Extinction Code

by James D. Prescott

  Memories began to flood back in and Mia used what energy she had left to hold them at bay. Stabbing a hand into her pocket, she came out with her cell phone. Fifteen more missed calls, most from foreign-looking numbers. Since escaping, she had fought against the overwhelming desire to call home, if only to hear her daughter’s voice one last time. She knew Paul would object, maybe even lie that Zoey was sleeping. But then another, darker realization began to hit her. What if her family was also in danger? Since the people after her had failed, what was stopping them from going after the ones she loved? Cycling through her contacts, Mia pushed Paul’s number and held her breath while it dialed. After four rings the voicemail picked up. Mia swore.

  “Hi, this is Paul, please leave a message.”

  After the tone, she rattled off everything that had happened and told him to take Zoey and head somewhere safe. She disconnected, hoping she hadn’t sounded like a complete nutcase. She then wrote him an email just to be sure the message got through loud and clear.

  Yesterday, the news had been in a tizzy about the blinding flash experienced by a large swath of people in North and South America. Racking up what was undoubtedly going to be a monstrous data bill, Mia began searching the major news outlets. She hoped that a determined reporter might have gotten information on what had caused the flash and whether people outside of Brazil had also been affected. Twenty minutes of scrolling later she’d found nothing useful. Most of the articles talked about the event, but stopped short of explaining what had caused it.

  While checking her local news in Richmond, Mia stumbled onto a link buried near the bottom of the website. The image showed firefighters dousing a flaming Cadillac XTS. The front was fine, but the rear of the vehicle was charred beyond recognition. She scanned the rest of the article with a growing sense of disbelief.

  Authorities say the badly burned remains of a prominent scientist were found in the trunk of his car this morning. DNA testing has yet to confirm, but police are confident that the victim is Dr. Alan Salzburg. A leading geneticist, Salzburg pioneered a number of important advances, among them the human artificial chromosome and the rare genetic disorder which bears his name. Police are treating the death as a homicide.

  The phone tumbled from Mia’s hands, numb with shock. Now, with the terrifying news of Alan’s death back in the States, one thing had become perfectly clear. Nowhere was safe.

  * * *

  Mia was awakened by a bang and a shudder as the owner of the car started the ignition and pulled away. It was nearly dawn, the darkened sky showing hints of grey. The driver flipped on the radio, blaring a Brazilian pop song, mouthing the words and bouncing to the rhythm. Peering out from the back seat, hidden amongst the trash, she could see he was both overweight and blessed with decent dance moves. His singing voice, however, left something to be desired. She reached carefully into the waistband of her cargo pants and felt a hot flush crawl up her face. The gun wasn’t there. That was right—she had removed it when she climbed in, placing it on the floor next to her bag. Mia eyed the space without finding the gun. Had it sunk beneath the sea of wrappers?

  The driver rifled through the debris on the passenger seat, looking for something. When he didn’t find it right away, he swore and returned his attention to the road. Thankfully, the Civic was a stick shift, which required both his hands. After he shifted into third, he leaned back and jammed a hand into the back seat. For a moment, his eyes left the road, swinging toward the space between the front and back seats. A blaring horn cut that short and he jerked the car violently, rolling down his window to rattle off what Mia could only guess was an off-color expression about the driver’s mother. Perhaps having learned his lesson, he stuck with the passenger seat and the floorboard. Then, with a victorious holler, he waved a gold-colored CD in the air, kissed its shiny surface and inserted it into the dashboard.

  Even worse music ensued, but on the bright side it was loud and helped divert his attention away from her crouched form. Less than five minutes later, he arrived at his destination and pulled over. With a grunt, the driver got out and locked his door before moving away.

  The morning light painted the sky with a palette of pastels, oranges and pinks. Tentatively, Mia raised her head and caught the driver waddling around the corner. This neighborhood, she noticed, was even more run-down than the last. She flicked away the trash and found the gun resting exactly where she’d hoped it would be. Shoving it down the front of her pants, she gathered the rest of her things and exited the vehicle. She locked each of the other three doors before fleeing.

