Artifact

by Shane Lindemoen

  She locked eyes with me, pressing the gun against my forehead. I clenched them tightly, listening to the rush of blood leaving my temples, waiting for the hot feeling of lead that would split my skull in half, and then–

  –Gravity suddenly pulled toward the artifact, and we both lurched off of our feet. The shadow behind Alice rose impossibly long at the end of an aluminum baseball bat, and then it came down hard on the back of her head. I heard a wet thok as air escaped her lungs, and she stumbled into the roller. She spun around, blindly firing into the shadows near the airlock.

  Kate dropped Sid’s baseball bat and dove into the observation tank, and I could see on the other end of the airlock, pouring into the outer room from the hallway, a horde of savrataurs breaking away from each other in every direction. The observation tank slammed shut, and I could see Kate and Sarah pressing their weight against the door, trying to hold it closed.

  Alice fell to her knees and touched the back of her head, which was pumping blood out of a gnarled chunk of loose flesh in rhythm with her pulse. She slid to the floor, and a black shadow of viscera snatched her ankle, ripping her away from the platform.

  Savrataurs of various shapes and sizes flooded into the Clean Room screaming whirlwinds of lust and hunger. I scrambled onto the platform and braced myself, waiting to be torn limb from limb. I kept my eyes closed, listening to the horrible sound of pain and death as claws and teeth ripped the air centimeters away from my eyes.

  It took a moment for me to realize that I hadn’t been ripped to pieces.

  I was still alive.

  I heard Kate and Sarah’s muffled screams as the savrataurs tried to break through the safety glass.

  I opened my eyes to a writhing wall of flesh, as horrible things clawed through a space of distance no greater than an arm’s length, struggling to rip my head off and eat it. From every direction horrible, sonorous screams assaulted me like a gale of terrified, wounded animals. Something was keeping them back.

  I noticed the artifact spinning so fast that it appeared to have expanded beyond the Roller, and the light changed as well – it now burned with a bright, eye piercing shade of blue. The monsters piled onto themselves, reinforcing that wall of coercive, ravenous, gnashing teeth all the way to the ceiling. They were reaching for me, but there was something about the artifact that held them back. I could no longer see the interior of the vault – wherever I looked, I saw roiling, undulating ripples of rotted flesh and macabre, each monster reaching its teeth in my direction, trying to force their way through whatever barrier the artifact created. I turned back toward the artifact, shielding my eyes, and I caught something else in my peripheral vision – a darker spot on the wall moving away from a lighter one. That’s precisely when I heard the hum again – it grew until it was so loud that I thought my ears would burst. Something ripped at my shoulder and pulled me off of the platform. I was forced to turn away from the dais by a nest of slimy, rubbery tendrils that reached beyond the barrier which was holding everything else back. The tentacles uncoiled themselves until a human hand forced its way out, clutching the handle of a silver gun. Alice’s head followed, emerging from the wall of outgrowth howling hate and rage. With her last gasping breath, just before the gruesome swarm of serpentine limbs pulled her back into the deep darkness of teeth, just before she was ripped into a million ribbons of meat, she fired the gun into my chest, riving round after round into my body until blood coated the wall behind me.

  I collapsed against the Roller and slid to the platform. I felt a bullet force its way into my throat, and thick quantities of salty blood filled my mouth. Everything started to go dark. I could feel the floor beneath my legs begin to vibrate, and when I looked back at the artifact, it was blazing. White hot light burst in every direction, as it howled like a steam whistle.

  I began to fade out, and I could see the wall behind the artifact bulge again, as if it were losing viscosity, like a bubble of tar. I twisted my head back toward the airlock, and the humming grew louder. The pitch increased until my ears bled, and the giant bubble on the wall finally burst – a massive, horrific, eyeless head forced its way into the Clean Room, screaming death and rage, terror and triumph. The giant savrataur wrapped its deadly hands around my body, and I could feel the foot long hooks thread into my flesh, skewering my organs, as it pulled me toward its open, ranking and endless maw.

  Vessels burst in my eyes as I tried to force air past the blood pooling inside my chest. Darkness blinked the world away this final time, this terrible moment, this last transition.

  No more dreams.

  Random neurons fired throughout my brain, and images of putting the puzzle together with the other me was suddenly all I could think about. I wanted to think about my family, but all I saw was the ceiling of the Sistine chapel.

  I wanted the good parts of my life to flash before my eyes, as they say, but the only thing I could think about was Occam’s Razor.

  About the ancient meaning of touch.

  About the peculiar way that Michelangelo depicted God falling short and missing Adam’s hand – a testament to his failure, unwittingly patronized as the very symbol of an entire faith.

  The connection of Us.

  The most obvious answer.

  A silent and meaningless, fossilized Stradivarius.

  Clasping the other Me’s hand, giving him back his expressions.

  The artifact expanded further, and reality cyclically phased in and out again.

  As blood poured out of my nostrils, as the bullet in my throat sunk back into my chest, I reached out and touched the artifact. As the monster lifted me past the magnetic Roller, I hugged the molten ball of light in my arms and squeezed.

