A-Sides

by Victor Allen

Thin snow clung like dust to the rocks and a raw wind swept over the mountainous landscape, barren -but for a few vehicles, a mobile lab, and some digging equipment- of human incursion. Cassandra Roberts stuck her head out of the tent and peered into the frigid, six a.m. darkness, squinting against the eye-burning cold. The sun’s mantle had begun to catch fire in the east, over the Iranian border, but the slate gray of snow clouds dulled any glow on the horizon. To any who might have been looking they would have been put in mind of a Prairie Dog poking its head warily from its burrow, testing the air for which way to jump. Cassandra zipped up her heavy coat and pulled on her gloves before stepping outside the tent.

  They were going in today.

  It wasn’t the cold or the remoteness that bothered Cassandra so much as the flash and boom of artillery fire, not that distant, that rumbled across the south-central border of Turkey from both Iraq and Syria. Units of the Turkish military tried to remain unobtrusive, as well as their US and NATO counterparts, but cross-border incursions of insurgents from both Iraq and Syria were common and skirmishes, though not widely reported, were a near daily occurrence. Cassandra’s group was camped at five thousand feet, in the middle of an inhospitable, unnamed no-man’s land. Thirty miles to the west was the city of Sirnak, thirty miles to the east was Hakkari. All in between was mainly nomadic herders, a few struggling farms, and bleak mountains. Though the mercury in this part of Turkey sometimes spurted up to more than a hundred degrees in the summer, the wintertime temperatures right now trembled at just below freezing.

  The dig site itself had no name, but what they were looking for did: Kirinjiru, a name dropped from the lips with almost mythical reverence among cultural anthropologists. Most believed it to be only legend and the few who had dared to claim it was more had, at best, spent a couple of years in scholarly time-out, or, at worst, been hooted out of the cobwebby, staid and stuffy corridors of Academe.

  The first enticing hints had come from anomalous, ground penetrating radar reports from military surveillance flights monitoring the Iranian border and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Syria. They outlined a massive, underground complex, far more sophisticated and extensive than needed for any kind of para-military staging area. There were cavernous chambers and connecting tunnels radiating in all directions and at several levels over the course of fifty square miles, a monumental undertaking from a time and by persons yet unknown. A boots on the ground investigation was ordered up and that’s where Cassandra came in.

  Just a few days before, Cassandra had been hastening across the campus of King University, wearing only her fuzzy, bunny slippers, blue sleep pants, and a loose T-shirt. The icy, January wind blew her red hair out behind her and coaxed chapped roses to her milky cheeks. The previous day had been warm and Cassandra hadn’t bothered to check the weather. Now that she was out in it, and already late, she sucked it up and plodded on. Her blue eyes were still red from her unhappily disturbed slumber. In her right hand she held a steaming, travel mug of black coffee which she gulped while on the run, with her left, she held her t-shirt down. Her poor choices had been between having her high-beams piercing through the thin fog of her shirt, or letting the wind billow the whole thing up where her unbound breasts would be revealed for God and the whole world to see.

  It wasn’t the first time she had slept through her alarm and been late for lab. She’d nuked a cup of day old coffee and hurried out, not even thinking to grab a robe or brush her teeth. She’d been up late, grading papers from the Bio-165 class she taught at a local technical college. Uncle Sam had financed most of her post-grad work in cultural anthropology as part of the GI Bill, but she needed the little extra income to push her over the hump during her final year.

  She took the concrete steps of the Weigert building two at a time and hurried inside. Most of the milling students took little notice of her. They’d seen this show before. Her lab was on the second floor and she climbed yet another flight of stairs. As she careened into the hallway leading to the lab, she was brought up abruptly by a pair of uniformed men.

  She nearly dropped her coffee as she recognized her old unit Sargent, Dan Crane. Standing next to him was her brigade CO, Colonel Price, a man she had met only once. Both wore full dress greens, starched and creased and very competent. Compared to them, Cassandra felt like a dented and sputtering used car at the end of a demolition derby. She quickly set her coffee down and sketched a quick salute to the colonel, still holding her shirt down.

