by Sean Ellis
Sara tore herself away from the skull and moved over to the workstation where Dave was tapping in his password. She leaned over his shoulder. “Bring up all the files related to your current research.”
Dave complied, and as he did, Sara took a portable flash-drive from her bag and plugged it into the USB port. There wasn’t time to be choosy about which files to copy, and she knew that workstation probably wouldn’t have the really important stuff, like the genome of whatever virus Manifold was monkeying with. Genetic mapping typically required a supercomputer with memory measured in terabytes. Sara was primarily interested in the synthesis of their research. She pushed Dave out of the way and started dragging and dropping files into the flash-drive directory.
“That looks interesting,” she said, clicking on a file icon that read “Summary Report (draft).”
A text document opened, and despite the fact that it was both a summary and a work in progress, Sara saw that it was more than eighty pages long. She skimmed through it, ignoring the more technical aspects, and tried to get a general overview of what the project was really all about. Words began to leap out at her: retrovirus; evolution; consciousness.
“My God,” she whispered. “I know what they’re trying to do.”
“Well done, Dave,” Fulbright said. “Looks like you’re hired.”
“Son of bitch!”
The scream from Dave’s co-worker startled Sara, but not as much as what happened next. The man sprang to his feet and hurled himself across the room. Before he’d taken a single step, a storm of silent lead ripped into him and his chest erupted in a spray of crimson.
The man must have known he would die. Perhaps he had interpreted Fulbright’s comment as a tacit pronouncement of his own doom and decided he had nothing left to live for. Whatever the reason, when he decided to make his move, he tapped into his deepest reserves of determination, and when the bullets tore through his vital organs, he kept going. There was only one thing he wanted to accomplish.
Sara saw where he was headed, and in a flash of insight, understood what was about to happen. She had passed the conspicuous looking red button on the way in and recognized it as part of the lab’s emergency fail-safe containment system. The CDC employed a similar mechanism, which could be triggered by any number of remote sensor devices, or by a manual device just like that big red button. Evidently, even bioweapons designers were concerned about the accidental release of a deadly pathogen.
Before she could so much as squeak in protest, the man’s essentially lifeless body slammed into the button, and the fail-safe was activated. She knew that it would do a lot more than simply sound an alarm.
14.
The Great Rift Valley
Dominance.
It was the way of the world.
The Old Mother understood this. There could not be two dominant males in a clan. There could not be two clans in a territory. And though the world itself seemed as vast as the night sky, its limits beyond her ability to grasp, she knew that it was not large enough to sustain two dominant minds.
For more turnings of the seasons than she could imagine, the great beasts had trod the earth. Their size and strength ensured that the dominance of their common mind would not be shaken. Why they, above all other creatures, had received this gift of wisdom did not concern them any more than the fact that some who shared their blood did not share their thoughts. These latter ones were no threat to the dominance of the great beasts; they were permitted to roam the earth, gathering in herds of their own according to the dictates of their instincts rather than at the guidance of the common mind. But the children of the Old Mother…that was another matter entirely.
The herd could have crushed the Old Mother’s clan beneath their feet, torn them asunder with their powerful trunks, impaled them on their mighty tusks. But dominance was not about physical might or even strength of numbers.
No battle would be fought for supremacy, or rather if such a conflict were necessary, it had taken place long before. The herd of great beasts had not assembled in order to contest that outcome, but rather to submit to dominant mind, to the Old Mother.
Lead us, Old Mother.
And she understood.
The time of the great beasts was at an end, as was her own. She had dreamed of a place of death, and now it was time to journey there.
The oldest matriarch gently embraced the Old Mother with its trunk and lifted her onto its back. Then, guided by a single common purpose, the herd began to move again.
They journeyed toward the place where the sun rises, and soon found a land where the rocks burned and the earth bled steam and fire. It was a place where nothing would grow; it was a place of death. With no food or water, many of the herd simply dropped dead in their tracks, but their flesh and blood was offered to the Old Mother for sustenance, and she endured.
On the fourth day, they found the cave.
There was no hesitation. The beasts filed in under the watchful eye of the Old Mother astride the eldest matriarch, and as the sun sank over the distant horizon, only a few of the strongest bulls remained outside, watching reverently as the Old Mother herself at last went in. As soon as she had, they began to use their tusks and trunks to collapse the entrance, sealing their brethren in place of death.
In the darkness, the Old Mother could not see the fate of the herd, but she felt their breath and tasted the air as it grew hot and stale. Sensing that her time had at last come, she lay down and embraced the final sleep…
# # #
“Look at this.”
“What is that doing here?”
“Primate. An ape of some kind. There’s still a lot of preserved tissue. Maybe even some brain matter. I’ll bet we can get a viable sample from this.”
The Old Mother awakened.
# # #
Felice awoke screaming as the memories flooded into her. She saw Sigler, his gun raised, his finger poised on the trigger. Then she saw the others-her friends and co-workers-advancing from the perimeter of the clearing, moving toward her.
She understood everything.
