Uncontacted, page 14
The stream bed sloped downward as they worked their way deeper into the bowels of the mountain. As they neared the artifact, moving down a slick slope, the half-rock glowed insanely, sort of a purple shade. Everyone was talking, shouting, as they neared a pit, at the bottom of which was situated the source of a cerulean blue glow.
Antonio was having doubts about being here. He told Stel, who hadn’t said anything back to him in a little while, “I’ve been thinking about what’s down there, Stel, and you should know that means that, because of the code, because of the particular way it’s coded, you know—that I won’t—I can’t--I literally cannot—go any further or…”
Antonio stopped in place, the tribe all rushing past him, Stel urging him on, but waiting for now. “C’mon, Antonio, we’re almost there, let’s see what it is!”
The ecologist shook his head. “I can’t, I’ll die!”
What are you talking about, they all want to go, look at them!” Indeed, the tribe members were egging them both on enthusiastically, seeing the wildly glowing half-rock they carried, but no longer afraid of it now that they saw the one they were entrusted with was still there. But Antonio shook his head firmly.
“If I get too close to it, I’ll be a another damn boundary error! Like the indigenous people who died all at once. I’ll cease to exist BECAUSE I’VE BEEN DELETED, STEL—TERMINATED AS A RESULT OF A PROGRAMMING INSTRUCTION THAT TREATS MY CIRCUMSTANCE AS A FATAL RUNTIME ERROR, DON’T YOU GET IT YET! We’re not 100% human, Stel. We’re software entities, all of us, created by lines of code that tell us how to behave, code that determines whether we live or die depending on our circumstances. That’s what these machines are, Stel. They’re the devices that control the simulation that is humanity. I beg you to reconsider our actions here. We’ve seen enough.”
Stel shook his head rapidly back and forth many times. “Sorry, pal, but I don’t think you have much choice.”
As Antonio looked around, a cluster of tribe members encircled him, all aiming weapons his way. They had no idea what he had actually said, but his reticence and general lack of willingness to move forward was apparent.
“Here, I’ll give you the stone!” Antonio started to take off his pack, which burst through with radiant light of rapidly shifting colors, when a short arrow pierced the dirt ground between his feet.
Stel nodded toward the pit, where the same light show emanated from the bottom. “Tribe says we all go.”
Reluctantly, Antonio cinched his backpack in place again. They reached the edge of the pit and begin climbing down a series of precarious handholds. The tribe members began the descent first. One tribal man was unable to concentrate, looking down too much at the light, and he fell to his death, landing hard below, silent thereafter. The luminosity at the bottom of the pit increased.
The rest of them continued their descent, some of the tribe seeming to go mad with delirium, whooping and hollering and yelling. As they neared the bottom, it was plain to see that the other half-stone was there. The other half of the meteorite, of the simulation, Antonio thought. His movements were slow and deliberate as he thought not only about which hand- and foot-holds to use, but about the larger scenario now unfolding in all too real-time.
Stel called out, “I see it! It’s there, Antonio, do you see it?”
But when he received no answer he swiveled his head to look over at Antonio, and the ecologist disappeared before his very eyes, vanishing in a wispy diffusion of light.
Chapter 26
Antonio stood in a tranquil forest with a grassy floor. His father was there also, standing by his side as they prepared to go for a day hike in their local woods. A glowing red border framed the entire scene, but neither commented on it, as if it was a given that it was there.
“Let’s go for a walk,” his father said. “There’s something I need to show you.” His Dad was younger, as he was in his working prime and not as Antonio saw him with the tribe in the Amazon jungle. Antonio, though, was still his current age, like a weird dream where things were mixed up and couldn’t really happen, but that’s how it was.
“Where are we going?” Antonio asked, but his father only waved him along in a friendly way, clearly excited to show him whatever it was.
“Not far. There’s something in this place, our place that you know so well, that will help you to understand things better.” He added nothing further, so Antonio walked along with him, stopping now and then to point out a fox peeking out from its den or a hawk circling high above, watching all in the domain.
