Uncontacted, page 18
“They put the stones together, which I’m told destroys the computer simulation which comes from where….space? I mean, how else do you get a computing device embedded in a space rock? But who does it come from? That’s one thing we haven’t been able to figure out.”
“One theory is, it comes from us—humans—but in the future. They created a simulation to see how their ancestors evolved and behaved. Another more troubling possibility is that whoever created could decide to end the simulation if they don’t like how what they’ve created is acting.”
“But on the other hand, wouldn’t it mean that, as long as you have the code, the program could be copied and re-run on a different computer? So we’d all effectively be immortal.”
Antonio sighed. “Maybe we should save the philosophy discussion for later, James. I’m a wanted man with this thing, and you’re telling me one of the most powerful secret organizations in the world is pulling out all the stops to find me.”
“What we need to do is put these guys on the defensive.”
“How do we do that?” Antonio asked.
“We need to obtain proof that they’re the ones behind the illegal actions to steal the artifacts. International artifact theft actually has real laws with actual teeth, whereas proving they don’t have rights to some unknown technology could be a bit trickier.”
“Public shaming might work,” Antonio agreed. “Maybe you could leak a press release? ‘Secretive group slaughters entire tribe of jungle people to steals priceless artifact’—that sort of thing?”
A pause ensued and Duncan’s voice came back on the line. “I think we can do a step better than that.”
Chapter 34
London, England
Stel gawked at the device, already separated from its meteorite half, set up on a lab bench. “Are we ready?” he asked a small phalanx of white-coated lab workers. He looked around at the unfamiliar surroundings. “If there’s a problem, we could always go back to Oxford—“
“We’re almost ready,” the lead scientist said, a German man Stel had never seen before, who dismissed him with a curt wave of the hand. Stel bristled at being treated like some disposable lab tech, but he bit his tongue. He had the sinking feeling that he was no longer running the show when it came to this strange artifact, but the hard truth was that these people still paid his salary. In fact, they owned the entire facility in which the meteorite was now located. Stel had wanted to work at Oxford, out of his own lab, or at least Dr. Hanlan ‘s computer lab, but the managers from International Semiconductor had insisted on using their own private facility. Stel grew irritated that although they said they were almost ready, no one was moving to get things started with analyzing this new half of the artifact.
“We’re waiting for a couple of more people,” the German said. No sooner had he completed the sentence than the door to the workshop opened and four men in formal business attire entered. Stel caught his breath as he recognized the Chairman of The Bilderberg Group. The reclusive billionaire businessman was not known for making public appearances, and his whereabouts were usually a matter of speculation. All four men from the Group exchanged brief greetings with their scientists, as well as Stel. Then they told the technicians to proceed and stood back to watch as the artifact’s device was connected to a conventional computer, as had been done with the other device at Stel’s university.
A scientist nodded to the men in suits. “When we run the simulation on this device, we expect that it will run a program like the one that was executed on the second device.” Then he turned to a technician who stood poised with a computer cable running from the device.
“Proceed.”
#
Mumbai, India
Antonio paid for his coffee at the counter of the Internet India Café and looked for an open table. He found one inside, next to a wall. He occupied it, and then set up the new laptop he’d purchased on the table. While it booted up, he took the artifact’s device, which he’d already separated from the meteorite, from his pack.
He looked around, a little concerned someone might be watching him, but if someone was observing him he couldn’t tell. The place was noisy, packed with locals speaking a mix of Hindi and English, with loud Bollywood music blaring from overhead speakers. Antonio removed from his pack a plastic bag from the same store where he’d purchased the laptop. It contained a series of cables and electronic parts that he would need to connect the device to his laptop as he’d seen Stel’s computer scientist colleagues do at Oxford.
He placed his backpack on the edge of the table to shield his electronics from view, as well as to hopefully discourage anyone else from sitting at his same table. It took him the better part of twenty minutes to make the connection, during which time he looked around frequently to make sure he wasn’t attracting undue attention. But he got it done, satisfied that he had successfully duplicated the connection he had seen performed.
Now it was time to find out if it actually worked.
He picked up his coffee and drank from it while doing his best to act nonchalant. He eyeballed his laptop and confirmed that his computer recognized that it was now connected to an external device. Setting down his drink, Stel smiled as he hovered his finger over the enter button. He looked at the computer’s clock, just to give him an idea of how much time would elapse once the simulation started: 2:29 P.M. local time.
Perfect.
Antonio smiled and pressed the button.
#
London, England
“Something’s different about this program.” The small crowd of scientists, technicians and Bilderberg Group members stared up at the wall mounted monitors. On the screens, many dots filled the display, but as time passed they began blinking out, leaving more and more blank space.
Another tech answered the first. “Right, because with the other one, it started with one pixel and grew exponentially from there. This one starts fully populated and depopulates over time.”
Puzzlement reigned as the roomful of interested parties considered the raided jungle artifact. “Let it run,” one of the suits said, checking his Rolex.
