Trifariam, The Lost Codex (2012)

by Diego Rodriguez

  Shit! The helmet! That was probably a fucking retinal scanner!

  He had forty minutes left.

  “Mr. Oldrich, are you okay?” asked Agatha, her voice showing concern which was befitting of the situation. She had obviously been designed to be as human as possible.

  “Yes, yes,” replied James, trying not to think about the fact that he was having a conversation with a computer, a form of artificial intelligence, but deep down a machine. “Can you take me to the scientific laboratories?”

  “Of course.”

  The movement was similar to last time; a prolonged yet very brisk descent, traveling along like a train, and finally an ascent which culminated in a much gentler stop than his first journey. They had fixed it.

  When the doors opened he found himself again looking at the long corridor that he had seen in the morning, although this time all the laboratories were empty and there wasn’t a soul in the corridor.

  Fuck! He’s made sure that nobody is in the laboratories. What is he playing at?

  He walked along the corridor without wasting a second to look at the scientific experiments that he had had the privilege of seeing earlier that day. When he reached the end, he looked at his watch - thirty four minutes. The door to the last laboratory required a retinal scan in order to unlock, just like last time. He brought himself closer and put his eye up to the reader before Charly could even tell him to do so over the intercom. The door eventually swung open.

  Everything was just like before, except for the object which was levitating in the middle of the room and was somewhat different.

  The scientists had managed to fuse the two crystals along one of their faces, so that the two pieces of writing, the engraving and the relief, fitted together perfectly. The result was a rectangular prism with both ends completely square. As they were joined together, a kind of cylinder slid out from one of the ends and this was fitted with astounding precision into the inner circle of the triangle.

  Feeling fearless and following the same steps as he had this morning, he put his hand into the magnetic field keeping the object afloat and brought it outside, but this time it was different. An incredibly powerful heat scorched the palm of his hand while the force field made all the muscles in his arm seize up, preventing him from letting go. Just as he was about to cry out in pain, the heat subsided and he dropped the Trifariam on the ground.

  James could hear several unintelligible voices coming from the earpiece, accompanied by a blunt metallic sound. He had the distinct impression that Charly was not alone. Somebody was there with him.

  “Be careful!” he reminded the professor via the earpiece, but James didn’t pay any attention to him and looked at the burn on his hand in bewilderment. It was strange. It wasn’t a normal burn, it didn’t even have the blister which typically surfaces when skin comes into contact with something hot. His hand wasn’t swollen but there was something that surprised him, something which made his blood run cold. On the palm of his hand was a scar in the form of a symbol, a really strange symbol, and he had no idea what it meant.

  Thirty minutes.

  He flew out of the laboratory so fast that he forgot to close the door. When he reached the elevator, he found that it was still waiting for him and he couldn’t help but wonder if it was on Charly’s orders, so that he didn’t waste any time, or whether nobody had actually used it during that time.

  “How can I help you now, Mr. Oldrich?”

  “Take me to the Director’s office, Agatha!”

  Three minutes later, the elevator stopped on the same floor where that fatal revelation had taken place. Agatha politely wished James goodbye but he didn’t even answer.

  He looked at his watch and ripped it off his hand, smashing it into the wall when he reached the office door of the Director of Area 51. The impact was so violent that the back part of the watch, which normally contains the battery, fell open and revealed a green electronic card with a red light which wouldn’t stop flashing. It was most definitely a global positioning system.

  James entered the office just as the digital clock on the wall was showing twenty-four minutes and thirty-two seconds, but what he saw before him was something that he couldn’t have possibly imagined in his worst nightmares.

  Chapter 84

  The desk had been knocked over and the folders of classified documents were lying scattered all over the carpet. A letter opener in the shape of a dagger was lying out of its pouch around seven feet from the door; it looked as if somebody had used it for a reason which was totally different from that for which it was intended. Even the glass of the frame around his family photograph had been broken, as if somebody at hit it violently.

  The sight of the living room was even more disturbing. Lying on the carpet and with one of his arms resting on the base of the table was Justin’s lifeless body. He had two bullet wounds, both of them in his head and which had stopped flowing with blood. The carpet was tinged with red from the pools of warm blood which hadn’t yet been absorbed into the pile.

  James remained frozen in the doorway and didn’t even flinch when the door closed behind him, as if a draught of wind had slammed it shut. His eyes immediately flicked to the huge piece of glass which hid the entrance to the room where his ex-wife and daughter must have been, but it was closed. Obviously Charly had locked them back in so that Justin wouldn’t see them, and he had gotten rid of the scientist when he didn’t need him anymore. It was a clear warning of his future intentions.

  He kept looking around the room but his eyes, full of hatred, settled on Charly who was sitting on one of the sofas with his legs crossed and the gun pointing straight at his heart. His gaze was fixed on the object James was carrying in his right hand. He wanted to ask him several questions but he could only manage an evil smile.