  “Sir,” she said, looking at Colonel Price.

  Sargent Crane, always fond of Cassandra’s quirkiness, couldn’t resist.

  “That uniform isn’t standard issue, soldier.”

  “Sorry, Sargent. If I’d known you were coming I would have worn my camo nightie.”

  “At ease, Private,” he said.

  Cassandra quickly crossed her arms across her chest and shivered. What was most puzzling was the presence of the colonel. Cassandra had two years left on active reserve so she was still technically the property of the US army. But whatever they wanted from her, it didn’t take a full bird colonel to make it happen.

  “You’re being redeployed, Private,” the colonel said. “Get your gear together and report to the downtown recruiting center at 0900 two days from now. You’re flying commercial to Northwest Florida Regional Airport on Eglin Air Force base, then on military transport to Turkey. Sargent Crane will get you up to speed.”

  “Turkey, sir?”

  “The country, not the bird,” the colonel clarified. “You are familiar with the difference?”

  “Yes, sir. I spent three years as a desk jockey at Iskenderun. Spent most of my down time at Derinkuyu and Gobekli Tepe. Could never quite catch on to the lingo, though.”

  “It would seem that you’re the woman I’m looking for, then.”

  “It’s kind of short notice,” Cassandra said. She held her hands at her sides, palms forward, and swept her gaze down her unquestionably unmilitary rig. “And I’m mostly a civilian now.”

  “You’ve been highly recommended,” the colonel said, glancing at Sargent Crane. “It might not seem like it now, having this sprung on you like this, but you’ll be glad to be part of this mission. We’re doing you a hell of a solid.” He said no more, leaving the statement hanging cryptically in the air. Had it been only Sargent Crane, Cassandra might have kicked a little more, but she dared not throw up any chaff to the brigade commander.

  Three days later she had been dropped in this moon-like mountainscape. It was unlike any dig she had ever been on. She was the team leader, there on Uncle Sam’s dime, but the army’s main interest was, ostensibly, security. Cassandra thought their presence more sinister. Kurdish separatists, the PKK, still operated in this area. Publicly, a cease fire had been brokered in 2013, dutifully puppy-dogged by the press to give local politicians the appearance of having actually done something. The reality was that the fighting had never ended.

  Even more than the danger of roaming militia, if what Cassandra thought was out there really was there, she knew the findings would be clamped down tighter than the lid on a pressure cooker and there wouldn’t be a damned thing she could do about it. Her rag-tag group of undergrads and pointy headed academics probably hadn’t tipped to it, but she knew the Signals Intelligence van parked at the periphery of their camp was what had blocked their cell phone signals, not the mountainous terrain. If Kiringiru were real, it would mean that the entire human race had been snowed under in enough bullshit to turn the Sonora Desert into a mushroom farm.

  The fashionable thinking among her peers was that the Mount Toba explosion of some 70000 years ago had wiped out humanity except for five to fifteen thousand individuals. So, in the 2.5 million years of evolution before the extinction level event, the human beast had developed stone tools and rudimentary art, language, and communications skills. In the seventy thousand years since the eruption of Mount Toba, they had formulated agriculture, written and spoken language, advanced mathematics, thousands of di
fferent cultures and customs. They’d built the Hoover Dam, the Taj Mahal, and super computers, sent probes to distant planets, landed humans on the moon, and edged ever closer to the quantum secrets of the universe itself.

  The question had to be asked: How did the surviving hominids, without agriculture and in a climate of volcanic winter for the better part of a decade after the eruption -and on the cusp of a new ice age-, reduced to a few thousand widely scattered individuals -not even breeding pairs-, with death from disease and accident at every turn, survive? How did they share this desolate world with tens of thousands of large, hungry predators -well-armed with tooth and claw and looking to make an easy meal of these hairless monkeys-, and not only survive but take an extraordinary leap forward?As a science, Anthropology could never lean on a deus ex machina, but, to Cassandra, the never-to-be-uttered conclusion was unavoidable. We’d had some help.

