THE ARTIFACT

They found it in another of a series of endless, moonless, starless nights,

In the utterness at the bottom of a cold volcano,

Rumors spreading in coarse syllables through huddled cavern clumps.

Standing hunched together and moving by sound,

Following the hollow ticking of their teeth

And the familiar rot of flaking skin, 

Arrays of nerves tilted up, tasting the air,

They entered the asymmetric tunnel,

Walls of hardened magma sculpted by ages of pressure

Into glassy folds the color of amnesia,

Descent brought them to the foot of a carbon fiber stairwell,

Articulated and mechanized

Like the segmented spiral of a black silica shell,

With no light to reflect in the mirrored material,

No way for them to see their own faces in the glossy surface.

Eyes white,

They followed ancient corridors down by intuition and racial memory

Beneath the paralytic crust of crippled earth,

Through chambers beneath the labyrinths of empty aquifers,

Circumventing collapsed reservoirs

Crushed closed by the weight of deserts,

Feeling their way to a subterranean lake long dead.

Into a bed of gritty silt they grasped,

Disused sockets carelessly directed

With no sense of orientation.

Inner ears numb to vertigo were not consulted

By calcified nerve clusters, devolving brainstems.

The air they breathed was breathed again.

Many twitching digits contracted compulsively upon the item,

Compelled by latent curiosity to unwrap the heavy layers:

Disintegrating prehistoric sable,

Pristine synth fabrics and pliant phyto-weave,

All pulled back in turn to expose a core of broken husks,

Proterozoic chitin streaked a rich and oily chocolate brown,

Once plunged forever in the deep

Where was no memory of light, no echo of color, no concept of sight.

Anachronistic instruments peeling away the brittle layers,

They removed from the center one spherical obsidian container

With gyroscopic qualities,

Shifting to the touch of feeble neural extremities.

Turning, manipulating, with lizard cunning,

Dormant synapses stimulating vestigial cranial matter,

Until, the code decrypted, the globe came apart,

Metal segments separating with a musical ping

To reveal a dark kernel: a polished bead of unknown material.

They beheld it there,

Whispering possibilities,

Articulating forgotten hopes

Of re-igniting stars and stoking once again tectonic engines.

Of a re-awakening.

But then it dropped,

And it bounced,

And was lost. 

And they tore themselves asunder

In the black bowels of the dying planet.