  James stepped forward a couple of feet and placed the Trifariam on the table, just seven feet from Charly’s feet. He remained silent; he was carefully getting all his thoughts in order to express himself as best he could and not forget about anything he wanted to say. Before he spoke, he looked over at Justin’s lifeless corpse and saw something that chilled him to the bone. Some small feet were sticking out from behind the sofa; somebody was on the other side.

  Praying to god that it wasn’t his daughter, he ran over to the body paying no attention to the professor’s warnings, and when he got there he saw that it was the dead body of his ex-wife.

  He was overcome with anger. He screamed and clenched his fists tightly, his jaw tightening and causing him to grind his teeth. He had completely forgotten about the weapon Charly was toting in his right hand at waist-height and took a couple of steps forward. “You’re a monster! What did she do to you?! Answer me!” James took another couple of steps forward as Charly stepped back, lifting up his gun and aiming it straight at his head. “You fucking son of a bitch!”

  “I’ve done you a favor,” he smiled back. Those words stopped James in his tracks.

  “What do you mean?! You killed my ex-wife!”

  Charly took the remote control from his pocket and pressed the gray button. The pane of glass immediately pulled back and revealed the body of James’ daughter, still tied to the chair. She was crying, most probably because she had witnessed the fatal fallout. He tried to get her to look at him to try and reassure her, he still needed her and couldn’t kill her. His plan worked because James managed to put a lid on his thirst for revenge.

  The clock on the wall read twelve minutes and twenty-four seconds.

  “From what I understand, your wife cheated on you with a police officer.” Charly smirked, he seemed to enjoy hurting him. “She was a bitch. You should be thanking me for taking her off your hands.”

  James’ teeth began to grind again in hatred, as if he was suffering from a sudden and uncontrollable attack of bruxism. He knelt down next to the pale body of his ex-wife. Her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. He slowly closed them with his hand and looked back over at her murderer, but instead he saw th
e contorted face of his daughter pressed up against the glass “cage”. The girl stared dumbfounded at her mother’s body lying on the floor, wiping away her tears and her breath on the glass with the sleeve of her top.

  James could read her lips perfectly. “Are you okay Mommy?” Her eyes filled with tears. He didn’t reply but he nodded so as not to worry her. “You’re a son of a bitch! Take your fucking source and leave us alone!”

  “That is what I intend to do, but I still need you.”

  “I’ve given you what you asked for. You’ve killed your scientist, my ex-wife and you have my daughter locked up in a room with a bomb which is about to explode. Deactivate it for Christ’s sake! You’ve already got everything you wanted!”

  “Justin was a patriot. He yearned to study the source, discover all its secrets and apply them to the real world in order to restore privilege to the United States and the hegemony that the most powerful nation in the world should have. I called him a couple of hours ago and ordered him to install the latest updates in the security system that our computer engineers had successfully designed. I knew that it would be looked upon favorably to tighten security now that the source would be resting here for an indefinite amount of time. Weren’t you surprised when you saw that nobody was in the scientific laboratories? As the surveillance system is inactive, all researchers are prohibited from entering until security has been reestablished. Anyway, Agatha is always active.”

  “Why did you kill him?”

  “You still don’t get it, do you? Justin would be my safe-conduct, my passport to absolute power with total impunity. Meanwhile, although we don’t have anything on film, Agatha has recorded you entering and leaving the scientific laboratory where the Trifariam was being held.”

  “What?” It had just occurred to James what his plan had been, and it was truly Machiavellian. “You’ve set everything up so that the government thinks that me and Justin tried to steal the source?”

  Charly grinned. “Exactly! It will be easy to make the President believe that a young scientist with a thirst for glory disabled the security system and handed over complete access to the laboratories to his accomplice.”

  “Nobody will believe you and even if they do, you don’t know how to channel and store that kind of energy.”

  Charly lowered the gun slightly, pausing to think for a moment. “Our scientists claim that we are looking at the energy of the future, an energy which is clean, cheap, inexhaustible, safe and public. The technology used to make the Trifariam is much more advanced than our own. We believe that we could study it and be able to produce similar prototypes in less than a decade thanks to reverse engineering. However, without the Trifariam it would take us five hundred years of evolution to reach a point where we could design it for ourselves.”

  “But what about the free energy that you are developing in your laboratories? Why don’t you use that?”

  Charly’s eyes glinted as if he was staring into flashlight. He hesitated over whether or not to tell him the truth. He knew that none of his “guests” would get out of that “meeting” alive, so he decided to explain. “It is true that we have made great advances in renewable energies which could supply power to the whole planet without causing pollution. Our studies in magnetic and gravitational fields could be applied to conventional vehicles with no problem whatsoever, not to mention the results obtained from antimatter.” Charly smiled when he thought about what he was going to say next. “We’ve already created a craft which can be powered by a matter-antimatter engine. But don’t be fooled - all those developments belong to the United States of America and they are projects which will be channeled for their own ends. In other words, they will maintain world supremacy, both on land and in aerospace. It will take over thirty years before it reaches the general public and if the Trifariam remains in their hands, the exact same thing will happen.”

