Extinction Code

by James D. Prescott

  “You just made that up.”

  “Okay, I did, but it still makes sense.”

  She fought a grin before pointing her finger at the choppy water below them. “You think this thing struck the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. Is that what you’re suggesting?”

  “I’m not saying it, but it’s one of many possibilities. The peak rings fit, so does the tsunami and everything else the Alvarez brothers found back in 1980. You wouldn’t be doubting me if all we’d stumbled on was a giant space rock, would you?” He spotted the shift in her expression. A battle was raging within her. “I think a part of you is afraid of what we might find down there. I think a part of you is worried it might knock our species off of some imaginary pedestal. Maybe the earth isn’t so special after all. Maybe we’re little more than a pothole on some galactic highway and here’s the guy we gave a flat tire to.”

  Gabby laid her hands on Jack’s shoulders. “I keep coming back to something Stephen Hawking said. That whenever an advanced society encounters a more primitive one, things usually don’t turn out well for the latter. Perhaps some things are better left alone.”

  “This is the tenth—no, the eleventh—research expedition we’ve been on together. I’ve seen you stand up to Jivaroan tribesman who were threatening to shrink our heads and talk your way past Rwandan gorilla poachers after we stumbled into their territory. In all that time I’ve never seen you tuck tail and run.”

  Gabby’s eyes darted away. He was right and she knew it. “That thing’s been there for millions of years. Will a few more really change that?”

  Jack’s tone softened. “We owe it to ourselves and to the world to find out what’s down there.”

  “Aren’t you worried it might change things forever?”

  He took Gabby’s hand and squeezed it gently. “I’m counting on it.”

  •••

  Confident now that Gabby would stick around while they sought answers on their unexpected discovery, Jack made his way to Fifth Avenue, the main strip where the mobile laboratories had been arranged into something resembling a street. The rig had no manned submersible, but it did have an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) named Zeus, the same one the engineering team had relied on to check that the anchors holding the rig in place were still intact.

  Jack arrived before a white shipping container. Inside he found Nicola Ganotti, an Italian-born grad student and Rover operator who had joined the expedition from the University of Milan. Early twenties, with a dark forest of hair and a slight gap between his two front teeth, Nicola was hardly a stereotypical northern Italian male. And the contrast had little to do with his lack of fashion sense. Nicola was as smart as a whip, but he struggled to maintain eye contact for longer than a nanosecond.

  “How quickly can you get the ROV ready?” Jack asked, sidestepping the pleasantries.

  Nicola jumped up from his computer desk and nearly struck his head on a nearby shelf. These containers were not only small, in the wrong hands, they could be downright dangerous.

  “Dr. Greer, hello,” Nicola said, rubbing his palms along the top of his windbreaker pants. A full second went by before he held out his hand.

  Jack obliged. “Can your people have it ready within the hour?”

  “Zeus is ready right now if you need him,” Nicola said, nodding at the computer monitor. “We just finished inspecting the anchors and the cables for structural damage, but I mean, we can reconfigure him in a jiffy for whatever you need.”

  Jack got on his walkie. “Gabby, you there?” A few moments went by without a reply. “Gabby, pick up.” The line fed back a wall of static. They had been chatting a few minutes ago. She couldn’t be far. Jack decided to change tracks. “Dag, you reading me?”

  “Loud and clear, boss,” the Swede shot back. “I’m with Rajesh and Anna in the mess hall. Did you know she has access to every scholarly article ever written? Hey, man, how mind-blowing is that?” He still had trouble using ‘man’ in a sentence without sounding like the leader of a commune.

  “It’s wild,” Jack answered, not sharing Dag’s enthusiasm at the moment. “We’re sending Zeus down into the crevasse to get a better look at this thing. I’ll pipe the feed into the control room on deck five. Have Gabby and Grant join you.” Jack clicked off for a moment as he went back and forth in his mind. “And bring Anna along too.”

  Chapter 8

  Scott plopped a wad of paper printouts on the desk, causing the electron microscope Mia had been working with to tremble.