  Unlike the residential neighborhood last night, this street was populated with large, decrepit factories. In the distance she spotted what looked like a slum with shacks crammed one on top of another.

  Mia went at a brisk pace, uncertain where she was or where she was heading. The news of Alan’s death had thwarted her plan to rush back to Richmond. Not with his killer awaiting her return. It was the worst kind of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation.

  She could tell the local Brazilian police what had happened, but what proof did she have to back it up? Alan had left her as the custodian of what amounted to not only his life’s work, but, assuming he was right about the coded message hidden in Salzburg syndrome, perhaps the most startling discovery in modern science.

  Mia turned a corner and ran right into a man. She stumbled backwards. The man turned and so did the other three who were with him. They’d been sitting on wooden crates in loose-fitting clothes, smoking cigarettes and drinking from bottles of cachaça, an alcohol made from distilled sugar cane.

  Mia waved an apology and quickly headed in the other direction. They catcalled and shouted after her in Portuguese. She missed almost everything apart from “come back,” or had it been “get over here”? She glanced back and saw that her four new friends were following her. Their faces turned down in scowls, they had the expressions of men eager to make their first catch of the day.

  Mia picked up the pace and so did they. She entered the slum. Along the dusty streets, a handful of people moved about, perhaps getting ready to go to work. She decided to move in amongst them. Surely the men following her weren’t dumb enough to try anything in front of witnesses.

  With every step Mia felt the pistol dig into her pelvis, a painful feeling, but also a reassuring one. She didn’t want to pull the gun out just yet, not before she really needed it. If they were also armed, it could start a gun fight in the middle of the street.

  Mia drew parallel with a small group of people. She began to cross the wide dirt road, intent on mixing in with the crowd. That was when she heard her assailants break into a run. Barely a few feet from the other side of the street, she pulled the pistol and spun around. The men skidded to a stop, two of them less than five feet away, the others not far behind.

  “Take another step and I’ll blow you away,” she warned, hoping they couldn’t see how much her hand was shaking.

  The man closest to her took a step forward, testing her resolve. His features were surprisingly soft and kind, except for the scar that ran from his ear to the side of his mouth.

  She tightened her grip on the pistol, her finger on the trigger. The only thing she knew about guns was you never put your finger on the trigger unless you were ready to shoot. Her uncle had taught her that. She was ready. “I’m not kidding.”

  Scarface took another step closer and Mia squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. She squeezed again, then three more times in rapid succession, but the result was always the same. Her eyes widened with fear as the barrel of the gun sagged. The lead assailant narrowed his eyes and took one more step before a Toyota four-by-four struck both Scarface and his friend, launching them into the air.

  The men landed with a thud and rolled, kicking up clouds of dust and screams from the locals. But they weren’t the only ones hit. Right as the truck had clipped their legs, the side mirror had knocked the gun clean out of Mia’s hand, spinning her in a circle. A few
feet away, the vehicle skidded to a stop. A man leapt from the driver’s seat and fired two shots into the air. Scarface’s remaining friends took off running, leaving their wounded comrades moaning on the ground.

  “What are you waiting for?” the man shouted with a heavy accent. “An invitation from the Queen? Let’s go.”

  Never in a million years had Mia imagined being as excited to see Ollie’s face as she was right now.

  Chapter 16

  The briefing room on board the USS Grapple was about as sparse and unattractive as Jack had assumed it would be. The walls were coated in a layer of lime-green paint while the floors were a darker shade, something closer to pond scum. Four rows of chairs lined the space. Up ahead was a podium and next to that a display screen. Above them was a mix of neon lighting fixtures and exposed air ducts.

  After Jack and the rear admiral’s little chat, Stark had called in the Grapple, a salvage ship at the time conducting an operation off Galveston, Texas. She was used for a variety of tasks and particularly well suited to deep-sea missions. Following their conversation, two things had become clear to Jack. The first was that his gumption had somehow impressed Stark. The second was that the Navy was now in charge of the operation.