  Although James was wondering how one sole nation could have gained such a large advantage over its competitors in so little time, the answer lay once again in the Exopolitics. Supporters of this theory have always claimed that after the Roswell incident, the United States had access to extraterrestrial technology which they were able to study and clone through reverse engineering. The project was later put on ice because the burning of fossil fuels would provide their companies with greater power and influence, even if their own planet was destroyed as a result.

  There is a famous statement attributed to one of its members, Alfred Webre, which says that we “live in a world in a cosmic quarantine”, isolated from our distant neighbours, waiting for their inhabitants to give us that evolutionary push needed to integrate ourselves with Universe.

  “This source can give you the world monopoly on renewable and clean energy for the next thousand years, something that the United States doesn’t want to be a part of for the time being. You intend to make the Government believe that I stole the Trifariam with Justin’s help, but you took us by surprise and killed the scientist, risking your own life in the process. You’ll make it look as if I escaped, but in reality you will kill me and it will be you who keeps the source and studies it. You will come out of all this looking like a hero and you will eventually become the largest energy supplier in the world. That being said, did you really have to kill her?”

  The clock showed less than eight minutes and James was starting to get impatient.

  “The chloroform wore off sooner than I had expected. She woke up and caught me by surprise when I was trying to hide Justin’s body in the chamber.” Charly undid one of his shirt buttons and showed him a couple of scratches which ran from his neck to his chest. “I still have no idea how she untied herself, but she tried to kill me with that letter opener. I had to shoot her.”

  Even though he no longer had any feelings for her, he was filled with sadness when he looked at his ex-wife’s lifeless body lying on the carpet. At the end of the day, she was still the mother of his child. “There are six minutes left! Deactivate the bomb! You already have what you wanted!”

  “That is not entirely true. There is a strange link between you and this object, as if it only pays attention to you. We believe that the source is a device which relies on quantum computing. It is a branch of science in which we have made great progress but conventional scientists are only just starting to study the area. It involves a computer which is infinitely superior to our most innovative model, and for some strange reason it only pays heed to you.”

  James looked at the burn on the palm of his hand.

  Four and a half minutes.

  “I still need you for the time being.”

  James was beginning to realize that he couldn’t let Charly escape with the Trifariam but he didn’t know what to do. If somebody could harness such immense power, they would become the leader of the world. Nobody would be able to compete with them and they would create a monopoly based on a technology five hundred years superior to that of our own. They would become a god among mortals. “What do your people think about what you are doing?”

  “You must think I’m stupid! Nobody knows. The vast majority of MJ-12 members are actually in favor of making all the information they hold public. It is ridiculous!” he exclaimed. “Over time we would lose our privileged position.”

  He glanced at the desk in search of something he could use, but Charly seemed to realize what he was doing and quickly raised his weapon so as to intimidate him.

  “You’re running out of time, professor.”

  “I will do everything you want, but deactivate the bomb. If you kill her, I will never help you and you will have to kill me, too.”

  Charly knew that but he didn’t pay any attention. Time was still running out. “Pick up the object!” he said eventually. “Activate it. If you can do it… I’ll let her live. If not, she’ll die.”

  “What?! You’re crazy! How the hell do I do that?! Fuck!”

  “You have three minutes left.”

  He instantly grabbed the Trifariam and picked it
up. He started to manhandle in an attempt to activate it but it was impossible. He started to pace around the empty space between the desk and the door and walls.

  Two minutes.

  Fuck, what do I do? He looked at his daughter. She was kneeling down and gazing at the body of the mother. By the tears in her eyes, she seemed to know what had happened. The image was horrific and it caused him indescribable pain. I have to concentrate. How does it become activated?

  Charly did not take his eyes off him for one second, lifting up his gun by way of warning whenever James got a little too close.

  As he was pacing around in his imaginary circle, he noticed the letter opener in the form of a dagger lying on the floor. It was the one his ex-wife had used to no avail to try and kill Charly. He looked at the clock on the wall; he had ninety seconds. He had to try it. He bent over slightly, making it look as if he was applying force to the Trifariam, similar to when one tries to unscrew a tight lid of a jar of jelly. Suddenly, he stood up straight and took a deep breath, as if to say that it was impossible. He pretended that the Trifariam had slipped through his hands, which were tired from all the effort, and it crashed to the floor just four inches away from the letter opener. James quickly moved to pick it up as Charly looked on quizzically, yet to pick up on the harebrained intentions of the young professor. He picked up the source in his left hand while the right grabbed the handle of the letter opener, and with one swift movement he hid it up his sleeve.