  Cassandra had served up the question to a statistics and probability wonk at the university, given him all the pertinent data on hominid population numbers and distribution, climate effects of the eruption, and whatever else she could think of, and asked him to grind the data.

  The cold numbers had disturbed Cassandra. With a breeding population of fifteen thousand individuals, the chances of the species’ survival was a paltry 1.728%. At a breeding population of ten thousand, the probability of survival was a dismal 0.8%. At a breeding population of five thousand, the probability of species survival was, effectively, zero. With the data at hand, the hard numbers didn’t lie. Yet here we were, alive and kicking and seven billion strong seventy thousand years later. She tried to comfort herself with the idea that any probability above zero was sufficient to satisfy the equation, but that seemed almost as far-fetched as the idea that we’d had some outside help.

  Within the first three days at the site she knew things were not as met the eye. Sargent Crane, dressed in civvies and sporting stubble, was presented as a member of her team -a logistics and supply person-, meaning he didn’t have to actually know anything about archeology or anthropology, only how to get this thing from here to there. Strangely enough, the other eggheads and doe-eyed grad students had just assumed his name was Sargent, as Cassandra always referred to him as such. It was a bit of a private joke between them.

  Another false note was the presence of Geiger counters amongst the group’s equipment. For an archaeological dig, particularly one funded by the military with their reliance on strict, Teutonic regimentation and order, the radiation detectors were certainly not part of the basic table of organization and equipment. Cassandra wasn’t so naïve as to think the area hadn’t been scouted in advance and the presence of the Geiger counters was disturbing.

  Other, less obvious signs, were the teams. Carefully entrenched among the Turkish military units were small groups of Anglo men who were, to someone with an educated eye, teams of some sort, disguised as support personnel. Tunnel rats, she suspected, possibly sappers. They had that twitchy, nervous property of movement and unhealthful light in their eyes that came from too close brushes with high powered ordinance and near death escapes from tunnel collapses.

  The milling groups were great hits with the Turkish soldiers. Alcohol consumption wasn’t strictly illegal in Turkey, but was looked upon with slitted eyes. To their rescue came the teams, brewing up gallons of home-made Penny-Beaujolais from bread crusts, leftover, rotting fruit, and sugar packets, all fermenting in empty, steel cans covered with rubber cut out of blasted inner tubes. The sutlers and sommeliers of this flavored poison gladly shared it with the Turkish rank and file. After the first week and the first batch, even Sarge and Cassandra had meandered over for a belt. The stuff had the kick of a red-eyed Percheron and was so awful (thus the second, and probably more accurate, moniker for the stuff, Toilet Wine) that Cass believed it would be easier to choke down a dead skunk steeped in swamp water and left to ferment in a mold-encrusted bathtub.

  On the fifth day, Sargent Crane had instructed Cassandra to get her “neo-hippies and pencil-necked geezers in line.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Sarge,” she had asked.

  “You need to confiscate all cell phones and laptops,” he had answered. “You know the rules, and so should they.”

  “It’s not like like they’re transmitting anything out of here past the SIGINT jamming,” Cassandra had argued.

  “No,” Sarge had replied. “But just because they can’t transmit doesn’t mean they can’t record. Don’t go soft on me now, Cass. You knew what this was when you signed on.”

  Cassandra had sighed and went about collecting all the electronic recording gadgets. The younger team members, having grown up under color-coded threat alerts, pop-culture presidents, and constant, Big-Brother-esque intrusion into their lives, gave up their devices almost immediately, as if the fourth amendment had never been invented. The older members groused only a little more, all too soon submitting as quietly as the ebbing tide. They wanted to be in on this. Sarge was right: she knew what she had signed on for.