They crossed over a gurgling brook into a clearing of lush green grass with strange plants bearing exotic flowers here and there. Odd insects abounded, too, creatures that at first glance seemed familiar, like a butterfly or a dragonfly, but on closer inspection revealed that they had eighteen legs, for example, or four wings, in the case of the butterfly, or no eyes, in the case of the dragonfly. Just not quite right.
Then his father pulled out a handheld electronic device of some sort, probably a smartphone, but as in a dream, something was off about it, too, as his hand seemed to pass all the way through it when he tapped the glass.
“I have a puzzle I want you to solve. It has a single, definitive answer. No tricks. Once I press this button, you will have until exactly…” He paused while he looked at the clock on his device. “…Four O’clock.”
“What time is it now?”
“3:48. It’s not a lot of time, but it’s all you need if you think clearly.”
“Okay.” Antonio had no idea why that made him feel okay. It sure didn’t seem like a lot of time to solve an unknown enigma, but then again, he didn’t know what the puzzle was yet.
“And…begin." Diego Medina pecked his finger on his device’s screen, causing it to ripple and move as if it was the surface of a pond, and then a series of shapes materialized in the clearing around them.
“Shapes” was the best that Antonio’s flabbergasted mind could come up with at the moment, but they weren’t mere shapes. They were objects, by the looks of it, real things that had somehow been instantiated right before his very eyes, and very realistic looking. Antonio thought they were ‘realistic looking’ and not actually real, since how could something real magically materialize out of thin air? They must be holograms, he thought. But unlike the holograms he’d seen before, these seemed impossibly dense.
He walked over to the nearest one of them, a large hedge that was carefully manicured and trimmed. He put a hand out into the hedge, expecting it to pass through an illusion of light. He caught his breath when he felt the prickly sensation of small leaves brushing against the skin of his right hand. Antonio turned around to ask his father about how this was possible, but his Dad had disappeared from sight.
“Time is ticking, Antonio. Good luck.” He heard his voice issuing from thin air but, looking all around, could not see him. What the heck, he thought, it’s only a few minutes. He decided to focus on the puzzle.
Turning back to the scene in front of him, Antonio was pleased to see a vivid depiction of what could only be described as the Garden of Eden. A scene of nature in its perfect, unspoiled state. Antonio walked into a pristine forest, even more so than the rain forests he studied, yet at the same time it was far less frightening. Animals moved about their natural business, sloths lounging in trees and wild horses running through the grass. As an ecologist, of course, the myth of Eden as a flawless, pristine Earth before humans came along and ruined it all appealed to Antonio.
And then he saw the man. Naked as the day he was born, or created, as the case may be, standing on a smooth round rock, surrounded by large, colorful butterflies. He didn’t recognize him, but he knew who he was all the same.
Adam. Of course, no Garden of Eden setting would be complete without Adam and….Antonio looked around but didn’t see an Eve. But as he watched the man, Adam stuck his hand into his own side, piercing the flesh, blood raining down his side and thigh, horrifying ripping sounds reaching Antonio’s ears.
“Stop, what are you doing?” Antonio yelled, but Adam didn’t hear him. His face showed visible strain as he reached inside his own body and cracked one of his own ribs off with an audible, atrocious snap. Then he pulled the bone out, held it up in the air, and lightly tossed it onto the grass beneath a flowering tree.
It began to rain, a hard, warm, cleansing rain that washed away Adam’s blood and healed his wound. It stopped a few seconds later and standing there beneath the tree was a beautiful woman, naked but for a strategically placed fig leaf.
Eve.
Antonio grinned as he watched her look at Adam and smile coyly. Well this could get interesting, he thought in a male-driven kind of way, but then he caught movement in the tree above Eve’s head and looked in time to see a snake winding its way down a branch that drooped beneath its weight. It wasn’t a slender snake, either, but a fat, bulging python like the one Antonio had seen in the Andamans. As the snake moved across the branch it dislodged an apple, which fell to the grass at Eve’s feet. She picked it up, turned it over in her hand for a moment while Antonio shouted, “No!” But of course she didn’t hear him.