And screamed again.
15.
Manifold laboratory ship, Indian Ocean
A steel door slammed down like a guillotine blade, blocking the only exit from the laboratory. In the same instant, a magnesium charge inside the containment vessel holding the ape skull flared to life. It flamed hot and fast, incinerating the skull and consuming all the available oxygen in the container, and then just as quickly, burned itself out. Then, the strident wailing of a claxon suddenly filled the room.
“What the hell was that?” Fulbright demanded, spinning Dave around to face him.
“It’s the fail-safe,” Sara supplied before the compliant Manifold researcher could answer. “It’s supposed to keep the rest of the ship safe in the event of an accident in the lab.”
“Not quite,” Dave cut in, his voice quavering. “It does lock down the lab, but it also starts a self-destruct sequence.”
“Self destruct?” Fulbright said. “The lab is going to be destroyed?”
Dave shook his head. “Not just the lab; it’s already contained. We’re not getting out of here. The alarm is to give everyone outside time to abandon ship before…”
“Shit. How long?”
“Five minutes.”
Fulbright checked his wristwatch and clicked on a button, before turning to the commandos. “Get that door open.”
“It’s three inches of solid steel,” Dave protested half-heartedly. “We’re finished.”
“Three inches. Good to know.”
The men from the assault team appeared unfazed by the news of the death sentence. They deftly produced blocks of plastic explosives, along with what appeared to be water bladders for hydration packs, and began taping these to the security gate to form a three-foot square. The process took only a few seconds, during which time Fulbright overturned a stainless steel lab table and pulled Sara behind it. Realizing what he intended, she hastily unp
lugged the flash-drive and stuffed it in the water-tight bag. The commandos joined them, and as soon as they were all down, one of them shouted: “Fire in the hole.”
The concussion reverberated through the closed room, hammering into Sara’s gut like a punch from a prizefighter, and the smell of high explosives residue made her gums hurt. That she recognized was a manifestation of her SDD.
Fulbright checked his watch before standing up to survey the effects of the breaching charges. “We’ve got three minutes people. Move.”
The shaped explosive charges had done the trick, blasting an opening in the steel gate, large enough for one person at a time to crawl through. Without asking, Fulbright propelled Sara forward, and she hastily pulled herself through the still smoldering hole.
Once outside, Fulbright wasted no time. He grabbed Sara’s elbow and started running back the way they had come, shouting instructions to the rest of the team into his radio. Sara headed for the ladder where she’d left her rebreather, but Fulbright forestalled her.
“No time for that.”
She gaped, uncomprehending, as he raced past their equipment, and moved instead to row of large cylindrical containers mounted along the ship’s superstructure. Moving with what looked like practiced efficiency, Fulbright worked a lever handle, and the cylinder burst from its stays and flew out over the side.
“Jump!”
Sara hesitated, still trying to grasp what was happening. Fulbright didn’t bother with an explanation, but simply grabbed her shoulders and propelled her over the rail. She clutched instinctively for a handhold, but it was too late. Arms flailing, she dropped thirty feet into the warm ocean.
The impact stunned her, knocking the wind from her lungs, but somehow Fulbright was there, hugging her body to his and kicking furiously back to the surface. Everything that followed was a blur.
A resounding thump jolted her back to awareness, and she realized that she was no longer in the water. She jumped, like someone waking from a dream of falling, and saw that she was in some kind of rubber boat. Fulbright was sitting next to her, panting like he’d just finished a marathon. A greenish glow surrounded them, courtesy of a Cyalume chemical light stick.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
Sara tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t take shape, so she simply nodded.
Fulbright took a few more breaths. “Okay, that was close.” He gazed at her thoughtfully. “Did you get anything useful?”
Sara instinctively felt for the waterproof bag with the flash-drive. It was still there, slung over her shoulder. But the mere fact of its presence was no cause for rejoicing. She turned to Fulbright. “I managed to download their research reports,” she said, at length. “I know what they were trying to do, but without a sample of the virus they were working with, the information isn’t much good.”
A noise like the rushing of river rapids made further comment impossible. She craned her head around in time to see the bow of the research vessel, its lower hull shot full of holes from the detonation of Manifold’s self-destruct device-the source of the thump she had heard a moment before-abruptly tilt upward and then slide beneath the surface. The otherwise placid sea roiled with whirlpools of cavitation, but in a matter of seconds, all trace of the research vessel was gone. Three other lifeboats bobbed in the water nearby, but in the darkness it was impossible to tell how many of the commandos had made it off.
Sara sagged back against the vulcanized rubber gunwale, overcome by fatigue as the adrenaline drained from her bloodstream. Several minutes passed before it occurred to her to feel a sense of relief at having survived the ordeal.
Finally, she sat up and elaborated. “That ape skull was from an Australopithecine female.”
“Australia?”
Sara shook her head. “Australopithecus was one of the primate species that eventually evolved into Homo sapiens. It’s one of the fabled ‘missing links’ between apes and humans. The skull contained a retrovirus, which Manifold believed was responsible for the mutation that gave rise to human consciousness.”
