Artifex

by Gentry Race

  “I can feel it! It’s hurting!”

  “Arthur, he can feel the pain too?” the captain asked, alarmed.

  Arthur turned some dials to reduce the sensations uploading to Charny.

  “I turned down the pain sensors—”

  Charny tried to bolt upright, and the captain and two men tackled him.

  “Dammit, Arthur!” the captain yelled. “Shut it down!”

  “No, you can’t sever the connection!” he yelled. “You’ll turn his brain into mush!”

  Arthur was one number short, and desperately hoping that the man could still get him the information he needed.

  Lucy mimicked Charny’s hysteria, flailing around on the acidic cenote floor. Arthur calmed down Charny long enough for him to control Lucy and make her way to the side of the pit. He had Lucy cling tightly to the rock, trying to claw her way up. Part of the loose karst gave in, crumbling down on top of her.

  The large side of the cave wall toppled down. Pieces of rock hit the wires, tightening his slack strung from above.

  Arthur felt the jerk of the machine he was monitoring as it reprinted the slack. The wires kept pulling down and down into the watery pit, shortening the slack.

  Arthur looked at the white matter reserve tank and watched the slack in the rope tighten. With the reserves depleted, the molecular assembling ceased altogether.

  “Quick! We have to unlatch—”

  The cords stopped voxelizing. The men were thrown into the air while Charny’s head was pulled as well, snapping in crushing agony. His lifeless body gouged the soft jungle ground, stopping just at the edge of the cenote.

  He was dead.

  6

  The Superstition

  Arthur walked toward the entrance of another tent that strikingly resembled his own sleeping quarters. With an outward reach of his hand, the nanites responded, and a zipper voxelized. Inside, a scientific lab overflowing with clockwork gadgetry, laboratory equipment, a monitor, and all of Liz’s books that she loved to take with her on voyages.

  The cybernetic android, looking more lifeless than ever, lay heaped on a gurney. The wires poking from her skull were short and frayed.

  Arthur had labored to build a heaven, yet his heaven was populated with the horrors in front of him. Perhaps the technology was not ready for the world. Perhaps the world was not ready for the next step in human evolution: the space station being constructed in the sky, Annulus.

  Arthur felt empty. Like a clock without a craftsman.

  He thought about what his father would do in a time like this, but it was too late. A man had died in the name of science, and it was Arthur’s fault.

  He ran his fingers through the wires on Lucy’s head and felt for the power button at the base of the headset. He pulled back the sheet, exposing Lucy’s featureless body. Her legs were corroded, her feet gone. Arthur leaned in closer, with a keen eye on the missing appendages.

  A strangulation of nanites. An antithesis to everything he’d built. An erratum.

  He played the recorded footage from the incident on a nearby monitor and unsheathed a monocle from his breast pocket decorated in cogwheels and spring loaded decals. He put the device to his eye and began inspecting the bot’s wounds. A chemical reaction had taken place, eradicating the nanites the voxelized flesh was composed of.

  “Professor?” A voice shot from the door.

  Arthur startled, then looked back to see Liz’s lovely sight. Her bright green eyes held a worry he’d never seen in them before. She’d never felt awkward around the android bodies he’d worked on before, but this time was different. The weight of the incident was upon him heavier now and Arthur was saddened.

  “Yes?” Arthur recovered and said gallantly.

  “I heard about the incident,” Liz said, stepping into the tent and running her fingers over the many test tubes and laboratory tools.

  “It was terrible, Liz,” Arthur said. “I didn’t want the man to die. It’s just… we needed to find the answers.”

  “What went wrong?” she asked.

  “A man was hooked up to Lucy while she was in the cenote, and she had her legs eaten off as if by acid. One thing led to another and he was pulled from the chair. Killed instantly from the jerk,” Arthur said. He paused before continuing. “I don’t get it, Liz. In the lab, I performed dozens among dozens of tests, and the nanites were always flawless. But, here… Something is stopping the printing process.”

