Files, Files, Files
“Hey, Charlie, are you going home tonight?”
Ben was standing in the elevator doors at the 86th floor of the conservatory with his anti-acid coat over his arm and his fingers flicking his access pad up and down as he looked down at me. The clock on my work-pad was ticking towards nine, several hours later than I needed it to be. The mountain of files still to be sorted was insane. Not only were there files, but there were files about historical files, and then more files regarding the files, and the director wanted it done by the end of the day.
“I think I’m going to have to stay, Ben. I’ll se you tomorrow, right?” I said. I smiled up at him even though my insides were screaming.
Ben smiled, but the sentiment didn’t reach his eyes and his brows knitting together told me that I looked as pitiful as I felt. “Yeah, I’ll se you tomorrow.”
The silence that followed the swoosh of the door as he left was staggering. This late everything was quiet except the blood running though my veins and the air in my lungs. The more I thought about it, the louder it became until it was rushing over me the same way it did when I was walking home and standing under the six-tiered highway cross.
I got back to work, numbing my mind with the endless monotony of dates and descriptions. When I first got into it, time flowed more like a smoot stream than the dripping of a faucet. Even if it went slow, at least it wasn’t hard work.
When I looked up at the pad again, it was nearing midnight. I had hardly made a dent in the mountain. I stood up from my desk and stretched. Every joint seemed to crack as I rolled my joints, and even my spine cracked like bubble wrap as I swung my torso around.
A light started blinking on my pad. I didn’t pay much attention to it as the first glance revealed it had to do with the motion sensors down in the vault. It was unlikely that there was an actual intruder in the building. The levels of security, check points and scans you had to go through to get to that part of the building was bordering on idiotic. It wasn’t like anyone wanted to steal a bunch of earth scrap deemed interesting enough to get a file, but not interesting enough for anyone to look at them for at least a hundred years.
Regardless, it wasn’t my problem. There was always security in the building, and they would sort out whatever it was.
I got back to work, sorting through the files, putting the pre galactic era files in one place and the post galactic era files in separate places according first to the branch of the galaxy of origin and then to solar system. If the director wanted it more sorted than that he could look up all the planets himself.
The light kept blinking in the corner of my eye. Faster than a heartbeat but just as insistent. The longer I thought about it the more I wondered. The light was bouncing off the table, the celling and everything else in the room. It was impossible to ignore, and still it wasn’t my job to worry about the artifacts. This was. The endless files about the artifacts, that in no shape or form would be done… in the allotted time…
It was tempting to just take a quick look. My access to the security feeds weren’t strictly against company policy, and it wasn’t like anyone would check if I just looked at it once.
With the level of fucks I had left to give the decision was made. I grabbed the pad and started typing around the intranet that connected every part of the digital aspect of the conservatory. Getting to the security feed wasn’t hard, but it took a lot of steps and could be tedious for most people who didn’t do tedious and repetitive work as their bread and butter.
The alarm had gone off on the 53rd floor, in section 14 b. That was part of the artifact trove that spanned floor 38 to 66. I stared down at the room and saw nothing amiss. The light wasn’t on, but the much bigger red light was circling around the room and the little speaker on the pad was giving me just a small hint of the actual volume of the blaring alarm.
There were no one there. The artifacts were unmoved.
I looked at the system notes then. There had to be some cause for the alarm, and there had to be some security guard here somewhere who had fallen asleep while working.
system note: SEP143024/00:00ECT
ERROR: OVERHEATING
SECTION: 14B
ARTIFACT: 22.B.3.12
system note: SEP143024/00:01ECT
ERROR: UNDERHEATING
SECTION: 14B
ARTIFACT: 22.B.3.12
system note: SEP143024/00:02ECT
ERROR: OVERHEATING
SECTION: 14B
ARTIFACT: 22.B.3.12
The system notes kept coming like that. One after the other, every minute another warning about either overheating or underheating, but that made no sense.
