The Monarch Papers

4. Artifacts-1

Chapter 4

Artifacts

“Well, after about an hour or so of staring at these things my eyes are starting to glaze over and I haven’t made any progress.”

Thingfromthedeep

The ride home was uneventful, which was problematic. I do my best thinking in the car, and I was hoping the trip back to the city would jar something loose in my subconscious. No such luck. Whatever was going on with Kemetic Solutions behind their bland and unremarkable facade, it wasn’t going to be easy to find.

When I got home, I thought I should let the Mountaineers know about my little field trip. Granted, I didn’t have much information to share, but if the Mounties were good at anything, it was taking a morsel of information and turning it into a meal.

I pulled the memory card from my camera and put it into my laptop, which was so old that the only things keeping it together were a wad of bubble gum and wishful thinking. I could actually hear the gears grinding underneath the weight of the squirrels running inside as I waited the requisite eon for the OS to boot up. When I was finally able to inspect the pictures I had taken, I saw there were strange digital artifacts bleeding into the images. Thin rectangular bands of black and red ran across the pictures, as if the camera was unable to fully process all of the digital information.

Something about the artifacts struck me as familiar, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I decided to post the pics anyway, hoping something in them might get the Mounties’ hive mind whirring.

I wrote:Place looks like every other corporate office park. Except it’s ironclad. No way in without clearance. Windows are reflective. Not even a Wi-Fi signal leaking out of the building. Completely locked down.

I took a couple photos but was cheerfully encouraged to make an appointment (don't know how I’d do that) by a voice on a call box.

Got back home and checked the photos.

I mean, yeah, my camera’s a POS, but I don’t know . . . it’s never done anything like this. Thoughts?

Right away, Robert and Kelsey saw that the mess of digital artifacts actually contained a few letters, “KS” and “NW,” and what appeared to be the Star of David. I wanted to think that if I had the eyes of a man twenty years younger I would have noticed it too, but my vision had never been that good, even with the help of LASIK surgery and sobriety. When the Mountaineers started discovering clues in the artifacts, the Book reached out.

You’ve been searching far and wide

For keys to revolution

But something hidden deep inside

Will lead to the solution

Another fragment’s reaching out

From the dark that means to bind it

And it might take all that you have

To heed the call and find it

Two of the letters, “KS,” gave Robert the inspiration to search for a Kemetic Solutions website, which he promptly found. It was a rather lovely welcome page, an animated KS logo that exploded into butterflies every twenty seconds or so before looping back to the logo. Butterflies again. To go further into the site we would need a password.

I knew a couple of women who wrote for the Sun who liked to spend their time fishing for sites on the dark net and honing their hacking skills. I toyed with the idea of bringing them in to break the site wide open, but since magic was a part of the mix I doubted there was much they could do. Besides, with the Book of Briars being involved, chances were the password we needed was most likely hidden somewhere in my photographs.

I reached out to the few non-Mounties I still knew in the Low, but no one ever got back to me. It’s always been difficult getting people to talk to a reporter, but recently it seemed that my contacts in the Low World had shied away from me. The sands beneath our feet were shifting, and the rules of interaction were changing with them. I didn’t know if they were avoiding me because I was a reporter or because I had thrown my hat in with the Mountaineers. Either way, my sources were drying up.

Leigha was the one who recognized the star symbol was actually a reference to the elements. I’d seen alchemical symbols before, but I’d never known that, when combined into a star shape, they represent aether. This could have been a happy coincidence, but Robert remembered from the Call the Corners spell that “aether” was a word (and element) associated with the Gossmere Guild, which sits in the northwest direction of the chronocompass. “NW” again—even I had to admit that couldn’t be by chance.

As I sat there watching the Mountaineers work their way through the clues hidden inside the images, I grew very tired, like all the sleep I had missed over the past month was now suddenly catching up to me. It was only late afternoon, but I felt like I hadn’t slept in days. I’m not sure when or how, but I eventually crawled into bed and didn’t wake until late the following morning.

By then, the Mountaineers had made more progress. Examining my photos, they had noticed a slight discoloration of leaves on a bush that somehow appeared as the letters “ZIP.” From there, Revenir had found a file hidden inside the image file by renaming it with a ZIP extension. I’d had no idea such a thing was possible. This opened a password-protected file named “patience.rtf.” And sure enough, the password was “aether.” It was some rather nice teamwork from the recruits, though the fruits of their labor were a bit scarce. The only thing this newly found document said was “63 minutes.”

63 minutes until what, we all asked ourselves.

The only lead they had was the Kemetic Solutions site, so we parked at the looping logo animation and waited for 63 minutes to pass. As we waited, Robert regaled us with the finer points of steganography (the art of hiding secret messages in images) and its Benedictine roots. Give me a bottle of rye and three hours to pick that man’s brain and I’d be in heaven.