All of a sudden the device seemed to shift on the tabletop, as if an earthquake was in progress. One of the techs looked down at the bench legs, even kicked one, but the table itself was in fact secure. Nothing else in the room was shaking.
“We’re losing the sim.“ One of the scientists pointed to the monitors, where the simulation images that came from the space rock flickered in and out. A technician reached out to the device.
“Maybe the cable’s not fully seated in the—“ He broke off mid-sentence when his hand reached the device. Instead of gripping the cord to test if it was snug, his hand passed through the device until it touched the tabletop.
Stel had an uneasy feeling. “I’ve seen this before,” he said, watching the unknown piece of technology transform from a solid object into a confusing dispersion of light. The men from The Bilderberg Group turned to him.
“With the first half of the device?” one of them asked. “I didn’t read about that in the report,” another added.
Stel shook his head, and with the movement came an overwhelming sense of vertigo, as if he was suddenly very dizzy, his feet not fully connected with the floor. “In the Andaman Islands, down in the pit where the tribe kept their half of the artifact…”
Stel sounded to himself like he was really far away from the Bilderberg guys in a tunnel. As he looked at them, they began to appear less dense, shimmering like holograms.
“The meteorite?” one of them said, asking for clarification that the other stone exhibited the same behavior. But to Stel the word seemed to reverberate around the room, its syllables deconstructed into separate parts so that it came out, “The meet….ee……ee….ee…or...ite-ite-ite….” While at the same time everything around him seemed less concrete.
“Dr. Foster?” Dr. Foster…Fosterers…Fawwwww….st….
Stel spoke, but as if in a dream, his words didn’t come out. He wanted to explain to them how in the Andaman pit, it was Antonio himself who had disappeared, not the stone. He remembered how the meteorite he had carried in his backpack—the one from the Amazon—had remained in the pit, while Antonio had disappeared. He had left that account out so as not to seem crazy. He didn’t know how to explain it and thought he would be laughed at, and they would make jokes about consuming too many strange tribal ethnobotanical concoctions. But now that he wanted to relate that, the words were like fuzz in his mouth.
“Not…the stone…” Antonio. It was only Antonio who disappeared, the stone stayed be….hi…nnnnnd.
But when Stel looked over to the stone, he saw only an empty tabletop.
Chapter 35
To Antonio the scene was unbelievably lush, so much so that he ignored the glowing red border that framed it all. The scene was an evening one, with a reddish glow from the sun having just set, blending into the red frame. He stood on the edge of a placid pond that was bordered by thick, flowering jungle, with large birds of extraordinary plumage perched all around. A full moon was just beginning to rise above the trees behind him, its silvery light reflecting across the ripples of the water.
On the far side of the pond was a building, a large house or a mansion constructed of stone blocks that were covered with fuzzy green growth. Huge pillars supported a second level forming a veranda at ground level, vines and epiphytic plants draped around the dark entrance. Torches mounted on the front of the edifice flickered in the evening light. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt calm, serene, relaxed, as he surveyed the surreal scene.
As before when he had been transported to the simulated world (he didn’t know what else to call it), he marveled at the realism of the objects. He reached out and touched a plant, to make sure it wasn’t some abstract representation, recoiling upon feeling the waxy leaf on his fingertips. But at the same time, he knew. He knew that this wasn’t exactly real, although it would likely have a real outcome. What was he supposed to do here, though? The last time he was in this virtual world, his father had been there, too. But this time, he didn’t see—
Antonio whirled around as he heard the voice. “Where are we?”
“Hello, Stel.”
“What is this place? How did we get here?” Stel glanced around hectically.
As Antonio had been the first time he’d been encapsulated in a simulation or dream world or alternate reality, whatever it was, Stel was frightened, confused, and a little fascinated all at the same time, Antonio could see.
“I don’t really know, Stel. But the more important question is: why are we here?”
“How should I know?”
Antonio looked around, slowly, carefully, in no hurry to answer. “There’s something we’re supposed to do here.”
“What is it? I don’t recognize this place, do you?”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
Antonio shrugged while he and Stel stared at one another from about twenty feet apart. Both wore the same clothes they’d been wearing before coming here. “It’s best if you think about it less as a place, Stel, and more as a game.”
“What kind of game?”
“Like a video game, but one that has a real-world outcome depending on your actions taken in the game.”
“How do you know so much?”
A loud birdcall squawked somewhere nearby, causing both men to turn their heads, but there was nothing to see.
“Before, when I disappeared from the pit…:”
“You came here?”
Antonio shook his head slowly. “Not here, the scenery was different. But the important thing was that I had to pass a test, I had to demonstrate that I understood something, and then I was given the knowledge to realize that the two meteorite halves should never be allowed to touch.”
Stel stood slack-jawed for a moment before speaking. “That was the first thing you said when you came back into the pit—don’t let the stones touch.”