  She threw him a stern look. “Be careful, would you? This thing costs more than your house.”

  He rubbed his bloodshot eyes and then adjusted his surgical mask. “Here are the results from the blood tests we ran.”

  Her phone began to ring and Mia reached into her pocket and sent it to voicemail. It was probably her daughter Zoey. Right now, however, these blood tests were her top priority. Mia scanned down the first page before flipping to the next and beginning the process anew. Scott stood watching her. She glanced up. “Why am I getting the distinct impression you’ve already gone over this?”

  He bit the side of his lip and nodded.

  “Any bacterial infections or viruses?”

  “They were all over the map. About ten percent of the patients we tested had Hepatitis C. A couple others had STDs. The rest were clean.” Scott plucked an apple out of his pocket, pulled down his mask and took a bite.

  “So what’s at play here?” she asked. “Kinda hard not to see a connection with the flash of light the night before, but then again, you would have expected more patients with eye issues.”

  “I agree. Maybe we’re dealing with some sort of radiation leak,” he speculated, biting off another chunk from his apple.

  Mia went back to the electron microscope and intensified the magnification. “Take a look at this and tell me what you think.”

  He slid in next to her and peered at the display. The patient’s chromosomes had been spread over the sample plate. Through the eyepiece, they resembled a series of puffy X’s. “Looks like alphabet soup to me.”

  She pointed to them one at a time, identifying chromosome one, two, three, all the way up to twenty-two followed by the sex chromosomes. In all, humans had twenty-three pairs of chromosomes (strands of DNA encoded with genes) made up from forty-six individual chromatids. The two chromatids of a duplicated chromosome were held together at a region of DNA called the centromere, giving it the classic X shape.

  “So then what’s this extra chromatid doing all by its lonesome?”

  “That forty-seventh chromatid,” she informed him, “is Salzburg syndrome.”

  Scott’s eyes grew wide and his head cocked to one side. “Salz-what? Never heard of it.”

  “That’s because it was only discovered a few years ago by a guy named Alan Salzburg, a brilliant scientist and a grade-A asshole.”

  “Sounds like you know this guy.”

  Mia frowned. “I used to work in his lab, but that was before he discovered Salzburg. During my time there, I became obsessed with creating a fully functional human artificial chromosome. When I finally cracked the problem, Alan swooped in and took all the credit.”

  Scott’s face squished up. “Ouch.”

  “And when I protested he made my life a living hell and so much more.”

  “So much more?”

  “Maybe another time,” Mia said, feeling that old simmering anger rushing back in. “It was sometime after I left that someone in the lab discovered a new and extremely rare genetic disorder. Not surprisingly, they named it Salzburg syndrome after the guy who probably did next to nothing to find it.”

  “You know, this Alan guy sure reminds me of Thomas Edison,” Scott said. “Saw this brilliant documentary on the BBC not long ago.” He ran his fingers through his hair and scratched at his skull. “The bloke had a nasty habit of stealing other people’s inventions and passing them off as his own. He was a top-notch wanker.”

  “Asshole or not, I do have
to admit the discovery was an important one,” Mia said. “Each of a chromosome’s chromatids contains either a dominant or recessive version of a given gene. When children are born with an extra chromosome it’s usually because a third copy was made, a condition called trisomy which leads to conditions like Down syndrome. The difference here is the single Salzburg chromatid isn’t a duplicate, the DNA inside of it is entirely new and no one knows where it came from.” Mia eyed the electron microscope display. “Thankfully, Salzburg is exceptionally rare. Which is probably why it hasn’t gotten more attention.”

  “Define rare,” Scott said, the apple held in his now limp hand.

  “Well, Down syndrome, for example, occurs in roughly one out of every seven hundred births. Salzburg, on the other hand, shows up in about one in ten thousand. Except here’s the really strange part. Salzburg doesn’t only show up at birth. It can appear at any age, like cancer. Sometimes people don’t even know they have it.”