  Stark addressed them from the front of the briefing room. Grant, Dag, Gabby, Rajesh, and Anna were seated in rapt attention. At the back were Commander Hart and Lieutenant Olsen.

  Not surprisingly, selling Gabby on this next phase of their research expedition had not been an easy task. Although stated in a dozen different ways, the gist of her argument against pushing any further was a good old-fashioned fear of the unknown, the same reasoning that might have kept us away from the depths of the ocean or the surface of the moon.

  After Jack proceeded to knock down each one of her arguments, she had shifted tack and suggested they were no longer able to complete the research as outlined in their grant agreement. Jack countered by telling her the original mission hadn’t changed. They had come to drill what was left of the meteorite suspected of killing the dinosaurs. Instead, they’d found what to Jack’s mind was looking more and more like a spaceship. Of course, for all he knew, it might have landed in the crater afterward. But what if this had been what killed the dinosaurs? Any way you sliced it, finding answers required further investigation. After nearly an hour of a conversation that had ebbed and flowed from congenial to downright hostile, Gabby had finally thrown up her hands and surrendered.

  It was nothing new for Jack and Gabby to butt heads. Hell, it was one of the reasons he loved working with her. Jack had a point-and-shoot style. She, on the other hand, had a keen ability to spot where he’d become myopic in his thinking. Put another way, he was the rifle while Gabby was the aiming reticule—precise, efficient, normally cool-headed. Now, they’d swapped roles and Jack was still trying to understand why.

  After Gabby had thrown up the white flag, Jack’s next mission was to speak with Rajesh, who had had some serious reservations about dealing with the military. During his time as an MIT grad student, men from DARPA had apparently showed up on campus, asking for a meeting. He had agreed and quickly discovered the focus of their questions revolved around A.N.N.A. version one point zero. In her they saw a tremendous potential to save lives on the battlefield. As Rajesh explained, their pitch had been to use her revolutionary self-learning neural network and algorithm in order to create a whole new generation of battlefield medics. It all sounded so wonderful until Rajesh asked them about the other military applications they had in mind, the kind that involved machines designed to kill. In spite of their assurances that would never happen, Rajesh wasn’t an idiot. He knew the temptation would be too great and by then there would be no stopping them. If the military wanted to build an army of soulless killing machines, let them do it with their own code.

  Jack fully understood Rajesh’s objections. He promised that not only would Anna be safe, but if Rajesh, or even Anna, had a change of heart, they could leave the expedition at any time. For her part, Anna said she was eager to fill in humanity’s knowledge gap in this area. It sounded nice, but Jack wasn’t convinced she had any concept of the historical magnitude of what they were about to embark on. And maybe that wasn’t such a big surprise. Homo sapiens had a long tradition of peering into the black recesses of space and wondering whether we were alone. Whatever Anna and her burgeoning intelligence represented, one could argue she was the first of her kind, a new species whose time spent on the earth could be counted in months rather than millennia. Anyone born into a world with flying cars and interstellar travel couldn’t help but see them as terribly normal, even banal.

  “Dr. Greer,” Rear Admiral Stark said coolly. “I asked you a question.”

  Jack snapped back into reality. “Sorry, I was somewhere else.”

  Stark motioned toward the paused image on the monitor, which showed what looked like a space suit. “Have you ever used an exosuit on one of your geology expeditions?”

  Jack leaned forward for a closer look and shook his head. He was familiar with atmospheric diving suits. The shell was made from a hard aluminum alloy and featured rotating appendages outfitted with pincers for manipulating underwater objects. Stepping into of one of these five-hundred-and-thirty-pound beasts essentially transformed the wearer into a massive crab. Although expensive, the suits held several advantages over traditional scuba diving gear. The most striking was the pressurized interior. Much like a one-man submarine, the wearer could essentially bring earth’s surface atmosphere with him several hundred meters under the sea. A scuba diver on the other hand was forced to breathe a dangerous cocktail of gases and spend hours in decompression chambers or risk the bends.

