The Archytas

by Kinsella, Luke

  Hours passed with Carter glancing out of the window, trying to make out the faintly illuminated images in the distance. He wondered when he would finally be able to return to recreation travel, and how long it would be until he found an answer as to all that was going on.

  Eventually he became aware of the box, sighting it from his periphery as he refilled his glass. He walked over to it with suspicion. It was a small silver box with a lid attached to hinges. It did not have a lock of any sort, and as he lifted the lid, it opened with ease.

  Inside there were a series of objects. One white pill wrapped in clear plastic, the pill had a letter ‘T’ pressed into it. One small box of matches, twenty, full. A handwritten letter, jotted in ink. A small pistol, loaded. A large sealed packet of seeds, assorted. And a still taken from a simulation dream displaying an image of a person whom Carter did not recognise.

  Carter picked up the letter and began to read:

  Sorry I could not tell you this in person, I still do not know what they know, and I did not know what I know until now.

  I have a small favour to ask of you, read this letter, read it all, remember it all, and it will not be difficult. After you have read it, burn it. Leave no trace. Keep the matches; they will probably come in handy along with the seeds. You might not need them but they can help.

  In a few days, some men will come to your room. They will ask you many strange questions. It does not matter how you answer. They will ask you to do something, to touch an object. Follow their instructions, I believe it will be safe, but you have to trust me.

  Only after you have touched the object, wait for an opportunity and kill the men, if you can. Injure them at least. Following this, beneath your bed is a panel. Check the panel now.

  Carter walked over to his bed and reached below. He found the panel, flipping it open to reveal a keypad. He studied it shortly, before returning once again to the letter:

  When, and only when the men cannot follow you, you need to enter the code, it is 2774, I doubt you will forget it. Study the keypad, memorise the location of the buttons, and be ready to enter the code as soon as the men are immobilised.

  Following that, there will be a hatch. Enter the hatch. Within, there is a ship. Fasten yourself to the chair, hit the ‘Launch’ button, and prepare to be propelled through space at impossible speeds.

  I am trying right now to calculate your trajectory based on the time you will release, and making great efforts to remove the unexpected debris from your path. Again, you will have to trust me.

  Inside the ship there is a button marked ‘S’, this will take you into quantum stasis, you will feel and think nothing again until somebody interacts with your ship. You will feel disoriented when you come back, and it will be as if only seconds have passed.

  I suspect that when you awake, the first person you see will be the boy in the still. His name is Justin Jenkins, but he will probably have chosen another name. I spoke of him before; he was the boy that created the pigeons. He cannot be trusted. Make something up. Run. Plant some seeds. Survive.

  The final thing, the object. The men will make you touch an object, after they are dead, take the object, place it into the box, close the lid and take it with you. Take everything with you.

  If the mission fails, take the time pill. This should be your final act if it gets too much, I hope it does not.

  A final warning, remember the location of the object you need to steal. You will not be able to see it, but it exists. You can feel for it, but it would be a lot faster if you remembered where it last existed.

  Good luck, I hope the dreams were worth it.

  Yudar.

  56

  Grace had been walking for two hours before she saw the building. She had crept away from the boys tending to the crops, and walked through a vast forest of plants and nature. Not stopping to look back, Grace encountered no other lifeforms on her way.

  Eventually she came to a small three-storied farmhouse. Outside the house was a strange piece of equipment that Grace had never seen before, it was smooth, silver, with glass panelling to the front and at either side. An elongated sphere, almost like an egg. She did not know what the machine was, a tube attached to the rear of the object led into the building.

  Grace walked to the machine and began to tamper with its sides, but nothing happened. It remained silent and still.

  She walked to the ground floor window of the house and peered inside. A small table and two chairs were in a large room, disorganised. The room was otherwise empty apart from a faucet and some scattered objects that she could not identify from where she stood. With no visible movement inside the building, Grace decided to head inside.

  In the kitchen, a bizarre tube-like device hung from one of the walls, a screen reminiscent of something she had seen in the city was attached to the wall opposite. It displayed nothing but blackness, but she knew it could display images. She had certainly seen one before.

  As she reached the foot of the stairs, she noticed that there was a thick grey dust covering every inch; untouched for years, it seemed. She walked the steps carefully to the second floor. Three rooms adjoined the landing and a second set of stairs led to a small wooden hatch in the ceiling.

  Grace checked the three rooms, the first was one of two bedrooms, the bed was immaculately made, a small wooden desk and some papers, a cupboard with clothes that would fit an adult male. Nothing remarkable, nothing unusual, except that again, a thin coating of dust had made itself present on every surface. The second room was an ordinary bathroom. The third room was once again a bedroom, slightly smaller than the other, but with similar features, except that the bed was not made, its blanket was hanging down to one side. Some miniature objects were in the room too, strange pointed objects with fins, white and silver. They reminded her of the egg shaped machine outside the house, a similar look but distinctly different.

  She returned to the landing and climbed the second set of stairs to the wooden hatch. She careful opened it and peered her head through the gap.