  “And what about the rest of the patients we swabbed?” he asked.

  “That’s what has me so confused,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “I found Salzburg in every one of them.”

  She and Scott stood in silence for a moment, pondering what she’d just said. Mia’s phone broke the spell. Once again, she reached into her pocket and killed it.

  His gaze shifted to her pocket. “Zoey again?”

  “Probably,” Mia said, grinning away the many unanswered questions swirling around in her head. Among them: how could a recently discovered and exceptionally rare disorder suddenly be present in huge swaths of the local population?

  Still uncertain, Mia removed her phone, plugged in her passcode and glanced down at her screen. She continued to stare for several seconds, her emotions running the gamut from confusion to disbelief. She wondered whether she was dreaming, but the cramps forming in her stomach told her this was no dream. She blinked hard, but the display on her phone never changed. It read:

  Missed Call:

  Alan Salzburg

  Chapter 9

  The descent toward the fissure in the seabed took the better part of an hour. While Nicola operated the rover by tweaking Zeus’ thrusters, other members of the ROV team fed the submersible’s fiberoptic cable and power supply. A third monitored the machine’s vital signs. Powerful LED lights on the bow illuminated the surroundings.

  “Wow, that’s quite a gash,” Nicola said through his headset as the fault line came into view.

  “Grant, you notice anything unusual?” Jack asked the biologist, who was with Gabby up in the control room.

  “I see a total absence of marine life,” Grant exclaimed. “Even the coral has disappeared.”

  “Assuming it was there to begin with,” Jack said. This was yet another reason he made a point of speaking with the local fishermen while out in the field. They were often rich repositories of information on conditions along the ocean floor.

  “We are now entering the fault line,” Nicola announced.

  “Three hundred meters,” a voice from Nicola’s team called out.

  The sheer edge of a cliff face drifted by the camera as the sub continued its descent. This went on for several minutes as the voice rattled off the depth readings every fifty meters. Frustratingly, the ROV’s nose had to remain level, at least until they exited the crevasse. When they reached five hundred meters or fifteen hundred feet, Jack felt his pulse begin to quicken, only barely aware his index finger and thumb were doing a slow, pensive dance.

  Then the bottom edge appeared. The rover left the wide fissure and descended into an immense underwater chamber. It felt to Jack as though they were entering another world. He recalled spelunking at Grotte di Teulada in Italy and the similar feeling it gave him. Slowly, the roof of this colossal underwater cathedral faded from view and a new shape began to materialize from out of the darkness. Jack’s heart really began to thump a wild beat in his neck.

  “Oh, boy, would you look at that,” Dag said as it came into view.

  A slightly rounded metal tip loomed against a backdrop of marine sediment. Watching the particles whiz past them gave the eerie impression of being in outer space.

  “Get in a little closer,” Jack told Nicola, who tweaked the ROV joystick between his fingers.

  The object was so massive, they couldn’t see all of it at once. Three Titanics set bow to stern would still come up short.

  The ROV came to within fifty feet.

  “No reflection off the metal,” Grant said in amazement. “As though it’s absorbing the light.”

  The ROV was rotating to the left when Anna’s soothing female voice came on the line. “Dr. Greer, please angle the camera ten degrees to the south?”

  Nicola looked at Jack, who nodded for him to comply.

  The nose dipped.

  “Closer, please,” she said.

  Once again, Nicola obeyed.

  “Closer, please,” Anna repeated.

  The ROV was less than five feet away. Any closer might risk an impact.

  There were markings etched into the otherwise smooth hull. They looked like pictographs, maybe hieroglyphics.

  “I hope to hell you’re recording all this,” Jack told Nicola.

  Nicola assured him he was.

  Grant cleared his throat. “Given no one else looks inclined to admit the obvious, I suppose I’ll be the one to come right out and say it. My terminology might be off, but I believe the gents at SETI would call this first contact.”

  Jack let out a long shuddering breath. “What do you make of those symbols?” he asked no one in particular.