I went back to look at artifact 22.B.3.12 at the feed, but it was just a stationary sphere, mounted in a display case that at some time had been in a museum somewhere in the galaxy. I looked up the information on the artifact and found that I had sorted the file earlier actually. The physical file was down in the pile by my feet.
Feeling much more awake I fumbled through the pile and fetched up the physical file.
ARTIFACT 22.B.3.12
ORIGIN: Earth, ca 1200 AD
RETRIEVAL: 2054 AD, The North Eurasian Commonwealth
CULTURE: unknown
PURPOSE: unknown
NOTES: The artifact appeared in a dig site without proper archaeological process. No one confessed to its retrieval and if the lead archaeologist is to be believed, “it just appeared out of nothing”. The metal sphere has markings yet to be deciphered and follows no known writing system.
I looked up at the feed again. There was nothing changed in the image, and there was still no security guard making their way down. The system notes kept coming every minute.
It couldn’t hurt just to go take a look, could it? It was just an old sphere, and if I could figure out what the malfunction was, maybe I could fix it and get a leg up on the next promotion.
I brought the file with me as I made my way deeper into the building. The elevator ride down was long, and it gave me more chance to read through the file. The sphere had been everywhere it seemed. The contemporaries who found the thing had called it a head scratcher, and I could empathize. It had been to hundreds of specialists the first few hundred years, then it had fallen into obscurity. The conservatory had acquired it 48 years ago and first today had someone even looked at this file. It was right there in the file history; I was the first to look at it.
The elevator doubled as a scanner as we descended. The additional checks one would have had to take to get to the artifacts were the same as I had to take on my way to work, so the internal elevator circumvented that whole thing. Still, I had expected to find someone at the desk when I entered the artifact foyer. There was no one there. The desk was unmanned and when I walked around it to look at the screens, I saw the exact same things as I had seen on my pad upstairs. The system notes were trickling in on one screen and the blinking feed was on the other. Weird. I pushed the button to mute the alarm, but the red light kept blinking.
I tapped my card on the access pad and entered the room with the artifacts. Walking to section 14 took a few minutes and I suddenly wished I had taken one of the hovercarts that was parked right inside the door. I had never been a good driver, but the carts nearly drove themselves, as long as you entered the destination correctly.
I followed the path down to section 14 in the relative dark. The only thing illuminating the rows of display cases was the red emergency light. Everything was given a black shade in this light making it look more ominous than it was. No one had gone down this hall for years I was sure, and there was nothing ominous about that, it was sad actually.
I turned the corner of section B.3 and caught sight of the thing. The sphere was floating. It hadn’t been visible on the security feed, but now that I was looking at it directly, I could see that the sphere was resting at the top of the display case, just a few centimetres from touching the enhanced glass. The front pane was gone, and, on the floor, there was a lit torch seemingly abandoned. Someone had been here.
I picked up the torch so I could look at the sphere more closely. There was nothing in the file that gave any explanation of how this could happen naturally. There was nothing in the file suggesting that this was even possible. In the light of the torch the smooth surface looked golden. The patina pictured in the file was no longer present. The symbols carved into the smooth surface was glowing faintly.
A buzz coming from the thing startled me. I looked down at the pad as it pinged in another system note.
system note: SEP143024/00:24ECT
ERROR: OVERHEATING
SECTION: 14B
ARTIFACT: 22.B.3.12
I looked back up at the now still sphere. I reached out my hand and held it just a centimetre from the surface. There was heat coming off the surface, but not nearly enough to warrant the system note. I looked back down at the pad but in the process my hand shifted forward, and my fingers brushed up against the warm metal. The pad fell to the floor. I screamed but there was no sound. I no longer had a mouth to scream with, lungs to push air through, vocal cords to vibrate. My insides were screaming again, but now they had become outside, and I was no longer tied to matter.
system note: SEP143024/00:30ECT
ERROR: UNAUTHORISED REMOVAL/MISSING OBJECT
SECTION: 14B
ARTIFACT: 22.B.3.12