  There was movement in the room, two legs dressed in blue, and another strange device. From what she could see, it was round, but without fully opening the hatch, her view was somewhat obstructed.

  The legs continued to walk around the object, before disappearing out of sight behind it, only to return moments later. Grace continued to watch. She clearly had not been noticed, and it was safe for her to assume that she would not be.

  The pair of legs circled the object five or six more times, before Grace decided to open the hatch. She did so with minimal movement, until it was completely open. She waited a few seconds, before poking her head through the hole.

  She saw a boy. The same boy she had seen outside the city. He was holding something in his arms, pushing a huge metal pole. The pole was attached to the main object, round like Grace had rightly assumed. The pole turned a small cogwheel connected to the top of the device. As the boy pushed, the wheel in the centre would turn. The boy clearly did not acknowledge Grace; he was in fact in a trancelike state, his only goal to turn a lever. She cast her mind back to the boys she had seen when she first escaped. She wondered if they too were as possessed as this boy was, but she could not remember their eyes.

  She closed the hatch and returned to the second floor. If she was to sleep somewhere, then the room that was tidiest seemed like the obvious choice.

  She took the blankets and sheets down the stairs and outside, and shook them to free them from the dust, before returning to her new room on the second floor of the house. She left her bags on the bed, before returning outside to gather some crops that would later become her dinner.

  57

  It was the prism. They were copies. The birds, the members of their species floating in space. Copies of originals. How the birds reached this point was not known. How anything occurred was not known. Two men named Carter, one dead the other waiting to kill.

  Yudar had let his thoughts take over as he walked through the ship. S
omething he usually did very well to contain, but not today. The results of testing had indeed shown that the bodies in space had died within the last few days. The point of observation. Yudar was not sure what it meant, but he had found his energy source, and they had retrieved it. It was on the Archytas, ready to be examined.

  His species had already given it a name, the Universe Prism. It was small, about the size of an adult hand. It was a right-angled tetrahedron with four faces, three in mutually perpendicular planes and one in the sloping plane. A classic tetrahedron emitting more energy than had ever been measured before. It was invisible but certainly existed. Yudar’s memory flashed back to Ancient Greece, before silently returning to the depths of space.

  “I want to see it,” said Yudar, as he arrived at the door to the Relic Chamber.

  “Step right in, sir,” one of the men standing guard said, as he extended his hand toward the door. It slid open following a routine biometric scan, and Yudar walked inside. He followed the long corridor to door 44, the room that held the Universe Prism.

  Inside, there were a group of scientists and high-ranking officers. Parkins was there too, and was first to speak.

  “After you, Chief Engineer,” he said.

  “Thanks,” replied Yudar, as he walked over to the table.

  Although the other men were standing behind him, in that moment Yudar felt like he was standing alone. Everyone else invisible to him, like the object. The moment powerful, and offering a complete distraction from all.

  The Universe Prism was before him, a white cloth hung over it displaying the outline of shape in its many folds. His energy source. All of the power in a small object the size of his hand.

  Yudar carefully lifted the cloth to reveal absolutely nothing. No reflection or glare, no shadow or outline, but it was there, most certainly.

  “What was the name of that man we found? Carson?” asked Yudar.

  “Carter, sir,” said Parkins, from somewhere behind him.

  “I have an idea,” said Yudar, returning the white cloth to reveal the shape of the Universe Prism. He turned his gaze back to the direction of the officers behind him, “I believe that when a person comes into contact with the object, it makes a copy of that person at the point the prism was first observed. I think you should take the object to Carter, make him examine it, ask him your questions, and get him to touch the object. I believe this is why we found him floating in space.”

  “Very well, sir,” said Parkins, “we shall proceed at once.” Parkins nodded at one of his fellow officers, who immediately scrambled toward the Universe Prism and picked it up.

  “What are you doing?” asked Yudar, shocked.

  “Doing as you asked, sir.”

  “What did I just say? Touching the object might make a copy of you somewhere in space. Great, now there is another Officer Franklin floating around dead somewhere.”

  Officer Franklin’s expression changed to one of abject fear.

  Parkins could not help but laugh, “Don’t worry, Franklin, Yudar’s theory hasn’t been proven yet.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Yudar, “it will be.”

  58

  Carter had received his instructions and was waiting.

  He had concealed the pistol in his jacket, everything else he had placed inside the silver box, which he had hidden beneath his bed.

  Thoughts of danger drifted through his mind. He was thinking about how much he actually knew about Yudar, whether he could really trust him. He cast his mind back and realised that despite knowing each other for such a long length of time, they had met on less than fifteen occasions.

  He thought about where he would be going, Terra presumably, given that Yudar had filled him in about the boy in the still. He contemplated what would happen if his ship were to crash. What would happen if they gave chase? Would he forever be a fugitive, a betrayer of his species? Yudar’s plan was everything but infallible. Something could easily go wrong; he wondered if it was worth the risk.

