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“Except a blackout of some sort.”
    “A blackout…”
    “Or something. It’s the only way I can explain it.” I tried concentrating as much as I could. “How the hell did I get here? Did I drive? I’m not sure I even own a vehicle.”
    “How could you not know that, Lance?”
    “I’m not sure how to answer that question.” I shrugged helplessly. “I feel broken.”
    “You have a massive burn on your chest, buddy. You’re not exactly tip top.”
    I sighed again. “I can’t explain it.”
    Alice leaned back and peered out of her window into the parking lot below. “Your car isn’t out there.”
    “So did I walk here? That would have taken me hours.”
    We sat in silence again, listening to the distant hum of vacuums. Alice was looking at me as if I were a malnourished puppy.
    “They’re taking the artifact away from us.” She said suddenly. She rifled through some folders on her desk and then passed me a writ of intent. “They’re sending it to some hotshot cryptanalyst in Boston. I guess they figured they didn’t need physicists anymore.”
    “That’s brilliant. We don’t even know what it is yet.”
    “Well, it’s out of our hands now.”
    “Good,” I shrugged, tossing the writ onto her desk. “Let it blow somebody else up.”
    “No Lance,” she said, quite seriously, “Any chances we had of figuring out what it is and where it came from are gone. Our accident seems to have changed how the higher ups want to approach this thing. Six years, Lance. Six long years and what have we got to show for it? We have maybe a few days to find that hidden frequency in the artifact.” She waved at the stacks of paper, “After that…”She shrugged.
    “Alright. What do you want me to do?”
    She poured us each another cup of coffee. “You’re not the only one who has been seeing strange shit since the accident.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I think you know exactly what I mean.” She said, “So. How long do you suspect it will take before something weird happens?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Alice smiled. “Alright then. We’ll just sit here, drink our coffee and wait.”
    6.
    The coffee was ice cold. It tasted like she spiked it with some sort of cleaning solvent, and there was a frothy build around the edge of the cup. It made the liquid somewhat thick, like a milkshake, and I have to say it was disgusting. I remembered that I never even liked the bitter swill in the first place, but even if I did, this didn’t taste anything like coffee – it tasted like rubbing alcohol. I got a little upset that she would give it to me. “What the hell is this?”
    Alice frowned and looked into her own cup. Shocked, she carefully set it on the desk and checked her thermos. “This isn’t what I was drinking a few minutes ago…”
    She pulled her desk–lamp over the cup and examined the liquid inside.
    The more I thought about it, the more unusual everything seemed. It hit me suddenly that this – this whole event – was the weird thing I said would happen. The weird event already happened. It was unfolding before my eyes.
    I wasn’t afraid this time – I was mostly interested. I hoped the weirdness of it all would have been as salient as bleeding to death or crashing into a lake. Next to that, as an example of such a peculiar event, the toxic sludge going unnoticed the first couple of sips seemed to stray on the side of nicety.
    I said, “It was coffee before just now. I tasted it. You tasted it.”
    Alice looked up from her cup. “What does it mean?”
    I said, “Tell me everything you know about the artifact from Mars.”
    “What could I tell you that you don’t already know?”
    I dumped what used to be my coffee back into her thermos. “Everything.”

THREE
    1.
    I suddenly found myself walking with Alice past a separate row of cubicles. In a hallway beyond a sprawl of office space, we came upon the dull stainless steel parallelogram of a set of elevator doors. I tried figuring out where