Prologue

Hoover Dam, Colorado River, 1936, 17:27 eastern standard time

"All clear, Constance. You may proceed." A male voice from an intercom on the wall next to me boomed. The metal walls were bare and windowless. I faced the door before me as the door behind me, which I had entered through, shut with a thud. It was somehow a sound of finality.

My body from head to toe was covered in a white hazmat suit. I had nothing in my hands. The tools would be waiting for me in the next room. I marched stoically to my destination, yet I felt nothing but apprehension. Maybe something in me knew.

The hallway to the next door was fairly short, but it felt several miles long. I stood in front of the next door and waited nervously for the workers in the control room to open it. After a lifetime it slide open and revealed a room just as dull and grey as the hallway.

A smooth metal table stood in the middle of the small room. A smaller table had all the tools I would need already laid out in preparation. A pair of cameras was mounted high on the walls and watched my every move. The men and women watching in a separate room with the aid of said cameras were there to observe the object, but I felt scrutinized nonetheless.

In the back of my mind I remembered the great large mystery only a few rooms away. It sat like dangerous, unknowable fear in the darkest corner of my subconscious. We scientists had been gathered because we found something; something strange, foreign, and utterly alien. This thing, that we simply called "the Artifact", was enormous and cube-shaped. It had to be at least a hundred feet tall and wide. The radiation it emitted was like nothing we had ever seen before and the object itself appeared indestructible, until after years of studying it some of the scientists managed to break off a tiny three-inch-long shard.

The shard sat in a large metal tray on the table I now faced. There was nothing else around it on the smooth metal surface. I was now the one tasked with studying it up close and personal, risking my life for the "progress of science" as my supervisor had put it. Much to everyone's surprise the Cube had healed itself and looked just as it had before we broke off the shard. Everyone saw it as a sign we had found the holy grail of all scientific discoveries. It only left me with an ominous feeling that I was unable to shake, but I couldn't refuse a direct order from Sector 7.

I faced the cameras up on the wall and gave the watchers behind the cameras a look that was read as a question of whether to begin. It also felt like an entreaty for mercy.

You may begin, Constance, the same man droned over the intercom. I vaguely wondered to myself how this unseen man could be so indifferent, but then I remembered I was the one in the room with the radioactive shard and not him. I reached for a set of clamps on the small stand next to the table to begin. I tried to keep my hands steady as I gripped the shard gingerly with the clamps and held it still. With my free right hand I picked up a scalpel from the stand as well. My mission was to cut a thin slice so the material could be looked at through a microscope. I seriously doubted how viable that plan was since it took another team weeks of work to cut loose just one small shard, but unfortunately it wasn't my place to question what I was ordered to do.

With the scalpel resting gently on the shard, I began to sweat. It had already started to bead on my brow before I walked in, but by the time I had the surgical scalpel in hand sweat had wetted my hair which was then stuck to the back of my neck. Taking a deep breath I began to press the scalpel down on the shard. When nothing happened I pressed harder, beyond the light cautious pressure I had been exerting on it to begin with. I continued to increase pressure, albeit extremely slowly, until the scalpel sunk a hair's breadth into the shard. I was so concentrated on watching where my scalpel was I didn't notice at first that the shard was twisting loose of the clamps.

I did thankfully finally spot the potentially fatal error and righted the shard in the clamps so it was secure once more. I considered the relativity of the term of the word "secure" as I continued. This thing was unpredictable and could do anything while I was working on it.

I worked and worked for what felt like hours, but I knew had probably only been about thirty minutes when I nearly had a thing slice of the shard off. It seemed like the closer I got to separating it, the harder it was to cut, but I pressed on. I was finally only a millimeter away from my goal when the thing refused to be cut. I ground my teeth in frustration and pressed harder, then harder still.

It all happened to quickly for my brain to process. I felt my scalpel finally go through the shard and hit the table beneath it. So soon after that it seemed to happen as my scalpel touched the table, a brilliant flash of light blinded me. The next thing I was aware of was that I was lying on my back on the floor. The left side of my chest felt like someone had run a knife into it. Something liquid and warm was filling my hazmat suit rapidly and darkness was creeping from the edges of my vision.

Alarms were going off, lights were flashing, and people were yelling and screaming, but they seemed miles away and I couldn't seem to find a reason to care. It felt like a short time later I was drowning, my vision was going black, and I could no longer hear the wail of sirens and voices, but somehow I wasn't afraid. It was like falling asleep. Before I knew it I was blind, deaf, and numb. My last conscious musing was that I could no longer hear the rush of blood in my ears. After that… I died.