  Elizabeth saw the footage playing, and noticed the codex before Arthur. She walked gracefully to the disk and rubbed her finger over the embossed inscription as she watched the eerie, ghostly footage of Charny play out horridly.

  “Did you at least get the next set of numbers?” she asked hesitantly, not meaning to disrespect Charny’s death.

  “No, the accident accelerated everything,” Arthur said, his tone more somber. “We only obtained two numbers. One and Five.”

  Her soft eyes, as green as the codex device, darted to him, wide, as Charny said his last few words, uttering the alchemical descriptions Summer had given to Lucy.

  “Those are the Twelve keys of Basil,” Liz said in an outburst.

  “The what of who?” Arthur asked.

  “Basil Valentine was supposedly some monk that wrote about how to create the Philosopher’s Stone through twelve steps or keys,” she said.

  She quickly ran over to the her favorite bookshelf, passing her eyes over the various volumes, and plucked out an odd-looking book that was tattered and torn from the years since its printing.

  “This book has the full version of the twelve keys, not just their wood carving interpretations,” she said.

  “Interpretations?” Arthur asked.

  “Yes, Basil Valentine wrote them originally, and then they were interpreted into visuals later. What Charny saw must have been those visuals,” Liz said.

  She flipped through a few pages of the book, while Arthur shook his head at the primitive format of information acquisition, for he could have accessed the knowledge they were seeking in mere seconds.

  “Here,” she said, handing him the tome. “What Charny described looks to be the first and fifth keys of Basil Valentine.” She thought for a moment, watching the video, looking at the stone, and then looking back at the first and fifth keys. “There must be a pattern to help us find the next number in the sequence.”

  Liz read the full description of the first key from the book, but Arthur only homed in on one paragraph of the lengthy read:

  “If you would operate by means of our bodies, take a fierce grey wolf, which, though on account of its name it be subject to the sway of warlike Mars, is by birth the offspring of ancient Saturn, and is found in the valleys and mountains of the world, where he roams about savage with hunger. Cast to him the body of the King, and when he has devoured it, burn him entirely to ashes in a great fire.”1

  ‘Burn him entirely to ashes in a great fire’, Arthur thought.

  Liz paused for a moment, reflecting on the passage herself, and then began to read the fifth key.

  “If the earth were deserted by this spirit, it would be dead, and no longer able to afford nourishment to anything. For its sulphur or richness would lack the quickening spirit without which there can be neither life nor growth.”2

  Not imparted by the Earth? Arthur reflected on the words. Is the life giving spirit Sulphur?

  Arthur reflected on the events with Autumn and how, from what Liz had read, the allegory sounded just like her.

  “If you look at the those two particular keys, the first key has the dog jumping over the fire,” Liz pointed out, “and the fifth key has a woman standing next to a furnace, and there are fumes rising and flames… All relating to fire.”

  She thumbed through the text. Then she smiled and read the ninth key.

  “In the preparation of Saturn there appears a great variety of different colors; and you must expect to observe successively black, grey, white, yellow, red, and all the different intermediate s
hades. In the same way, the Matter of all the Sages passes through the several varieties of color, and may be said to change its appearance as often as a new gate of entrance is opened to the fire.”3

  “It’s the ninth,” Liz said, emphasizing her next words. “‘As a new gate of entrance is opened to the fire.’”

  “The mermaid had fiery red hair, “Arthur added. “But are you sure about this? We only get one chance.”

  “It’s one, five, and nine,” she said decisively.

  Arthur picked up the disk and spun the tracks to the respective numbers. The codex shook like it did before and opened.

  He could see a glowing within the chasm. A flame that flickered, everlasting, on a wooden limb. Arthur peered closer. He couldn’t believe what he saw.

  Can this be…?

  “What is it?” Liz asked.

