Discovery

by Douglas E Roff

  He didn’t know the answer to his own question because he himself had difficulty comprehending the mercurial and contradictory nature of human behavior. His forefathers had likewise been perplexed; it was a conundrum: what to do with the species homo sapiens. As much as his early ancestors toyed with the idea of hunting human kind to extinction, or near extinction, they considered the risk of discovery to be manageable, given the perceived benefits derived from interaction with what they considered “intelligent prey”.

  Some Gens Elders in the distant past accused their more aggressive and putative genocidal leaders of possessing the very human qualities they professed to detest. The desire to eradicate humanity before it became too powerful was no different than the way humans continuously desecrated other “lower orders of species” in their care, not to mention the many instances of genocide against their own kind.

  The ancient Gens leadership had fatefully decided upon concealed coexistence and had, in retrospect, probably made a mistake. The present leadership, if given the identical opportunity again, would not likely repeat the same mistake a second time. The Gens Collective had been, for thousands of years as a species, committed to a specific world view. That world view acknowledged the Gens dependence on humans for the “civilizing” effect they couldn’t have otherwise achieved on their own. Many Gens, though few, would ever admit it even if they preferred life in transformed proto human state.

  Simply put, they preferred human sex practices with all the complications flowing endlessly from human love and lust. Both male and female Gens found the immense variation in coupling to be infinitely preferable to brief episodes of coitus limited solely to procreation while in natural state. Transformed, the world opened up for the Gens and it was larger, fuller and more robust.

  Enzo, upon reflection, believed technology, in fact, gave the Gens Collective the upper hand. Enzo asserted that, with humanity oblivious to the very existence of the Collective, it was only a matter of time before the Gens Collective achieved the scientific, technological and military breakthroughs that had for so long eluded them. Then, they would control the destinies of both species.

  Unlike the past, when they had been occasionally caught up in the pseudoscience of the day, new scientifically verifiable innovations across multiple disciplines made possible the research that could one day free the Gens from the yoke of the human threat an dependence. One exception he had to acknowledge was the area of human creativity, which the Gens leadership would find difficult to replace organically among the Collective. The Gens could create, just not with the same mental flexibility, imagination and resourcefulness of the species homo sapiens. When it came to problem solving, the Gens Collective was adequate but nowhere near as mentally nimble.

  A mottled history flashed in his mind, confusing and unclear. His people, for the first time in their long history, were deeply divided in approach. There were three clear camps.

  The first camp, the Traditionalists, were committed to peaceful coexistence and anonymity as the principal means of survival. Discovery was to be avoided at all costs, even if killing a few Gens and humans was required. They assumed preventing discovery meant nothing would ever change and life would simply go on as it always had over the past eighty thousand years.

  The second camp, the Radicals, assumed that the discovery of the Gens Collective was an eventuality, even if they couldn’t predict when. The underlying assumption in this camp was that, given human behavior, the role of religious mythology and presumption of human superiority, conflict and war was inevitable. It was a matter of “we need to get them before they get us”. For the Radicals, time was running out as science and technology progressed, and discovery, even if not imminent, would still have profound negative implications. They feared the worst and had centuries of evidence to support their conclusions.

  The third camp, the Integrationists, believed that the time had come for mankind to become informed of their existence. They reasoned that humanity can change, improving on their well-known ability to segregate, discriminate and commit genocide. They believed that it was far better to begin the process of “coming out” slowly and carefully, building progress on progress. In their view, the worst possible outcome was an unintended discovery, followed by panic and chaos. Controlling the process and enlisting human support was the only way to integrate into a new world that respected their sentience and right to peacefully coexist on planet Earth.

  Paulo belonged to no camp and understood that this was essentially his burden. He didn’t claim to know what was best for his people. The path chosen, if wrong, could have serious and far reaching implications. Instead, he believed his role was to assess the risks extant at the time, then to guide his people in response to those perceived or acknowledged risks. His job was to make any option in any camp a viable option. Whichever way was chosen he would support and carry out. Ruthlessly if necessary.

  This was a role his ancestors had clearly delineated for the leaders of the Collective at all levels.

  Some leadership roles were hereditary, although no connection to concepts of royalty or political power were implied. It was likened more to a medieval tradesman’s guild. Hereditary positions simply had to do with stealth, security and military prowess. Their function was to maintain the peace and stability of status quo with humans, then record fruitful techniques and activities for posterity. They also were responsible for keeping the records of their numbers, locations and genealogy. Until recently, these records were kept locally, and centralized aggregated numbers were not produced or even available.

  Now that had all changed.

  Most leaders were chosen based on criteria that a human couldn’t possibly understand. In truth, neither could most Gens, as the process was buried deep in their genetics, tied to the transformation experience and their well developed, but equally undefined, leadership abilities. It was complicated, but like so much in their existence, they just “knew”. This fundamental aspect is what separated the Gens from the human experience. Baser human conduct could often be curbed and restrained by their more civilized and better natures. The Gens, when in natural state, could not. The Gens had a genetic predisposition toward primitive violence and a survival of the fittest mentality in an uncaring and unsympathetic natural world.