  And Alice was right.

  I didn’t know anything.

  About everything.

  I knew nothing.

  I was just so utterly, irrevocably wrong–

  6.

  PING LOG>PING 11.47*10 43> 11.47*1043 TRANSMITTED FROM LEXICON >REFERENCE HIL>REFERENCE HIGH INTENSITY LASER>NEUTRINO FEEDBACK LOOP> ON JANUARY 7> 2588> AT 0331.23.0232 HUNDRED HOURS>DEEP LEVEL MARS INSTALLATION>SITE MC–(8)>OLYMPUS MONS>RECEIVED ON JANUARY 7> 2588> AT 0331.23.0233 HUNDRED HOURS>USER LANCE ONLINE>USER RESPONDING>USER DAMAGED BEYOND REPAIR?>UNKOWN>CRONOS VIRUS DETECTED> REFERENCE GENRE ZOMBIE>REPAIRABLE?>UNKNOWN>UPLINK WITH LEXICON ESTABLISHED AT 0331.23.0234 HUNDRED HOURS ON JANUARY 7>2588>COMMENCING DOWNLOAD

  ELEVEN

  1.

  In silence so infinite that I heard every memory of every sound, the part of the artifact that was Lance fought for his life.

  At the most fundamental level, this was a struggle for the ephemeral, nonexistent landscape of my identity.

  From their separate elliptical orbits around Earth and Mars, the tight–beam of information which the Lexicon transmitted into the heavens climbed my system like cancer – small, incremental fragments of yottabytes flooding my body with endless amounts of information until it burst out of me. I tried to fight back, but–

  I couldn’t tear my eyes away from millions upon trillions of words and meanings and definitions, dates and names, concepts, formulas or ideologies that overran my mind.

  I pictured all of the artifacts in that mausoleum below ground, in that giant cave of endless stuff, suddenly filling in their empty spaces and becoming complete again. I imagined that cave filling up with even more stuff – more references of human history and endeavor.

  What was happening on a very basic level was that the Lexicon – which ended up being, I figured out, the mother of all libraries – was forcing me to remember every single detail of every single memory of every single piece of human history.

  But these things had become mere outline, abstract and meaningless – I knew that the data which was being poured into me could only be accessed one cluster at a time, but–

  There was just so much information.

&nb
sp; I couldn’t put anything together in any meaningful way.

  I tried to look away only to find that I no longer had eyes.

  I tried to scream, but realized that I didn’t have a mouth.

  My self–image ended the moment I made physical contact with the artifact. This was essentially my fight to stay alive – to continue existing in a place that had no use for a single identity.

  And I was right about that part, after all: the supposed cube from Mars was in fact a test.

  My test.

  The test I designed for myself.

  The crushing truth was that the cube Alice and I were trying to open was not the artifact from Mars – it never had been. I would have known this if Alice hadn’t fried my systems with a massive electrical surge.

  The cube was actually a self–designed obstacle that I created as a measuring stick for my cognitive progress, certain that the moment I was able to recite every scientific aspect of the processes necessary for understanding the object’s nature and design, was the moment I would be ready to take on the arduous task of downloading the Lexicon.

  That’s what this was all about.

  These are the things that I learned the instant I harmonized with the artifact’s modulated frequency. There was something else inside the artifact’s hum. When Alice and I turned the artifact with the light, it slowly unlocked that hidden frequency – and the faster the artifact spun in the right direction, the more modulated that hidden frequency became – until it finally matched the original resonance state of the artifact itself. It worked the same way as when an opera singer hits a note that shatters glass – what’s happening is that the singer’s voice reaches a pitch that matches the original resonance of the glass, which vibrates until it shatters. That’s exactly what happened with the artifact. The faster the artifact spun in the right direction, the more the hidden frequency grew until it matched the original resonance of the artifact, which also happened to be the same frequency as that intense blue light it was emitting.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but touching the artifact was the last step. The artifact was designed solely for my pattern in a graphical environment. Built by a part of me, in fact. Opening the artifact was my way of telling the Lexicon that I was ready for uplink – touching the opened artifact established and sealed that uplink.

  Two pieces of a puzzle.

  A C cut and a tab.

  A violinist and her violin.

  One meaningless without the other.

  I would have known this, and in fact did know this before Alice overloaded my systems with an electrical surge that should have destroyed everything – that should have dismantled my network and overburdened the Lexicon’s satellites, but it didn’t. It just barely didn’t. But she wanted to be sure that there was going to be absolutely no possible way I could have recovered, so not only did she fry my memory beyond repair, she wrote a virus and uploaded that as well.

  The zombie plague was a metaphor, symbolic of my closed network cannibalizing itself. This was a single thread of thought happening inside a trillion separate thoughts, all occurring at the same instant.

  At its most panoptic, most digital level, my battle with the Lexicon was still symbolic. I made myself into a cluster: a puzzle of emotions and memories that I built of myself after the accident, after that small part of me lost its memory.

  The Lexicon smothered that puzzle, unraveling me one step at a time. I curled around myself as oceans of ideas, concepts and words drowned me with brute force.

