Genome

by A. G. Riddle

  A few miles inland lay a single-runway airport. Their satellite footage of the potential landing strip was a week old, but the first flyover confirmed that the regional airport was still deserted. Or looked to be.

  The plane kicked up a large dust cloud as it landed. Conner and his team waited inside while the dust wandered down the runway, flowing over the white plane like a sandstorm. The soldiers unloaded two dirt bikes first, and four of the mercenaries set off, kicking up new, milky-tan dust clouds as they rode into the sun, toward town.

  Dr. Park injected something into Desmond’s IV.

  “How is he?” Conner asked.

  “Stable.” Park didn’t look up. He was a man of few words. Conner liked that.

  As planned, the soldiers returned with four stolen vans, all windowless and slightly beat-up.

  They loaded the bikes into the back of one vehicle, along with most of the rest of the cargo. They placed the medical equipment and Desmond in a second van that carried Dr. Park, Conner, and his three best men. The remaining two vans were filled with troops and other cargo, including large containers of gasoline. Each van carried food, water, and ammo—just in case they got separated.

  They locked the plane, threw a tan tarp over it, then drove north, through San Felipe. The tourist town showed no signs of habitation. Conner wondered if the residents had died or sought refuge in the shelter of a larger city.

  There was no way to know how long the drive to Sand Hill Road would take. Under normal circumstances, twelve hours was a good estimate—but that assumed the roads were passable. Also, they wouldn’t be taking the most direct route, choosing instead to travel back roads and avoid major cities. It would probably take twice as long, but it would allow them to avoid bandits and government checkpoints—both of which could end their mission.

  Near the US-Mexican border, they turned the vans off the road and drove through the desert. They crossed the unmarked international border somewhere between Mexicali and Tijuana. The region might as well have been the Sahara—there were no people, or life of any kind save for a few cacti and shrubs. The vans barreled north, four wide, so that the dust trails didn’t blind the van behind.

  They got back onto pavement at California Highway 98 and drove west, looking for abandoned cars. They found none, just a long flat stretch of blacktop highway baking in the midday sun.

  They pulled off the highway at the small community of Coyote Wells, which was no more than a truck stop. But it had what they needed: California license plates. The vehicle descriptions wouldn’t match the vans if run through a DMV database, but the tags would do until they found ones from vehicles of a closer match.

  They traveled east, driving away from the coast, where there would be more people—and troops. Desert turned to green, irrigated farmlands. Turning north shortly after that, they drove past Salton Sea, Joshua Tree National Park, and Yucca Valley.

  The van with the most soldiers drove a few miles ahead now, serving as a scout, looking for checkpoints or trouble. They found neither, only a few fallen trees and a rock slide, both of which they dealt with.

  And with each passing hour, Conner started to relax.

  A mile outside Barstow, California, they found tags on vans that were near matches to the makes and models they drove. Near Mariposa they cut toward the sea. Conner didn’t want to take a major interstate into the bay area, so they took the scenic roads that wound through the many parks, preserves, and national forests that stretched between San Jose and Santa Cruz.

  Somewhere along the way, hours after the sun went down, Conner drifted off to sleep. The soft, rhythmic beeping of his brother’s heartbeat monitor was the last thing he heard.

  A hand gripped his shoulder. Conner reached for the gun in his holster, then opened his eyes. Captain Goins’s face was lit by the van’s dome light.

  “Report,” Conner snapped.

  “Scout van is on Portola Road. It just turned into Sand Hill.”

  “Pull over.” Conner sat up. “Have the scout van wait.”

  He activated the sat phone and dialed Yuri.

  “Status?” the Russian said.

  “We’re in position.”

  “Resistance?”

  “None.”

  “Good. We’ll begin our attack. I hope it will give you some cover.”

  “Copy.”

  “Don’t forget why you’re out there, Conner.”

  Conner glanced at his brother, lying in a coma just feet away. “I won’t.”

  Yuri disconnected the call and strode to the situation room. To the head of watch, he said, “Pearl Harbor?”

  “We’re ready, sir.”

  “Commence.”

  The large screen at the end of the room displayed a world map covered in green dots. Slowly, the green dots turned to red—an indication of routers shutting down. The Citium had hacked the devices’ firmware years ago, embedding the Trojan horse, all in preparation for this moment. Now the devices were nothing more than bricks of plastic, silicon, and metal—until the Citium chose to reactivate them.

  Satellites that transmitted data traffic across the internet also went dark. The only satellites left functioning were the Citium’s, along with a few others owned by private companies.

  The world had come to rely on the internet.

  And now it was gone.

  Conner waited until a message appeared on his laptop:

  Global Internet Disabled

  He switched to the video feed from the scout van and activated his radio.

  “Proceed.”

  The vehicle pulled back onto the road, moving just under the speed limit. The driver wore civilian clothes, as did the others in the van, but Conner knew they would raise concern at any checkpoint. Their buzz cuts, rugged, chiseled faces, and hard eyes marked them as anything but civilians.