  “Scientists spent decades decoding the Mayan glyphs,” Dag said. “Even Anna isn’t that good.”

  “Insufficient data,” Anna added, confirming Dag’s point.

  “Duly noted,” Jack replied.

  They worked their way down the smooth gunmetal surface, a veritable wall of grey. Within less than a minute the subtle outline of circular seams broke up the uniform finish. There were about three dozen of them. They varied in size and were arranged in rows from large to small. Soon a darker shape appeared on the object’s outer hull.

  “Whoa, go back up,” Jack demanded. “What was that?”

  “It went by so quick, I didn’t get a good look,” Grant said.

  “Looked like a big porthole to me,” Dag offered, uncertain.

  Jack thought otherwise, but kept it to himself. The ROV’s descent slowed before it began climbing back to the mystery spot. Nicola stopped as soon as the dark object came into view. What they had seen wasn’t a window. It was a three-foot-diameter hole in the hull. Had it been cut? But the edges were perfectly smooth, not ragged the way you’d expect if industrial torches had been used. Besides, it was hard to believe a ship that had potentially crash-landed on Earth without suffering so much as a scratch could be cut by anything known to man.

  The ROV was drawing a touch closer when it dawned on him. Perhaps the opening had not been from someone cutting their way inside. He thought of the other seams he’d spotted nearby, arranged like missile tubes on a nuclear submarine. Maybe it hadn’t been a way in, but a way out. The idea sent cold fingers darting along his spine. Gabby’s soft disembodied voice echoed in his ear. Was it possible she had been right? That this colossal structure was better left in its watery grave as it had been for millions of years?

  Just then a real voice cut into the frequency. “Dr. Greer, it’s Billy. The Navy’s here.”

  Jack looked up, alarmed. For some reason, his mind had gone immediately to the Cuban pilot tied to his hospital bed in the rig’s infirmary. Had the Cubans shown up to collect their imprisoned comrade?

  International incidents aside, there was a far bigger reason to be worried, and Jack was staring at it through the ROV’s forward-mounted camera.

  Chapter 10

  The MH-60S Seahawk helicopter was already on the landing pad by the time Jack exited the shipping container and climbed the stairs to the rig’s upper level. A group of six sai
lors in tactical gear, their weapons in the low ready position, swept toward him. Following behind them was a self-assured US Navy officer adorned in a khaki uniform and beige cap. In his hand was a silver briefcase. The armed sailors rushed past Jack and down the stairs, splitting off in two directions like water moving around a boulder.

  “This is a private scientific installation,” Jack shouted after them as they sped by. When he swung back around he found himself face to face with the officer. The Navy man’s lips peeled back into a dimpled smile. A molar capped in gold winked as it caught a ray of sunlight. Behind him were two other armed men, both dressed differently than the group that had just gone by.

  “Rear Admiral Thomas P. Stark Jr.,” he said, offering his hand. A silver star was pinned to each pointed collar. Above his left breast pocket sat several rows of colored ribbons and above that a golden officer’s pin. When Jack failed to return the shake, Stark removed his cap and tucked it under the bend in his arm. His hair was blond and tightly cropped, like a well-mown lawn. Average height and weight, he was fit for his age, somewhere in his mid-fifties, Jack guessed.

  “I know why you’re here,” Jack said, wondering if Stark’s men were already plucking the Cuban pilot, Fuentes, out of his hospital bed.

  Stark’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you might.”

  “We were the ones who scooped him out of the drink. If the Cubans want him, they can come get him themselves. I have no interest in having my people used as political pawns.”

  “Little late for that,” Stark said. Those dimples were back in full force. He held up the briefcase. “Is there any place we can talk?”

  •••

  Jack led them to one of the vacant shipping containers. It had been intended as a lab to study rock samples, but after discovering the object, all that business had stopped cold. He got on his walkie and called for Gabby again. As co-chief, she should be here for whatever was about to take place. By the third try she finally answered and agreed to come down.