  Aside from that, Cassandra wore civvies, kept her own schedule, and had been pretty much left to do her own thing as a civilian. That she and Sarge shared more than a superior-subordinate relationship was always kept low-key and, if the brass suspected it, they didn’t seem to care.

  Now, a week after arriving, they were ready to go underground.

  Access to the site had been discovered in a natural, stone formation. Large, double doors, ten feet high and ten feet wide had been fashioned out of the surrounding stone. They had been almost preternaturally textured to blend with the surrounding face of the mountain. On first inspection, the seams at the edges of the doors were absolutely undetectable, polished and matched to within tolerances that made the stone masonry of the Giza pyramids look like a carelessly constructed brick and mortar wall thrown up by a drunken blind man on a moonless night. So closely did the seams fit together that not even rivulets of water had seeped into them to erode them and give them away. The doors themselves retracted inward, sliding back in an arc as rollers on dowels rested in grooves channeled in the upper and lower stone of the doors’ moorings. Even after, well, who knew how many years, the doors parted with only a modest amount of force applied to them, arcing back in their tracks with a massive, foreboding sluggishness but with almost no cracking and screeching of abrasive material trapped in their channels. It seemed to Cassandra that a strong wind might have been enough to push the doors apart, but none ever had.

  The gray daylight wasn’t enough to overwhelm the darkness inside the newly opened door and the mouth of the complex yawned like a screaming man turned to stone by a gorgon. A few brave snowflakes caught in the whistling wind whirled by the entrance, bright as sparks against the blackness. Cassandra and Sarge clicked on their high powered lanterns and looked at each other silently before stepping inside.

  Cassandra shone her light around, revealing an arrow-straight corridor proceeding on for an unseen distance. Beneath their feet was a flat, level floor, fine-textured as polished marble. She pulled off the glove on her right hand, knelt down, and ran her bare palm across the floor. Even stone, seamless, cold as ice and as smooth as same, almost as if it had been lathed. She swung her beam up and was unsurprised to see an arched ceiling to the corridor. The walls were as smooth and glassy as the floor, polished to a mirror-like fineness. Cassandra’s hackles began to rise as she replaced her glove. This was nothing natural, and it was beyond the capabilities of even modern technology. This was no concrete-lined tunnel braced with steel I-beams. It was as if the rock itself had become molten and reformed in a perfectly arched passageway.

  Without realizing it, Sarge and Cassandra had advanced some twenty feet into the corridor, almost as if entreated by some unseen siren. The duet of team members behind them slowly trickled in to stand, looking in awe -and maybe a little fear- at the massive corridor. Randy Adams, loaded down with batteries, carried a video camera and light while Jeremy Atwood, a twenty-year-old student w
ith a wispy mustache that looked more like a spot the cat had missed, held the gently clicking Geiger counter. It registered a staid, twenty clicks per minute, about normal for background radiation.

  “Okay,” Cassandra said quietly, looking back at Randy. “Start taping.” They were the first words anyone had spoken since entering the complex and they seemed small and weak in the enormity of the place.

  They advanced slowly down the corridor, flashlights probing ahead while Randy panned his camera upwards. All along the apex of the archway were pairs of evenly spaced, neatly drilled holes, about a half an inch in diameter. The obvious conclusion was that at some time in the past an elaborate lighting system had been attached but had now, for some reason and by entities unknown, been rooted out and ferried away.

  Some one hundred yards in, they ran across the first rooms. Set on both sides of the hallway and roughly twenty feet on a side, the rooms were, like the corridor, glassy smooth and seamless. Projecting out from each of these rooms were yet more corridors and passageways, threading deeper into the complex. There were strange protuberances and oddly shaped formations, both with those same, drilled marks the team had noticed in the ceiling. Whatever machinery or contraptions had been secured there had, like the lighting system, been spirited off, leaving only speculation as to their purpose.