She put her lips on the skin of the forbidden fruit and sunk her teeth into it. It seemed to Antonio that he had extra-sharp vision as he watched the juice from the apple run down the remaining unbroken skin and drip through the air to land on the blades of grass below, like sticky dew drops.
When Antonio lifted his gaze from the grass to the wider scene, he saw Adam dissolve in front of his eyes into a skeleton. Not just a skeleton, either, but a processed, clean skeleton, hanging from a stand…in a classroom, a perfect human anatomy teaching aid except for the fact that it was missing one rib. Antonio felt dizzy for a moment as he realized he knew the scene.
His high school classroom, with Mr. Verger’s AP Biology class from his senior year, if he wasn’t mistaken. “Settle down, people” Verger was saying. “Don’t forget that tomorrow is our field trip to the zoo…”
And just like that, the entire scene around Antonio seemed to swirl and dissolve yet again into chaotic light and then re-solidify into…
The front gate of a small city zoo. Antonio was alone, but he walked inside, looking at the exhibits. He stopped at the largest one, featuring a huge moat around a lavishly landscaped enclosure, in the center of which, on a pedestal in a simple cage, was a rat.
Ridiculous, Antonio thought. What kind of zoo goes through all this trouble to display a common rat? He moved on to the next exhibit, which was an ox in an unadorned wooden stall. Antonio shook his head at the awful living conditions for the beast in what was supposed to be a zoological garden, and again continued on. The zoo frustrated him, for all of the animals were seemingly ordinary and not very exotic at all. A regular pink pig. A common rabbit. A black garter snake, a mongrel dog. The one animal which truly held any interest for him at all was a Komodo Dragon, five feet in length and flicking its black, forked tongue at Antonio while watching him with its unreadable black lizard eyes.
That’s it, I’m out of here. Where’s the exit? He looked around but couldn’t see one, confused at how he could have gotten lost in such a small zoo. Then he saw movement and spotted a brown and green rooster running loose on the path ahead of him. He followed after it and it cut to the right. He broke into a jog to keep up with the bird as it zigged and zagged through the zoo, until it ran out onto a busy city street.
Antonio thought it would be crushed under the wheel of a city bus but the bird seemed to vanish beneath the wheel rather than be actually crushed, and after the bus passed by Antonio saw the rooster running up onto the sidewalk, fluffing its wings as if annoyed. He dashed across the street after it and the bird skedaddled into a casino, of all places, bright neon and LED screens on the outside advertising best games, loosest slots, coldest drinks, 24/7!
Antonio entered the establishment and passed by a few game tables, including one with a full deck of cards spread out, in order--kings, queens and jacks staring up at him as he strode by--their eyes actually moving to follow him. He stopped at a craps table, where a gorgeous woman in a tuxedo worked as dealer. It took a moment for Antonio to recognize her as Eve from the garden of Eden. The same woman.
“Hey—“ he started to say, but she was all business, cutting him off to begin explaining the rules of the game as she handed him the dice. “Your roll.” She smiled tantalizingly. Antonio rolled: double sixes. Her face took on a mock frown as she scooped up his money.
“I’m sorry, you’re not a winner. Would you like to try again?”
Antonio didn’t know why he felt such anger, but he was suddenly boiling over inside. “Hey, that’s not fair, you cheated! You’re not a good person, you ate the apple! You—“ But then a large, male bouncer showed up and grabbed Antonio forcefully by the upper arm. He dragged him away from the craps table to the entrance and tossed him out onto the street…
But the scene outside was no longer a city, but once again a grassy, garden-like area. He was standing in front of a carefully pruned hedge, a large one that was head high and seemed to run on in both directions for quite a ways. He couldn’t see over it so he began walking around it, noting that it had a lot of sides. By the time he got back to the casino entrance, where the bouncer now blocked the door with his arms crossed, shaking his head at Antonio, he had counted twelve sides to the hedge, a shape Antonio knew from geometry class to be a dodecahedron. He had no idea why he was thinking these strange thoughts, but after looking at the hedge again, he saw it had an opening just large enough for a person to pass through, and that inside, corridors of green wound this way and that.