  For the Gens Collective as a whole, war among the Gens Clans was mostly symbolic and ritualized. The Gens, as a rule, didn’t murder other Gens, although executions ordered by a Council around certain unsanctioned behaviors were known and well documented. Challenges for dominance and leadership could likewise result in the death of the loser, though ostracism was the preferred punishment for all crimes and infractions. Ostracism meant shunning of the individual and that was tantamount to a death sentence among the highly social Gens. This wasn’t unlike humans many thousands of years ago when ostracism from the village meant almost certain death.

  The Gens, even when transformed, didn’t covet another’s possessions or seek ownership of territory. They lived in a world that settled internal conflict largely through genetic, rather than cultural or legal constructs. Primitive mammalian dominance was a reality for both the transformed and natural state Gens.

  This, Paulo thought, was the heart of the problem: could two species, more alike than dissimilar, coexist together even though one knew not of the other? Didn’t their successful coexistence for uncounted millennia mean anything?

  Paulo was torn, saddened and uncertain. He resolved that he would have to decide the path he would take once confronted with the clear evidence that discovery was either verifiably imminent or not. The future of his people couldn’t be decided by what might hypothetically happen one day but by what was predictably about to happen in a world controlled by humans.

  Paulo decided then and there that the only way to proceed was to first find the Human who had stolen his Library and neutralize him. He disliked the idea of what he was about to do but was equally resolute in knowing that it had to be done.<
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  However, the Gens general proscription on murder didn’t extend to humans. And certainly not to the Human known only to him as Alan Sarmiento. Paulo would discover his identity and eliminate this vermin once and for all.

  Chapter 25

  The information from Bitsie was sent to Adam via an internal secure pathway rather than via the secure NSA pathway that might otherwise have been used. Reserved for confidential information that couldn’t otherwise be securely transmitted, Adam generally thought of its use as restricted to highly confidential scientific or complex and sensitive computer research that didn’t concern the NSA. Adam, Edward and Bitsie had long suspected that the NSA, their long-time partner, had been spying on them, and the Institute, so Edward often demanded that the team use their own home grown secure pathway, effectively turning off the lights to the NSA. Why that might be necessary was far from clear, but Adam agreed wholeheartedly with his father’s precautions in these cases. Adam didn’t think friends should be spying on friends. Given the Edward Snowden disclosures, he knew the NSA and the United States federal government didn’t share these values.

  It wouldn’t be like his folks in Portland to play a practical joke on Adam as neither Bitsie nor Tony could be considered pranksters or even equipped with a playful sense of humor. For that matter, neither was Adam. Or Edward. So, he read the narrative summaries his team sent him, along with the large parts of the Diaries and the readable parts of the Book of Gensarii and tried to understand what had captured the imagination of his colleagues and made a secure transmission necessary.

  One of the books sent, the Book of Gensarii, was divided into over one hundred plus chapters with summaries preceding the core content of each chapter, written in English. The chapter content itself was written in an ancient script Adam didn’t recognize, although the characters of the alphabet bore a remarkable resemblance to ancient written Aramaic. Aramaic, now an almost dead language with only a few remaining native speakers, was a Common Tongue in the ancient world spoken in large swaths of the Middle East. Aramaic as a language has a three-thousand-year history, many dialects, together with specific identifiable alphabets of their own.

  Using it now, or some obscure and ancient Semitic variation, would be difficult to recognize, and even more difficult to translate. But not impossible for the DL Main.

  A companion volume of approximately four hundred pages containing a visual representation of four uneven and undulating but roughly parallel lines that looked like a print out from a heart monitor. Its significance was unclear and bore no clues as to what it represented or could possibly mean. Adam postulated it was a visual representation of sound. But in fact, his was nothing more than a guess. Could be a Beatles tune or an online digital chat about recipes.

  The third book, or rather set of books, was the private diary of Tomas di Gensarii, aka Thomas Beneviste, written in modern English. An interesting read, it contained content and assertions that could likely never be verified and was therefore almost certainly an elaborate series of fabrications. The reason for the existence of this purely fictional nonsense was unclear to Adam, absent the possibility of some massive financial fraud relating to anthropological/archeological documents. There was a brisk international business in stolen ancient documents with full provenance verified and provided, so it wasn’t like these documents had no potential intrinsic value. If authentic, they did. The sheer volume of this cache of documents indicated a value in the tens of millions of dollars, if not significantly more.

  Perhaps Tomas di Gensarii was a frustrated novelist or screenwriter. Adam read the accounts with interest, as he would any other work of well written fiction. Personally, he preferred William Styron to Bram Stoker.

  The summaries in the Book of Gensarii comprised a history and encyclopedia of a fictional people that Beneviste called the Gens. It was a lengthy and interesting construct but resembled the plot of a novel, perhaps a movie script – nothing more. Adam thought the old man had some talent for writing fiction if this was, in fact, even his writing. It was a bit unusual and somewhat macabre, but he also thought the story line was a little too “out there”, even for Hollywood.