  The place was creepily sterile. Cassandra had spent a good bit of time at Derinkuyu and Gobekli Tepe, both ruins ten to twenty thousand years old, and had even visited Uruk, arguably the first major city on earth, built and inhabited around five thousand BC. Despite their antiquity, all of these places had at least had the trademarks of humanity: broken and burnt shards of pottery, coprolite, even altars and toilets.

  This place had none of that. It had the efficient, no-nonsense layout of a lab or research facility. No groundwater trickled from unseen aquifers; no creatures built nests or ran from the light, no loose stone or grit crunched under their feet. They might as well have been walking on a frozen-over lake. Looking at the perfect, uncracked geometry of the place, another thought occurred to Cassandra. This place, like Gobekli Tepe and Derinkuyu, had been constructed in one of the most seismically active regions on planet earth. Yet there was not a single crack or fissure in any of the walls, no unevenness of the floor to suggest the ground had shifted, no heaved-up slabs of stone. She didn’t know when the place had been excavated, but she had to assume it had been at least in the thousands of years. What were the chances that it could have escaped a major cave-in from an earthquake for those thousands of years? Who could have forged such an underground complex able to withstand those seismic forces? Even more troubling food for thought, who could have known that this area would be unaffected by earthquakes for millennia?

  The adjective alien was well overused, but it seemed the only one applicable in this case. The whole compound was like a magician’s set where the illusionists had abandoned the stage years previous, leaving behind evidence of their hocus-pocus, but not the conjury itself. The trapdoors and secret panels were open and exposed; the magic top-hat whence the bunny had appeared was full of bones; the covered dish which had birthed doves now served up only tattered feathers.

  They pressed on for another quarter hour, peering into cavernous rooms, noting staircases and those odd little bore-holes that told the removal of something. It was like seeing a bunch of dangling wires and wondering what had once been powered by them. Though the place was dustless and antiseptic, Jeremy had taken to holding his arm across his nose and mouth, as if afraid of breathing in some noxious spore. Cassandra really didn’t blame him.

  “How are we on time,” Cassandra called back to Randy. The expedition had spoken very little and there was no real excitement as Cassandra had expected, only a gloomy foreboding.

  “We’ve got maybe thirty minutes of light left in the batteries,” Randy answered. “Maybe,” he added hopefully, “we should head back?”

  “Five more minutes,” Cassandra answered.

  To put a date to the place, they needed to find organic material, and they did.

  Less than a minute later they were brought up short by some sort of obstruction which was picked out at the very periphery of the light. Rather than the obsidian blackness that had been the light’s constant echo, little spears and points began to come back to them, as if it were reflecting off of something.

  As they moved closer, none of them wanted to believe what was being revealed and Cassandra was nearly on top of the obstruction before her brain finally accepted what she were seeing.

  She held up her hand and turned to Randy and Jeremy.

  “I want you two to hang back here. I’ll call you when I need you. Sarge, you come with me.”

  They walked twenty-five feet forward until they got to what Cassandra already knew they would see. Stacked from floor to ceiling, and continuing down the corridor for an unknown distance beyond the reach of their light, were bones. They might have been animal bones, but it took only a few seconds to turn up a readily recognizable human skull. Then another, then a dozen times that. The gray bones had disarticulated and lay heaped in a haphazard pile, but enough of the specimens at the bottom of the stack had retained enough relational integrity to reveal that these bones had all been complete skeletons at one time.

  “Jesus,” Sarge breathed.

  “He’s not here,” Cassandra answered softly.

  “Thirty thousand comedians standing in the unemployment line,” Sarge said with a strained smile, “and you’re tellin’ jokes.”

  Cassandra knelt down and picked up a femur, looking for kerf marks, teeth marks, or charring. There were none. So this wasn’t cannibalism. She scrabbled around a little and noticed something odd (and odd in this context was a very relative term), and picked it up.