  Stark pressed a button on a remote, switching the image to a live feed five hundred meters beneath them. On the screen were a number of Navy divers in exosuits securing a large circular habitat to the porthole of the USO (unidentified submerged object).

  “Once in place,” Stark explained, “the Orb will be your home for the next ninety-six hours.”

  “Ninety-six?” Jack said, shocked they weren’t being given more time.

  “It might very well be less,” Stark told them. “Once agents from the ONI arrive, I got a feeling they’re gonna want you and your people gone. So my advice is get in there and do as much as you can in the time you have.”

  The ONI stood for the Office of Naval Intelligence.

  Jack bit his lip. Things might have been a lot worse. The Navy could very well have called his bluff and thrown them off the rig back to the US.

  Stark zoomed out with the underwater camera, revealing just how tiny the Orb looked next to the alien structure.

  “Let me bring in Captain Manuel Sanchez, commander of the USS Grapple, to explain a little more about your new home.”

  Sanchez strode to the front of the briefing room. A short Mexican American in Navy khakis, Sanchez was clean-cut with a slight deformity on his upper lip. He spoke slowly, struggling, it seemed, to keep his speech as clear as possible. “Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and, uh…” Captain Sanchez’s gaze dropped to Anna, seated in a front row.

  “Anna,” Jack offered, knowing Rajesh would have looked on with delight as the captain struggled.

  Sanchez’s face became strained. Clearly Stark hadn’t informed him a robot was on board. Recovering quickly, he carried on with his presentation.

  “The Orb is a deep-sea research habitat capable of supporting a crew of ten members on five separate levels,” he told them. He pulled up an image on screen. “It will also be your home for the next few days. As you can see, a narrow staircase provides access to each deck. Decks one and two are berthing quarters. Each of you will be assigned a bunk and a locker where you can store your personal items. The middle deck features a small mess with tables and chairs. Two microwaves will allow you to heat up the pre-prepared meals we will provide you with. The lower two decks will house a comms room and science lab.

  “The Orb has two airlocks. The first is where the s
ubmersible will dock. The second leads to the structure. As we speak, Navy divers are beginning the process of pumping water from the porthole. A series of micro-ROVs sent into the structure have revealed a chamber no more than ten square feet. Within the hour, the last of the water should be pumped out and the Orb secured in place.”

  Jack spoke up. “What if we run into a problem and need to evacuate?”

  “In the case of emergency,” Sanchez informed them, “the Orb can be manually released from the airlock connecting it to the USO. Compressed air will then fill a series of ballast tanks and bring you to the surface.”

  The captain then flicked to the image of a man in a baggy suit. “While on board the Orb, you may wear your regular clothing. However, specially designed biosuits must be worn within the target structure at all times. Failure to comply may result in cross-contamination or death.”

  Dag, his brain filled with endless knowledge on dinosaur bones, looked worried. “Cross-contamination?”

  Grant, the biologist, jumped in. “It’ll prevent us from leaving our microbes behind and mucking up any data we collect. The real question is, after millions of years on the bottom of the ocean, have any alien bacteria even survived?”

  Gabby crossed her arms and held her elbows. “I’m starting to think this was what Stephen Hawking meant when he said we might not survive first contact. Didn’t the Europeans wipe out millions of the native population with pathogen-carrying blankets?”

  “What about the air?” Dag asked. “Once we’re on board, will we be able to breathe?”

  Rear Admiral Stark popped back up. “We’re not sure yet, but your suits will be able to monitor air levels. Regardless, you’re advised to keep your helmets on at all times.” A cough from the back of the briefing room drew Stark’s attention. “Oh, yes, there’s one more member of the team I should introduce you to.” Stark raised a hand and waved someone forward from the back of the room. All present shifted in their seats to see who it was. From out of the shadows, a thin man in his forties emerged, wearing a dark suit that was last in style sometime in the mid-nineties. His thinning hair was parted in the middle and combed flat on either side of his skull.