  While it was a good read, Adam thought, why did Bitsie sound so obtuse and guarded about it on the phone? It wasn’t like her or Tony to take this book or anything in it seriously.

  ***

  Adam considered carefully what he had read, then dialed Portland on his secure land line.

  “Bitsie, what’s this all about? I got the transmission and I looked at what you sent but it hardly seems like a good use of my time. What am I missing?”

  “You want the full and complete or the Cliff Notes version?”

  “Cliff Notes, please.”

  “OK. Tony and I don’t believe these books are fiction. At least not entirely. We believe it may well be frighteningly real.”

  Silence, as if Bitsie was going to say more. She wasn’t.

  “Are you drunk or high, or both?” Adam asked.

  “None of the above, and neither is Tony. He’s with me on this and you know how he is about data verification.”

  “And you conclude this how?” Adam asked, hoping this was a joke so he could move on and chew on their collective asses as retribution for wasting his time.

  “We used the DL Main to selectively translate a few of the newly uploaded digitized manuscripts. The specific material we chose is an older dialect of Greek which we could translate by running it through the CodeBreaker translation software that you modified for your father and Dr. Benson at Harvard. Not finished yet but an interesting tale so far. But there are numerous other languages in evidence too.”

  “Explain.”

  “The languages employed in this library are many, and run the gamut from modern languages, including English, to languages and dialects previously unknown.

  Adam asked, “How many?”

  “Quite a few, including one we couldn’t classify.

  Adam seemed interested. “Which one was that?”

  Bitsie answered, “That’s the squiggly line dialect or language. Might be a catchy tune for all we know, but it’s a long grouping of four roughly parallel lines that undulate. We think it might be a language since it appeared in more than one book, along with other more recognizable languages and dialects. But there were no clues as to meaning or even what it might represent.”

  “I see.” Adam was back to thinking that all the excitement couldn’t be justified by these lean findings. It seemed to him to be conjecture piled on top of speculation and packaged neatly into supposition. This wasn’t science; it was an ancient mythology and speculative linguistics.

  Bitsie continued, “We also know now that supplemental collections do exist, or did, and that the series of numbers we found attached to the Book of Gensarii are very likely to be GPS coordinates. Haven’t run them down yet, but we will.”

  “Go on,” he said. Adam could be convinced but not by anything he had heard thus far.

  “Then we began determining the age of some of the manuscripts through radiocarbon dating on quick turnaround basis, so we know that at least in the test samples, the paper or other media like vellum or parchment as well as the inks and dyes are old. And, in some cases very old, in the thousands of years.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily imply authenticity, you know,” Adam added cautiously.

  “Of course not,” she said. “But this is either the most elaborate hoax in the history of mankind, or ...”

  “Or what?” Adam was quickly turning into “old Adam”. His voice was increasingly betrayed skepticism and a high level of snarkiness.

  “Or maybe there’s something to all this. Just maybe.” Bitsie was herself quite enthusiastic about the possibilities, but not confidant or convinced of anything quite yet. But, at a minimum, she felt that the ancient documents in the Library merited a much closer look.

  “Alright. What’s the full and complete then?” Adam asked this question wit
h a sigh and feigned concern.

  “We’re not there yet, Adam. First, we need to verify some of the data references and finish the radiocarbon dating some of the older looking and fragile manuscripts. However, the preliminary testing of paper and ink suggests that these materials had to be written by different people over a lengthy period of time.”

  “How lengthy?”

  “So far, at least four thousand years.”

  “Has everything we obtained been digitized yet?” Adam needed to know whether these materials had been uploaded to the DL Main, or whether the materials still resided on the Portland staging servers.

  “Very little of the entire collection has been digitized. The oldest materials are very fragile and will take some time to preserve before we attempt to digitize. We’ll have to get the document restoration people involved if you authorize the expenditure. On the ‘where we are now’ part of your question, we haven’t uploaded any material yet to the DL Main or the staging computers. That’s up to you, executive decision and all. We didn’t think you’d want this in the system quite yet.”

  “Take everything we have so far and get it ready to upload to internal Staging 1 for now. I don’t want to take the chance that we lose this stuff in a fire. But only Staging 1. I don’t want any of this released into the DL Main until we know more.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “And Bitsie ...”

  “Yes boss?”

  “If you and Tony are fucking with me in any way ... well, just don’t.”

  “Look, Adam, I know you had to ask but I know that you know better than that.”

  “Yeah, I do. But something isn’t kosher here, I can feel it.”

  Bitsie said, “And, we’re not sending anything else up to you right now, at least not through regular channels, including the NSA pathway. Tony thinks it’s better if you come down and see for yourself. If we’re wrong, then I’m an idiot. If we’re right, then the implications are staggering as I’m sure you can appreciate.”