  “I think it’s Greek fire,” he said. “An incendiary weapon used by the Eastern Roman Byzantine Empire, first developed circa  672. The Byzantines typically used it in naval battles to great effect, as it could continue burning even on water.”

  He looked at the small everlasting flame, burning over the codex, and wondered about its power. Considered if one could really control this element, too. He reached out and felt the warmth on his hand, and for a second, he thought he saw it move toward him, reacting to his being.

  “That settles it,” Liz said. “The gates are the four elements of life: Fire, Water, Wind and Earth. They all lead to the fifth element. The quintessence,” she said. “And there are three keys to every element.”

  “Do you think it’s really the Philosopher’s stone?” Arthur asked. “I mean, what else could it be? Science has already shown us the truth of how elements work.”

  Elizabeth looked closer at the black, corroded ankles of Lucy. “And for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

  “Opposite reaction,” Arthur repeated. “An antithesis.”

  He ran his fingers over the codex, inspecting its craftsmanship, The complexity of the carvings and how the stone device fit together — absent of any error or erratum. His father would have marveled at such design.

  Elizabeth picked up a towel from the table. Wiping her hands, she pivoted and walked toward the door. She smiled and tossed the bunched-up towel to Arthur, who looked up from his work just in time to catch it.

  She seemed more lovely every day he worked with her.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll find it, professor. If you have six keys so far, there are still six more to find,” she said.

  The sun was setting low on the horizon as the ship’s crew gathered around the fire.

  “Another night in paradise, fellas,” Old Man Bill said while holding his mug high in the air.

  “You keep talking, Bill, and you’ll spend forever here,” said Slanted-Eye Pete.

  “Ah, I’ve seen it all already, mate. You guys hold that hocus-pocus too close for comfort,” Bill said.

  “You watch out, Bill. Your soul is more fragile than you think.”

  Elizabeth barked at the men to clean their plates. The captain and Arthur sat quietly across from each other as they chewed their dinner. Arthur could tell the weight of Charny’s death sat heavily on Ellis.

  “Charny was a good man,” the captain said softly.

  Arthur nodded his head blankly, looking into the fire.

  “He shall have a proper Neologian burial,” the captain continued.

  Arthur nodded again, trying to swallow the words like the piece of freshly voxelized meat he was barely able to chew. He heard men at the surrounding fires snickering. Words like ‘cursed’ and ‘haunted’ were being flung about.

  “Charny died in the name of science,” Arthur finally said, loudly, reducing the clamor of the fireside crew.

  “Arthur, Charny died because of you,” the captain said, looking straight into his eyes.

  Elizabeth looked pained, overhearing these accusations.

  “Captain, it was an accident,” Arthur said.

  “You said it was safe.” Captain Ellis growled.

  “I didn’t know the cave wall would come tumbling down. The wires—” he tried to explain, but was cut off.

  “No, Arthur, this is the second time you have failed us. Men of our background don’t fail, and now a man has died.” The captain solemnly continued, “Charny had a family.”

  Arthur winced hearing this, but could only sympathize, having no children of his own.

  “I am sorry, Captain,” Arthur said solemnly.

  “No! You are a lying bastard!” the captain yelled out.

  Arthur kept eating, pretending as if nothing was bothering him, but that wasn’t the truth. Deep down, he mourned for Charny.

  “You know what I think about you, Arthur?” the captain taunted.

  “I can hardly wait to hear,” Arthur replied sarcastically.

  “I think you’re a coward,” Captain Ellis said.

  “Well, I’m surprised you think anything at all.”

  The captain jumped from his seat. “You little science puke! I’ll show you!”

  Arthur stood, readying his mechanical arm vambrace for action.

  Elizabeth quickly shot in front of the two men. “Gentlemen! That is enough!” she yelled. Arthur could tell she was fed up with the bickering. “I will not have you two fighting over the accident for the rest of the excursion. What’s done is done.”

  “Sorry, Liz,” Arthur said politely.