A maze.
Antonio entered and began winding his way through, sometimes reaching a dead end and retracing his steps, but continuing toward the center of the living labyrinth. At one dead end he saw a calendar hanging on the wall. Completely out of place, sure, but nothing seemed too strange in this odd arena, so he stepped up to it and took a look.
A picture calendar, the kind of custom printed product one could order online if they submit whatever photos they want used, one for each month. Antonio began to flip through it…January was a picture of his family standing in the snowy yard of their house when he was a boy, his parents both smiling, a snowman next to Antonio. He flipped the page and looked at February: a photo Antonio himself had taken of his father handing his mother a bouquet of red roses while kissing her on the cheek. February, Valentine’s Day. But there was something else special about February…he looked down at the bottom of the month, but it ended on the 28th day, it was not a leap year, hence his true birthday was not represented.
Antonio left the calendar and pursued the maze again. He wound his way to the center, which was a small open area with a table in the middle of it. On the table was placed a chunk of silver rock. Antonio went to it and picked it up. Not actually silver, but magnesium, he thought, hefting the specimen in his hand, which was lighter than expected for how large it was. He shrugged and threw the rock into the bushes, then climbed up onto the table to get a look over the hedge.
In the distance he could see a flag waving at the top of a pole. It was blue with a circle of yellow stars. He wasn’t sure what flag that represented, so he decided to take a closer look, because maybe it could tell him where he was? He got down from the table and started to exit the center of the maze to retrace his steps to the exit, when he decided to try something. He walked into the wall of hedge facing the flag, and found he could simply pass right through it as though it wasn’t there. He emerged in a grassy field with clear open space all the way to the flag.
He reached the flagpole and stared up at the flag fluttering in a zephyr. Still only blue with a circle of yellow stars. But I’ve seen that before…it’s the flag of the European Union? Strange, he thought, he couldn’t possibly be in Europe now, but nothing else seemed to be ordinary about this dreamland, so he didn’t think much of it. Feeling drawn to the flag, he walked to the pole and pulled on the rope, attempting to lower the flag, but although he pulled, the flag never got any closer.
Suddenly a decorated tribal man, thin sticks protruding from his nose in all directions like porcupine quills, emerged from a topiary animal, a hedge carefully manicured to resemble a larger-than-life wild boar.
The man spoke to him. “Do you want some gold?” he asked in fluent English. “Have some gold, it is only fair you get your share! Your people have stolen it from our jungle for centuries! Look, we will even weigh it out for you so you can see that you’re getting your fair share!“
The man extended an arm toward a hefty gold nugget on a scale. Antonio moved to the gold, but when he picked it up the tribal man laughed as the scale needle slammed to zero and kept spinning around and around counterclockwise even though that made no sense, and then the dial of the analog scale transitioned to a digital scale, its display reading 0.00000000000, before morphing into a video screen, playing a movie…
Antonio watched the screen as his father prepared his ultralight plane for flight. He was in the rain forest, and a timestamp in the lower left corner of the video confirmed what Antonio already suspected with a knot of trepidation in his stomach: 06/12/97, the day his father “died.”
He was watching a video of him preparing to take off on his fateful flight, the one that took him—purposefully—away from his life as he knew it, his job, his friends, his family…
Diego Medina cursed under his breath as he tried to get the battery to start. The motor coughed and sputtered with each crank but wouldn’t hold. This was heartbreaking for Antonio to watch, because if only that motor hadn’t started that day…
“C’mon you old piece of…” his Dad barked on screen. “Give me those volts!”
The motor fired to life and his Dad grinned as the picture—the entire video apparatus--disintegrated into a loose pile of Amazon canopy leaves fluttering to the ground at Antonio’s feet.