  The road was deserted. Desmond’s office building—and the location of the memory—was just beyond the Sand Hill Road exit on Interstate 280. There was no movement—cars, pedestrians, or otherwise.

  “Take us in,” Conner said. “And have the vans spread out.” Four vans together in a parking lot, belching white smoke into the December morning, would draw attention. Still, he wanted them close enough to help if trouble arose. “Have all units stay within visual range though.”

  When his van pulled into the office building’s parking lot, Conner drew the cell phone from his pocket and opened the Labyrinth Reality app.

  To the doctor, he said, “Do we need to be in Des’s office for this to work?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d like to move him as little as possible.”

  “Fine. We’ll try it here.”

  The app asked Conner how he would like to enter the Labyrinth: as the Minotaur or the hero. Conner smirked. He was the hero of the great game playing out around the world, but to the uninformed he was the Minotaur—a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull. With his mangled face, he certainly looked the part.

  Still, he clicked “hero” because he knew that’s what his misguided older brother considered himself to be. He would have programmed it that way, as a reminder to himself after he had lost his memories. Did Desmond put the prompt in the application to help renew his own faith in his cause? There was so much Conner still didn’t understand about his older brother.

  Another dialog appeared:

  Searching for Entrance…

  A few seconds later, it read:

  1 Entrance Located.

  Conner tapped the screen again, and a progress bar appeared with the word Downloading… below it.

  Ten minutes later, the phone buzzed.

  Download Complete

  At the same moment, Desmond arched his back and held the pose as if the makeshift hospital bed were on fire. Then he collapsed back to the stretcher and shook. The heartbeat monitor changed from a steady beat to a pounding alarm. Desmond strained against the padded hand restraints tied to the bedside rails.

  “What’s happening?” Conner aske
d.

  Dr. Park ignored Conner. He pulled one of Desmond’s eyelids open and ran a penlight across it.

  Conner grabbed the doctor’s shoulder. “Hey.”

  Park threw his hand off. “I don’t know.”

  Conner felt suddenly helpless. He’s dying. And I killed him.

  Chapter 5

  Peyton followed her mother and two Navy SEALs through the sunken submarine, careful not to tear her suit. They had tested the air for toxins and found none, but Lin Shaw had reminded them that strange experiments had been conducted on the Beagle, and with every lab and office they opened, there was a risk of toxic exposure. The suits stayed on.

  As the CDC’s leading field epidemiologist, Peyton was used to operating in a suit—a biohazard suit. The hot zones she operated in were mostly near the equator: the Caribbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The Beagle was the opposite, a frozen tomb, and around every turn lay a new mystery: a laboratory with an experiment, an office with notes, scenes of the aftermath of the explosion that had sunk the sub thirty years ago.

  During their first dive, the team had placed tiny LEDs in the passageways. They now glowed up from the floor, illuminating the glittering ice crystals on the walls. Peyton’s helmet lights pushed away the rest of the darkness. Floating dust motes rushed past as she walked, as if she were flying through the dark of space and stars were passing by.

  This section of corridor had bunks on the left and right. About half of them were occupied by bodies, well preserved by the cold. Some of the Beagle’s crew had died with a book on their chest, while others embraced a lover or friend. For Peyton, it was strangely like seeing a village during an outbreak—a tableau of the final hours of people in a hopeless situation.

  Walking through the sub and seeing the dead researchers always reminded her of the pandemic, and the people she had lost from her own team. It was a reminder of what Yuri was capable of. For Yuri, the pandemic had been simply a means to an end: distributing Rapture. The microscopic robots were preprogrammed to neutralize the pathogen, but they remained in the bloodstream indefinitely, awaiting further instructions. With the right software, the Citium could instruct those nanites to alter their hosts at the genetic level.

  Peyton had Rapture nanites in her bloodstream. So did Lin. They were safe for now, only because Peyton’s brother had deleted the Rapture Control program. But Peyton assumed that Yuri and Conner were working feverishly to rebuild the software. Her mother was right about one thing: time was running out. With each passing hour, she felt more aware of the tiny invaders inside her, like a poison flowing through her bloodstream, slowly diffusing, waiting to paralyze her body and mind, to take her freedom from her.

  Up ahead, the two SEALs stopped, unpacked their gear, and turned on their specialized plasma torch. It glowed blue, and sparks of orange flew off as they brought it to the sealed door.

  While they worked on opening a new area, Lin and Peyton ducked into the open office she and Peyton had started searching during the last dive. Without a word, Lin pulled open a drawer of a filing cabinet. Peyton held the camera up, ready to photograph the front and back of every document that came out.

  On the Arktika, the two members of the Citium tactical team made their way belowdecks, to a compartment adjacent to the reactor room. One man stood in the passageway, casually keeping watch, while the other attached explosives to the bulkhead.

  They then moved to the second location: a bulkhead adjoining the hull on the side of the ship opposite their submersible. They moved down the passageway, listening for footsteps ahead of and behind them. Periodically they would reach into their backpacks, pull out explosives, and affix them to the bulkhead, spreading out the charges to ensure the holes ripped in the hull were in different compartments. Sinking the Arktika was a simple matter of getting enough water inside.