After one hour and three minutes, the Kemetic Solutions homepage redirected us to a two-minute video. I didn’t see anything special, just your typical boilerplate business promo with inspiring images, corporate buzzwords, and a heavy dose of creepiness thrown in for good measure. It seemed that their mission was to make the world a better place through some technological wizardry that was never clearly specified.

VictorianFlorist was kind enough to transcribe the video, and the words seemed just as unsettling on their own:

Promotional Video:We are tiny creatures, living in an obscure corner of a vast universe. Small, alone, alongside billions of other planets just like ours and yet, we are different. This is a special place with special inhabitants. Ours is a planet full of life—life and freedom. Freedom to grow, to evolve. Freedom to enjoy simple pleasures. Freedom to connect safely. But to ensure that freedom we must defend our world with advanced technology and industrial solutions. There will always be threats to freedom, but we are ready. For years we at Kemetic Solutions have developed technology to keep this world safe and free. But we didn’t stop there. Our technological advances now power discoveries in physical well-being. We are helping advance the research of rare diseases and the discovery of new cures every day to help people live better lives now. But also to help us understand where we come from and where we’re going. Our systems protect life and extend it into the future. From research and technology, to industry and commerce, Kemetic Solutions allows life to evolve. Helping communities to function, knowledge to flourish, and digital technologies to progress. Our global communications help governments, media, and organizations of all kinds stay connected. So we can enjoy our lives in the sun, as our great and special world keeps turning. Kemetic Solutions. Freedom. Safety. Evolution.

Right away, I had questions. What technology, specifically, had they developed to “keep this world safe and free?” Which rare diseases were they studying and how close were they to finding their cures? How, exactly, did their systems “protect life and extend it into the future?” Which governments, specifically, had they helped?

I had dozens more, but I knew it was useless to torture myself over such questions. It was highly doubtful I’d ever have a chance to corner a rep from Kemetic Solutions and get the answers.

Several of the Mountaineers, Bells especially, thought the video had a cultish vibe to it, and I wholeheartedly agreed. I’ve always found Mac enthusiasts and Xbox diehards cultish in the extreme, and this felt like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs invited L. Ron Hubbard to a mescaline party and woke to find “Kemetic Solutions” scrawled on a roll of toilet paper in the guest bathroom. Not to mention that whenever a company, government, or group of any kind throws the word “freedom” around that much, freedom isn’t what they’re selling. The mantra of “Freedom, Safety, Evolution” left me with a cold feeling—one as deep as any that Lauren’s snowy ghost had given me.

As if the video weren’t creepy enough, something odd was happening on the Basecamp forums. Someone using the handle xxxxaetherxxxx was going through old posts and changing them. Kelsey was the first to notice, as one of her older posts had been altered—though the change was subtle, and to my eye, pointless. In all, five posts, from five different people, had been changed. They seemed to have no connection to one another, until the Mountaineers noticed that each altered post mentioned a number. It took some fiddling, but they determined that this “Aether” character was giving us a date and time.

Oddly enough, Aether’s account had just appeared two days prior and hadn’t been approved by Bash, the resident Basecamp IT wizard. Whoever Aether was, they were either magimystically connected like King Rabbit or they knew their way around some code. But why alter posts and not just come out and say hello?

When the time Aether had given us finally arrived, Hannah discovered that the welcome video on the Kemetic Solutions website had changed. Or, more accurately, it had been intercut with snippets from another video: a car moving down a highway, a low-angle view of the sky, a car trunk closing. My first thought was that we were watching from the perspective of someone being shoved into the trunk of an SUV. There were also images of an IV in someone’s arm, flashes of text on car windows, cards with strange symbols scattered on the ground, and a person leaving footprints in the snow. As the video played, an unfamiliar voice spoke. And it seemed to be speaking directly to someone named Aether:

Meet us. Please. Just for a few minutes. We’d like to talk to you face to face. We have some questions and, uh, I think we could do some incredible things together. I’m going to show this card to the camera on my phone. And I want you to tell me what the camera sees. I want you to see through my phone. Does that make sense to you, Aether? I want you to try very hard and I want you to show me what you are truly capable of. I want you to reach out with your mind and into my phone. I want the camera to become your eyes. I want the processor to become your mind. I believe you could find a family with us. A family, Aether. Perhaps for the first time in your life. No, we have no interest in changing your mind, but with your mind, we will change everything.

The Mountaineers went through the video frame by frame and found a number of phases and words hidden in the video: “watching,” “find her,” “help us,” “stumbled,” “not much time left,” “There Are No Constants.”

Each of these Easter eggs held a world of threat and promise. Questions hidden within questions. Theories bounced around the forum but no one could offer any concrete answers, least of all me. The consensus seemed to be that Aether, with the help of some kind of technological power, was the one responsible for the intercut video, along with the hidden clues.