“I don’t understand. A virus is responsible for turning apes into humans?”
“It’s more complicated than that, but essentially, yes. Viruses are just strands of genetic material that use our cells to replicate themselves. Certain viruses-retroviruses-actually alter the DNA of the cells that they invade. That’s the basis for gene therapy. It’s theoretically possible to introduce a virus that would rewrite a person’s entire genome. As new cells are created by mitosis, they would all carry the new DNA, and over time, every cell in a person’s body would be produced with the new code. That’s the theory, but in practice, it’s almost impossible. There are just too many cells in the body, and the natural response of the immune system would either fight the virus or kill the host.
“Manifold postulated that such a virus was responsible for adding the section of the genetic code that triggered self-awareness. From what I could gather, their working hypothesis was that an early hominid was exposed to the virus in utero, when the cells were still undifferentiated. That allowed for the mutation to completely alter the embryo’s DNA without triggering an immune response. When the child was born, the mutation would have enabled it to make to quantum leap to a rudimentary form of human consciousness, which it in turn passed on to its offspring. The section of the genetic code supplied by that retrovirus is in every human alive today. It seems that skull belonged to our common great-many times over-grandmother.”
Fulbright’s forehead creased with a frown. “If the virus is what evolved us into humans, how would it be a danger today? How could they use it as a weapon?”
Sara bit her lip thoughtfully. “I think they were trying to figure out a way to switch off that gene. Maybe by a secondary exposure to the virus.”
“Switch it off? That would…what? Turn us all into mindless apes?”
She nodded grimly. “I think that was the general idea.”
Fulbright let out a low whistle. “Can they do it? More importantly, is there a way to develop a vaccine to keep that from happening?”
“They would have had to do the genetic sequencing off-site, using a Cray supercomputer. So even though this lab was destroyed, we have to assume that they have the genome for the virus, and maybe even a viable sample that they can culture. To develop a vaccine, we would also need a sample of the original virus.”
“And where are we going to get that?”
“From the source.” She tapped the bag with the flash-drive. “We need to go where Felice Carter found that skull. We need to get there now. ”
16.
The Elephant Graveyard, Afar District, Ethiopia
King eased his finger off the trigger and glanced at Felice from the corner of his eye. He couldn’t tell whether she was telling him not to shoot, or screaming at the zombie-like figures shambling toward them. Regardless of her intent, both happened; he checked his fire and the zombies froze in place. He kept the MP5 trained on the nearest one a few moments longer, but none of them so much as blinked.
It was actually kind of creepy.
“What just happened?” he asked, without turning to look at Felice.
He realized that she was sobbing. “I did this. To them. I made them that way.”
His first impulse was to console her with words of denial, but he knew such claims would offer little comfort. She knew what had happened; somehow, she just knew, and if she believed that she was somehow responsible for turning the others into cannibalistic beasts, that was something he could ill-afford to dismiss. “Felice, honey, whatever has happened, we can talk it about it later. Right now, what do you say we just move very slowly back outside?”
She let out another wet sob then sniffed loudly. “No. It’s all right. They’ll do whatever I tell them.”
“O-kay,” King answered slowly. “But if it’s all the same to you, I think I’d prefer to discuss this somewhere else.”
Felice got to her feet, ignoring King’s extended h
elping hand, and walked toward one of the men. She stopped directly in front of him, and then reached out and placed her hand on his cheek. The man didn’t react at all. “This is Bill Craig. He was a zoologist. He also liked to write science-fiction stories.”
She lowered her hand and moved to another of the motionless figures. “This is Wayne Skiver. He was the lead geneticist. He was also planning to open his own restaurant someday.”
King noticed her conspicuous use of the past tense. “Felice. This wasn’t your fault. Let’s get out of here.”
“It was my fault. I found it. I unleashed it.” She filled the words with such anger that King felt a chill shoot down his back.
“What did you find?”
“A ghost. An evil spirit. The Old Mother. She drove these elephants into the cave four hundred thousand years ago. And when I found her, she destroyed their minds, took control of my friends; Bill, Wayne…all of them.” She turned back to him. “I know you won’t believe me, but I can feel her in me.”
King strode cautiously over to stand in front of her, just as she had done with her co-workers. He took her hand in his. “Felice, I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but I’m sure we can find some way to deal with this. Let me help you.”
This time she complied, but the look she gave him was one of resignation, not gratitude. King didn’t really care, as long as it got her moving. They moved away from the shrine and down the path through the bones. The seven zombies remained still as statues behind them.
He had hoped that her distress would ease once away from the shrine, but it was not to be. “Did you see the bodies?” she asked as they negotiated the tunnel back to the surface. “They turned into cannibals. My fault. All my fault.”
He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Felice. You’re a scientist; think about this rationally. Something caused it to happen; a virus or a prion or something. That’s what you’ve got to focus on; that’s what Manifold wants to control. And if they can figure out how it works, then they can make other people like that.”