  Carter was sitting on his bed with a glass of water when the door to his room slid open. He was nervous for the first time in years as two men entered. He recognised neither of them. Generic nameless men.

  “Carter, what is this?” the first man asked.

  Two more men entered the room with an operating table, a sheet was covering up an object, and by its shape, Carter could see that it was a body. He wondered if it was Maxwell. The letter had not said anything about a body though. One of the men removed the sheet to reveal a corpse.

  Carter stared in shock. It was himself, out of time, lying on a table. He could not explain it, and in his confusion, his mind became blank.

  “Carter, are you okay?” another man asked.

  Carter sipped from his water glass, before he spoke. “Can I take a closer look?”

  “Be our guest, Carter.”

  Carter stood up and walked over to his body. It was the strangest feeling he had ever felt. His own self, lying there. A blank face, eyes closed, skin deteriorating, lost to the entropic cycle of time.

  “Carter, please tell us why we found your body floating in space?”

  “What? I have no idea.”

  “Really? Are you sure? Because Sykes said before we retired the last planet that you were acting very strange. Can you explain that?”

  “I don’t know what that was about, really I don’t.”

  A confused expression painted itself across the face of Carter. He stood, staring directly at the face of a man that had been himself. He thought again about time. He wondered where the other Carter’s thoughts were now, if anywhere. If they shared memories? The same lifetime of experiences? Alternatively, did he feel nothing at all?

  “Carter!”

  Carter snapped from his trance at hearing his name. He focused, and could see that one of the men was carrying a white cloth, an object wrapped within.

  “What is it?” asked Carter.

  “We believe that this object is the reason for your body floating in space. Have you seen this object before?”

  One of the other men added, “Carter, have you ever dreamt of a prism in any of those strange dreams you were having?”

  “No,” said Carter, “I don’t remember anything like that.”

  The man set the object down on the desk, and removed the cloth to reveal nothing.

  “There’s nothing there,” said Carter.

  “We need you to touch it.”

  “Touch what?”

  “Touch it,” said the man, now holding the white cloth.

  Carter thought about Yudar’s note and despite being very suspicious of the four men, walked over to the desk and guided both of his hands slowly toward the place where he thought the object was.

  “Do you feel it?”

  “Not yet,” replied Carter.

  Eventually his hands made contact with the object. A ringing appeared not in his ears, but somewhere deep inside his skull. His hands darted from the object, yet the piercing sound persisted deep in his mind for a few seconds longer.

  “What was that?” asked Carter, once the sound had diminished.

  “What did you feel, what happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? You didn’t react like it was nothing.”

  “Seriously, nothing happened. I touched the object and nothing happened,” said Carter, as he wandered back toward his bed.

  The man with the cloth walked to the desk, Carter kept his eyes fixed on the space that the object was occupying. He quickly turned, and at the same time, reached into his jacket and retrieved the pistol.

  A different kind of ringing filled Carter’s head now, the resonating sound of a bullet fired from close range, then another, then another. The fourth man had already turned and neared the door as Carter raised the pistol level with his head. With another loud pop, time had taken them all.

  Carter quickly walked toward the desk, took one last look at his own dead body, blood dripping down the forehead of that other ve
rsion of him, but not his blood.

  He collected the object and walked back to his bed where he proceeded to place it inside the silver box. The piercing sound entwined with the ringing of pistol fire created a glorious cacophony of unpleasantness set to a painful background of tinnitus. Seconds later, he was typing a code into a keypad.

  His bed lifted to reveal a small jet-black ship. He grabbed the box and entered through the glass opening. As he crawled into his new home, he wondered what the object was to cause such sounds in his head. However, he knew he did not have time to think now.

  In his ship, Carter sat. The lid swept closed around him, sealing him inside his small bubble of hope.

  “Send thy soul in quest,” he uttered, before hitting the button that launched him from the Archytas, and out into the sea of birds occupying the space beyond the ship.

  59

  Grace shifted in bed. The sheets wrapped around her, the best she had slept since leaving her home.

  She staggered to her feet and got dressed. She felt a certain dizziness to her movements, it was possible, she thought, that she had slept for a week.

  She ambled downstairs as quietly as she could, and entered the kitchen. She tried the faucet, but only a few droplets of water escaped before the device suddenly stopped working. She was thirsty, but with no water in the house, she would have to do what she had already planned on anyway, and that was exploring.

  Outside, the crops in the meadows around the house were illuminated by the clearest of sunshine she had ever seen, a bright white glow across a field of pure green.

  From the house, she checked to the right to see the walls of the city looming on the horizon, and decided to head in the opposite direction.

  Along her walk, Grace stopped to smell flowers, to pick crops. She gnawed on the freshest carrots, devoured raw cabbages, and smiled as she did, a whole world to feast on, seemingly her own.

  A few birds swooped around her head for a moment, getting a little too close, before eventually drifting away in the direction of the capital. It was the first time Grace had seen birds in her life, but she knew what they were; people had often spoke of them, more stories from the past.