Antonio nodded. “But this challenge will be different. The two stones are now separated—although it seems you’re doing your best not to keep it that way—so that can’t be the goal here. You have the Amazon Stone, I have the Andaman stone.”
Realization dawned across Antonio’s features. “But I don’t have it anymore.”
Antonio looked Stel up and down, noting that, like him, he didn’t not carry objects of any kind, like a backpack; he had only the clothes on his back. “You don’t have it with you in here, but just like I don’t have mine, it’s because they’re still sitting wherever they were right before we entered this…simulation,” Antonio finished, looking about.
But Stel’s eyes widened in obvious panic. “No! I saw it…” He shook his head, looking for the right word. “Disappear. It started to waver and shimmer, sort of like a hologram—sort of like you did in the pit—and then I saw it vanish. I watched it disappear, Stel, and so did other people in the room with me.”
“Other people, such as members of the Bilderberg Group, perhaps?”
Somewhere nearby they heard the growl of a panther, but wherever it was, it remained hidden.
“I see you’ve been looking for my half of the artifact.”
Antonio’s face turned red with rage. “It’s not your artifact, Stel. You stole it. Neither of them belong to us, they belong to the tribes who were entrusted with their safekeeping long ago. Keeping them from being joined together, which would end the simulation that apparently represents all of our existence.”
“You’re not the Keeper of the Stones, Antonio, even though you seem to have appointed yourself as such. Experts say they came from space, and therefore they belong to no one…or, if you ask me, to whoever gets them first.”
To whoever gets them first… Something clicked in Antonio’s mind when he heard that, and at the same time an explosion of fluttering bird wings rent the air as a flock of thousands of birds took to the trees.
“I think I know why we’re here, Stel.”
Stel looked down from the massive avian flock to make eye contact with his former colleague. “Why?”
“I know where my half-stone is.” Antonio had a fleeting thought of his backpack sitting unattended in the Internet India Café, but he supposed time was slowed while he was in the dream world, or some such trick of physics. Whatever the case, he hadn’t the time to consider it now. “But you said yours disappeared before your eyes, and the eyes of your entire thieving group.”
Stel’s eyes narrowed for a moment, but that was quickly overshadowed by the new understanding that filtered through his mind. So you don’t have it anymore.
Stel said nothing while he stared at Antonio, who waved around about the tropical environs.
“It’s somewhere in here, Stel. And like you said, it belongs to whoever gets it first.”
Chapter 36
Antonio watched Stel slowly backstep away from him, until he turned and ran off into a dense stand of foliage. Game on.
The arena in which they found themselves was large enough that if the Amazonian Stone was simply dropped into some patch of thicketed greenery, it would take a long time to come across it. Antonio looked up into the trees, recalling the arboreal camping they’d done. There was no way to rule out that it could be nested up there somewhere, too, he thought. He directed his gaze back to ground level and stared out across the placid pond. Even worse, what if the stone was in there, underwater?
He walked to the edge of the pond and looked down into its waters. They were crystal clear, enough to see the bottom in detail, where an assortment of strange aquatic plants reminiscent of something out of a Dr. Seuss book reached toward the waning light. Antonio walked along the edge of the pond, tracing its shape as he stared into its depths, looking for the meteorite. He knelt down once and put his hand in the water, to see if it was real, but it just felt like regular water, a little on the warm side, but not unusually so for a tropical environment. He was just about to withdraw his hand when he heard a splash and looked up to see a sizable crocodile swimming right at him from the middle of the pond.
Antonio yelled in surprise and fright as he sprung to his feet, nearly slipping on the moist soil at the pond’s edge. The croc lunged at him but missed as Antonio jumped over its head. He cleared it without touching and then turned around to see what it would do next. The answer came in the form of another lunge, this one with mouth open and teeth clamping around the ecologist’s lower leg. He kicked the beast in the eye socket with his booted heel, and it retreated, waddling off at high speed. As he watched, the croc seemed to burrow lower and lower into the mud until it disappeared.
Antonio checked his leg. There was a lot of blood, sluicing down his calf and soaking his sock. He pressed a finger into the jagged open wound and felt the pain. This is real, Antonio thought. I can get physically hurt in this virtual world. He had no first aid kid with him, but the wound was not deep, so Antonio rinsed his leg in the pond, knowing that crocodile mouths harbored a ridiculous amount of bacteria, meaning he should probably flush it out. He hoped there weren’t any more crocodiles in the pond, and he kept an eye open for them while rinsing the leg, but no more predators came. That done, he continued on his inspection of the pond.
It took him what seemed like a long time, probably an hour, to encircle the body of water while carefully probing its watery sediments with his gaze for the artifact. While he did this, he wondered what Stel was doing, and hoped he wasn’t getting lucky enough to stumble across the artifact in the bushes.
When he got back to his starting point on the pond, Antonio felt satisfied the stone did not lay within its depths. So now what? He crouched in the tall grass by the pond’s edge and listened for signs of Stel, but his ears were greeted only with the tittering and chirping of birds.