  She held the skull, minus its mandible, up to the light. It was misshapen and heavy, the brow ridges thick and apelike, the eye orbits ringed with pronounced, sharp-edged ridges. Lumps and bumps of calcified bone dotted the cranium, and the occipital bone at the rear of the skull was elongated at least two inches beyond normal. There were a few teeth left in the skull, but they were small, even, and tile-like, with no canines. Frowning, she looked around again and found more bones that seemed more in line with the skull. Leg and arm bones that were too thick and heavy, bowed, and dotted with those queer calcium deposits. And it wasn’t just the one. A quick inspection revealed that there was a pretty even distribution between the normal human bones and skulls, and the anomalous bones.

  The corridor was stuffed with bones. They might have gone on for miles, but Cassandra didn’t want to think about that. It seemed painfully plain to her what this was: A refuse pit. The skeletons, normal and anomalous, had once been human bodies, rejects from some obscene vivisectionist experiment, tossed carelessly aside like scraps.

  She carefully gathered a couple of skulls, ilia, and long bones, sealed and labeled them in plastic bags, and tucked them in her specimen sack. Carbon dating could reliably date the bones to fifty thousand years. Passing the samples through thermal diffusion columns could reduce the sample to pure carbon and date the remains up to seven hundred centuries. If that gave ambiguous results, there was always aspartic amino acid racemization that was accurate up to a million years. Then there was DNA testing if there was pulp left in the teeth or marrow in the long bones.

  She stood up to motion Randy and Jeremy forward, and that’s when everything went to hell.

  They first heard a soft, high-pitched whine that steadily grew in intensity, as if machinery dormant for thousands of years were powering up. The gravity in the hallway suddenly seemed to intensify and Cassandra’s arms literally felt as if they weighed a thousand pounds. She staggered backwards, unable to support herself, and fell into the pile of bones, pinned there.

  She forced her overloaded muscles to turn her head and saw Sarge on his knees, straining to remain vertical as the gravity wave threatened to yank him down. The skin on his cheeks and below his eyelids sagged, as if it
were being pulled down. His lower lip bowed outwards, revealing his lower teeth.

  Cassandra heard a crash and the light from the video camera blew out with a hollow tinkle. The flashlights she and Sarge carried had been wrenched from their hands and rolled away, their beams playing unhelpfully along the ground and illuminating nothing but blank stone.

  The staccato clicking of the Geiger counter had ramped up, squawking at a steady two hundred and forty clicks per minute, as if a Morse code operator on speed were hammering away in wide-eyed, unhealthy dementia.

  But the worst thing was the light.

  All around them, the blank stone walls suddenly began to glow. From floor to arched ceiling, a diffuse glow began to emanate from the stone, quickly building from an almost imperceptible pale blue to a reddish pink, like a stove eye heating up. The whining moved in lockstep with the light, driving upwards as the light reached a blinding intensity. Sarge and Cassandra were unable to raise their arms to shield their eyes, so they simply closed them against the blinding glare.

  They stood frozen in tableau for perhaps ten seconds before the light subsided as quickly as it had appeared. The rapidly clicking Geiger counter slowed and resumed its sober, slow chirping once the light had vanished.

  Mobility returned in inverse increments to the light’s intensity and Sarge and Cassandra scrambled to retrieve their flashlights. Cassandra turned quickly and shone the light towards Randy and Jeremy. Though not unscathed, they seemed far less affected than Sarge and Cassandra, who had been caught in the most powerful part of the cone of radiation.

  “You okay, Sarge,” Cassandra asked. She herself felt pretty much okay. Once the gravity wave had released her, she felt no different, neither better nor worse.

  “Pretty fuckin’ well,” Sarge answered shakily, “all things considered.”

  With no light left other than their diminishing flashlights, Cassandra quickly secured her samples and the team hastily retraced their steps out of the disturbing excavation and out into the amicable dimness of the day.