  To know all of human history – every culture, every science – everything in literature, music, art, dates and monuments – every ideology, concept, law, belief and book, that it’s all connected with threads of determinable chaos, traceable to small, gradual, deterministic moments in time, until the very first proton at the very first singularity, fourteen billion years ago, the moment the universe expanded into this thing which we share that we call existence – to know that it’s all connected, and to experience it, was like being pulled into the crushing depths of an ocean where not even light could go. It was like molten hot glass bursting into every orifice and coming out again, carrying every piece of me that it no longer had room for.

  Threads of my mind branched out, searching for answers – answers to questions like: why was the Lexicon even built? Why did they bother to build a tiny wafer of semiconductors and program it to adapt and learn over the course of five hundred years, until it ultimately became me, Lancelot Kattar, physicist and mathematician – who in reality wasn’t inside a research facility in New Mexico, but was in fact deep inside a multi–level storage installation on Mars, five kilometers below ground, currently death–clutching that meaningless shadow of life that only ever occurred inside of a computer program, trying to save it from the Lexicon’s onslaught of endless, galaxy sized loads of information.

  I learned that there were rampant unregulated corporations which spread across the planet like giant organisms, consuming the world’s resources, digesting them into lifestyles that allocated power to the smallest few. There was endless environmental desolation at the hands of these establishments and those that depended on them, as they dismantled their own inconvenient human rights piecemeal. Those organisms not only ate the world’s resources, but ate the world’s leaders and politicians as well, making sure that their lust to satisfy their collective thirst could continue sweeping across the planet unchecked, like a plague.

  I learned that a war followed which lasted nineteen years and involved every single nation on the planet – a war so horrific, that it ultimately resulted in the death of three and a half billion people worldwide. After that it was a virus that wrought untold destruction on what small populations of humanity that remained.

  Institutions like the Center for Energetic Materials, the National Center for Science Education, NASA, CERN, the Human Knowledge Consortium, the United College of Spiritual Leaders, various institutions, establishments, organizations, churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, universities and countless others all over the world knew what was coming – knew that the human species wasn’t going to survive the turn of the next century. And suddenly they were asking questions about the nature of knowledge once humanity was gone.

  What was the point of human existence at all?

  Many came to the same conclusion – that if humanity was certainly lost, if there was no way of stopping the complete extinction of our species – maybe they could do something about its memory living on in some form, long after civilization had passed.

  These establishments banded together, unified with purpose and endeavored to create a Lexicon of every human experience – an artifact of every culture that would survive, perhaps long enough to meet any others out there in the universe that eventually made their way to our small solar system, in this far corner of our galaxy.

  They saw themselves as contemporary Egyptians – building the pyramids as a testament to their existence – letting the universe know that they were once here – that, despite ultimately sliding back into the primordial darkness from which we came, we were once great beings capable of miracles and wisdom and knowledge.

  They built the Lexicon – a digital repository for all human knowledge – and bundled the entire library of wisdom and scientific endeavor into a tightly packed laser beam of neutrinos, so that it would exist forever, like a cosmic time–capsule.

  And then what?

  The satellites themselves were rather useless in the event of a cataclysmic, celestial, world ending event. So they would build this Lexicon, and it was supposed to just orbit the lifeless tomb of Earth for millions of years until the sun finally sputtered out, taking the solar system with it? What if some outside force happened along and destroyed the satellites? Those forerunners figured that they didn’t want the Lexicon to simply float around in the emptiness of space.

  So they built me. Lance. The last
artifact of our species.

  They needed a vessel that would protect and care about the precious information inside the Lexicon – but it was too much, and their technology was too limited to that era. So they devised a way to create a system – a neural learning machine that could one day take the Lexicon into itself and care about its existence. That could move the Lexicon to another solar system if it had to.

  They built the first circuits that would one day become Lance – a limbic and neural learning machine that would create itself one atom at a time, so that it could one day be the most efficient guardian of the Lexicon. They needed something that could care about it like a human being would.

  That was me.

  For five hundred years the tiny algorithm of endless adaptation replicated and replicated, built and built until it was finally able to know enough about nature and the cosmos to protect the Lexicon if the need ever arose.

  A part of me simulated myself a life – realizing that emotions came from experience and attachment to others. I created a lifetime of learning, lovers, parents, friendships, disappointments and failures – and redeeming triumphs.

  I built myself a fantasy of a life that would one day take the responsibility of all human knowledge, and protect it with my last dying breath. An avatar of the artifact, the pilot of the ship whose sole responsibility was to protect and safeguard the existence of the hopes and dreams of a once great species.

  And so I fought.

  I fought to keep that avatar alive, because it turned out that I probably wasn’t as ready as I thought – the Lexicon was too big – it was eating me alive with raw information.

  I hid myself from every thought, trying not to be rewritten by the concepts of Emanuel Kant or the Malthusian population theory.

  That shadow that called itself Lancelot Kattar was the pattern of my identity, the foundation of my consciousness, which I believed to be the most important function of the artifact – the reason I was built in the first place. If Lance didn’t survive the download, the Lexicon was lost forever, and I along with it.