  “I’m sorry, too, Elizabeth. For my commander will not look lightly upon his… behavior. I have no choice but to sanction you both to auditing. Your mind needs clearing.”

  Arthur finished his bite, looking straight at the captain. “Please excuse me, Captain. I seem to have lost my appetite.”

  He stood up, leaving the men and making his way past Elizabeth, briefly catching her soft, green eyes.

  “We’ll get through this, professor,” she said gently. “Together.”

  “I will do my best,” Arthur replied.

  7

  Wind

  Arthur walked along the trampled pathway that had been created by the bustling back-and-forth of the men setting up camp. He saw another tent not too far off, lit from within, housing silhouetted figures. More crewmen.

  “I’m telling you, mate! This place is not supposed to be here!”

  “Look at him. You’re a scared prissy!” the other crewman said.

  “No, it’s the devil’s triangle!” Another man shouted. “This island is cursed. Arthur doesn’t believe in Neology, and we will all suffer for it.”

  Arthur shook his head in disappointment. They cling to such myths.

  He wandered off the beaten path to clear his mind. The captain was right: General Malick would soon be here, and with him, the Neologian practitioners who would have their way with his mind.

  Neologian auditing was no light punishment. A series of unrelated questions would be asked of him, probing deep into his psyche to find a secret or some kind of flaw. The aim was to fix whatever shortcoming was found, and the practitioners would go to great lengths and horrors to achieve this. Excommunicated Neologians had even said that they would use what they found out as leverage against if you ever tried to leave the church, but Arthur had never seen anything like that in practice.

  He cringed at the thought of their audits, though.

  Arthur made his way back to camp and entered his small tent, eyeing the ever-burning Greek fire contained within the codex. He watched the flames dance hypnotically as he mulled over his situation. He wanted to finish what he started and lift the curse from Autumn and her sisters.

  He grabbed the codex. Determined, he left his tent and ventured into the thick jungle just beyond the encampment.

  After a short distance, he saw another cenote. This one was deeper than the last two he had come across. Arthur walked to the ledge; he heard nothing below and couldn’t see any water.

  “Hello?” he called out, hearing his echo reverberate down the cylind
rical shaft and back up to him.

  He made sure he had a solid foothold this time—thoughts of falling into the shrill water put his nerves on edge. But if he were to see Autumn one last time, that would be ever so sweet.

  The more he thought of the young mermaid maiden, the more he wanted her in his arms. She was captivating to say the least, and not just in a sexual way. He was afraid to admit, he was taken aback by the mysticism the whole place held. Here he was, a scientist and an engineer, but he felt he had seen and experienced the world as far as science could take him; it was natural that he would want to discover more of the unseen, and Autumn was that for him.

  He looked back toward his encampment, watching the faint flickering of the fire through the tree trunks and vines. All that waited for him there was hate and disdain. He didn’t want to go back to that.

  He tried to peek down into the hole once more, to make out the bottom, but to no avail.

  He bent down and picked up a small rock. He tossed it over the edge, carefully listening for its impact, but there was nothing. Skeptical, he picked up a bigger rock and lobbed it over the ledge. He heard a few clunks off the sides as it skipped down, but never a final impact.

  Arthur was perplexed. How could a hole go on forever? Then again, what he had learned over the last few days defied any logic he had before coming to the island.

  There was something waiting for him at the bottom of this cenote, and he was willing to risk anything to find the answers.

  Arthur stepped back a few feet, held the codex device—which was still emitting the Greek fire—in his hand, and took a large leap into the cavernous hole. He plunged into the darkness, feeling his stomach drop and the wind rush past his face. He was free-falling.

  Despite the horrific feeling of not knowing his fate, the scientist in him couldn’t help but note that he would reach terminal velocity any second; falling as he was at a rate of thirty-two feet per second. The boy in him hoped he would see Autumn at any moment, and that she would be able to save him.