

  “Oh, that bad, huh?” said Bridgett, looking at Jack with sorrow. “I can see that it hasn’t been going your way in recent days. I’m sure it’ll all get back on track in no time.”

  “Did you honestly just read my thoughts? Not cool!” said Jack. “You caught me off guard. I should have blocked you from my mind the moment I thought I felt the familiar sensation of someone fishing around inside it.”

  “Not fair!” Garnet interjected. “Bridgett can weasel her way into someone’s brain to get what she wants while I’m still dying to know who the hell You-Know-Who is!”

  “Can we all just get back to eating our food or something?” said Jack.

  Bridgett agreed while Garnet fumed for a second before relinquishing her stance on the matter. Jack swore when he looked at Ferra, as the conversation on the topic was ending, she silently mouthed the name “Alexie” while smirking, before turning her attention back to her food.

  Soon after his meal, Jack went back to his room to meditate and observe some quiet time. Although he was never comfortable being alone for too long in his younger years, having time for himself was beginning to feel like a necessity for his well-being. As was prone to happen, his meditation was interrupted by several raps on his door.

  “Uh, come in,” he said, startled.

  Alexie opened and closed the door with haste, sporting an intense look on her face. Jack was both confused and happy she came to see him.

  “What’s up? Is everything okay?”

  “Look, I was borrowing one of your dad’s notebooks—I hope that’s still something you don’t mind me doing—and I think I discovered a secret. A big secret.”

  “Hang on a second,” said Jack. “First off, it’s still fine if you want to borrow one of the notebooks. But I’ve already skimmed over every page he wrote on and reread many of them multiple times and I never sensed there was any sort of hidden secret. What exactly did you find?”

  “I’m not even sure how it really works. I’ve never seen it before, but I’ll try to explain what I think is going on.”

  She sat down beside Jack and opened up the notebook to one of the latter sketches in it.

  “So, you know how morphacite can start out any size and, if the user is skilled enough, it can be divided into pieces so small they would be hard to distinguish with the naked eye?”

  “Yes, I’ve done some stuff like that before,” said Jack.

  “Well, those pieces could also be flattened, making them look more two-dimensional than three-dimensional. And don’t forget that morphacite is still jet black, even at those small sizes.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Here’s my hypothesis: your father was somehow able to ingrain memory into morphacite that allows it to morph back and forth between two shape patterns. The first pattern is the decoy message and the second pattern, which reveals itself if you try to move the morphacite, is the content he wanted to keep secret.”

  “I’m absolutely certain I don’t understand what you just said.”

  “Okay, for example, let’s say I transformed a piece of morphacite into a flower, and then a cube, and
I was able to lock it between those two positions for anyone else who tried to use the same piece of morphacite. So, if you were to grab the cube and morph it into, let’s say, a knife, all you would be able to do is watch it go between a cube and a flower.”

  “All right, I think I’m following now,” said Jack. “What’s this got to do with my father’s notebooks again?”

  “I discovered this by accident, and it simultaneously freaked me out and blew my mind. This page right here, with the sketch on it, as well as some other pages throughout this notebook, wasn’t written on with black ink; what is currently flat on the page and posing as ink is morphacite.”

  Jack’s face twisted into a look of bewilderment and slight disbelief.

  “Go ahead,” said Alexie, “try and transform it like you would any regular morphachite.”

  Jack focused his mind, pretending that what looked like ink to him was morphacite as he tried to alter it. Not noticing it before, there seemed to be the faintest tingling sensation on the tips of his fingers as he touched the page. To his shock, the sketch of an exo on the page burst into an uncountable number of bits and pieces that reassembled themselves as a new, hidden text on the page.

  “No way,” he said, astounded.

  “Yes way,” said Alexie. “Now try and morph it again into something different.”

  Returning to the previous state, the words broke apart and formed into the sketch of the exo.

  “Jack, some of the secrets your dad wrote about are stirring—as well as disturbing, for that matter.”

  “It’s an incredible discovery. I’ll go through every notebook page I can tonight. What have you found out so far in what you’ve uncovered?”

  “Yes, definitely pore over every notebook you have and let me know what other things you learn of. There were fifteen pages in the one that I borrowed, as far as I know, that had hidden text. It’s not just drawings that can hold a secret message. Some were the pages with sketches, others were just all text. But some of the hidden writings had to do with the altruism of Rakiten and the founder of the Searchers. Your father was making some heavy accusations, Jack. He believed in and cared for the Searcher division, but suspected its humanitarian mission to be a facade. He describes listening in to conversations between John and Rakiten, in which Rakiten refers to the founder as ‘the Archon’. It was also stated that he scanned John’s mind to find out more information and determined that even John suspected at least Rakiten of having malicious intentions for the relics the Searchers have been tasked to find.”