  When all the charges were placed, the team leader tapped his open comm line three times. They were ready to proceed.

  Peyton’s mother froze when she saw the page. “Switch the camera off.”

  “Why?”

  Lin turned to face her daughter, her helmet lamps temporarily blinding Peyton. She held up four fingers.

  Peyton switched to channel four on the comm.

  “We’re not cataloging this one,” Lin said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s important.”

  “Even more reason to catalog it.”

  Lin paused. “Trust me, Peyton. I’m trusting you.”

  Peyton opened her mouth to respond, but stopped. She realized how much her mother’s words meant to her. She desperately wanted her mother to trust her and more than that, she wanted to trust her mother. As if in a trance, she powered off the camera and let it fall to her side. She held out her hand, and her mother transferred the page gently, as if it was a sacred document.

  Peyton was surprised when she saw it. She had expected a written document, but this was a color photograph. It depicted a cave painting of steppe bison, shown in rich tones of red and brown.

  “You said this was important. Why?”

  “It’s a picture from the Cave of Altamira.”

  Peyton had never heard of it. “How’s it connected to the Citium?”

  “Turn it over, dear.”

  On the back, someone had handwritten two lines of text:

  Do fidem me nullum librum

  A Liddell

  “The first line is Latin. What does it mean?”

  “It’s the beginning of an oath. An ancient one. A solemn vow to protect knowledge.”

  Peyton waited, expecting her mother to elaborate, but she didn’t.

  “A Liddell. Sounds like a name. Maybe that’s who wrote it.”

  “It’s not.”

  Peyton stared at her mother. “You know who wrote this?”

  Lin nodded. “Dr. Paul Kraus.”

  “You know his handwriting?” Peyton instantly realized why. “Because you worked with him when you served on the Beagle fifty years ago.”

  “Yes.”

  Peyton looked at the page again. “That’s what this has been about: finding this. He left this for you, didn’t he?”

  “In case something happened.”

  “Like Yuri’s betrayal.”

  “There were always factions within the Citium. Research was stolen. People played politics, tried to divert funds from competing projects. And Kraus was used to hiding his research. He was a German scientist forced to work for the Nazis during World War Two. He emigrated to the US as part of Operation Paperclip.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Paperclip was a post-war program that brought German intellectuals to the West. It had a huge impact on the course of history. A lot of American innovations in the fifties and sixties were a continuation of Nazi-funded research. The Saturn V rockets that carried the Apollo spacecraft to the moon? Just larger versions of the V2 rockets the Nazis fired at London in 1945. Same scientist designed both: Wernher von Braun.”

  “What was Kraus researching?”

  “Human origins. A second theory of evolution.”

  “That’s why the Citium recruited him.”

  Lin nodded. “They thought his research would reveal the true purpose of the human race—our future, what they called our ultimate destiny. Kraus spent his life looking for human ancestors—hominid species that went extinct before us. He believed they were the key to finding the code hidden in the human genome.”

  “What kind of code?”

  “There are multiple theories about what the code is—or does.”

  “What’s your theory?”

  Lin glanced away, her helmet lights following her gaze. “I’ll know soon.”

  Realization hit Peyton then. “You’re going to finish his research.”

  Lin said nothing.

  “That’s why you took DNA samples. During the pandemic, in the cordons, governments around the world took samples and provided it to Rook Quantum Sciences. That was part of your research, wasn’t it?
You wanted the genomic data to combine with Kraus’s research, which you hoped to find down here.”

  “Yes. As I said before, I had hoped the data would complete Kraus’s work, but I was never told how it would be collected. If I had known Yuri was planning a pandemic…”

  Peyton held up a hand. “I believe you, Mom. Wait—you said you hoped the data would complete Kraus’s work. It didn’t?”

  “It’s incomplete.”

  “How?”

  “The key to understanding the code isn’t sample size. It’s sample diversity. We need to know how the human genome changed over time. There’s a pattern to the changes, like a mathematical equation. If we can gather enough data, we can see how the data is produced.”

  “And what comes next.”

  A smile curled at Lin’s lips, as if she were proud of Peyton for putting it together.

  “Is that what the code is? An algorithm for advancing evolution?”

  “It could be used that way, but we believe it has another purpose.”

  “Which is?”

  Lin was silent for a moment. “Trust me, Peyton.”

  “You keep asking me to trust you, but you won’t tell me what’s going on. You’re not trusting me. That’s not fair.”

  “There are forces here that you don’t appreciate.”

  “Because you’re keeping me in the dark.”

  “No, because every question leads to another question. Eventually, they’ll lead to answers you don’t have the scientific or historical background to understand.”

  “Then I’ll get a library card.”

  “Don’t be flippant, Peyton. It’s rude.”

  “You’re lecturing me on etiquette while condescendingly telling me I’m not smart enough to understand what’s going on?”

  “I never said you weren’t smart enough, and I never meant to condescend. I apologize if you interpreted it that way. It wasn’t my intention.”