“But what are the golden threads?” said Milo as the pounding revelations began to fade, exhausted of insight. He turned to face Bridget, seeing her softly lit face once more as they together looked at the incandescent tendrils and their bulbous fruit above. Together they slumped to the sand at the foot of the skeleton, holding each other as the world around slowly materialized into being once more.
“Possibly the single greatest accident in the history of the cosmos,” said Bridget. “Most likely a bioluminescent slime mold, a colonizing single-celled eukaryotic species of the kingdom Protista.”
“Not the fruit of the gods per se?”
“Nor a Promethean torch or Eden’s tree of good and evil—at least not in any understandable sense.”
“But it is special,” insisted Milo. “It has to be special.”
“It is special,” said Bridget. “Species find their defense mechanisms by genetic accident; small mutations in biological coding resulting in toxic compounds, waxy barriers, foul odors, bitter flavors, thorns, molecules that bind to sensory thermoreceptors—”
“And psychedelics.”
“And psychedelics, yes. Animal and plant life will use any advantageous mutation that might protect and perpetuate their genetic lineage. At some point in the distant past, an anomalous strain of our light-emitting mold began to synthesize a molecular compound analogous to a neurochemical. Serotonin would be my guess. Variations of similar defense mechanisms naturally occur across a number of ecosystems. But this specific molecule is uncommonly psychoactive, and once through the blood-brain barrier, it breaks down the brain’s ability to differentiate informational priority. Quite the effective deterrent to most species of the animal kingdom, as you might imagine.”
“The mold weaponized the mutation,” Milo said, marveling. “Turned it into a defense mechanism through a million-year process of natural selection.”
“It’s really that simple, isn’t it?” said Bridget. “A naturally occurring defense mechanism. Most animal species would experience disorientation, seizure, even death at higher exposures. It’s a neurotoxin, for lack of a better description. But for our early ancestors, this was nothing short of what first made us truly human. It’s the genesis of everything we now know, everything our species has achieved. She may have been just one woman—but our world stands upon her shoulders.”
“My memory palace—my newfound powers of deduction,” whispered Milo. “Charlie’s physical self-mastery. Joanne’s incredible sight. Your medical intuition. All fruit of the same cognitive tree.”
“But what happened to DeWar?” Bridget asked.
“I can only speculate,” said Milo. “I believe his men spent their final hours on the beach, lost to their most treasured memories. And DeWar could have spent a thousand lifetimes exploring an unfathomable universe of knowledge. He placed his journal on the altar before returning to his lonely throne to meditate. His body ultimately failed his mind; it was only a matter of time. We have that choice too—to stay and build kingdoms in our imagination.”
“And what would have happened if Lieutenant Sadao Kawabe had found this? Brought it back to his superiors?”
“It could have changed history—for all we know, he could have brought back the deductive knowledge necessary to split the atom.”
“Dale wants to bring this to everyone—all seven billion of us,” said Bridget. “He believes we’re a Stone Age species in a world of nuclear weapons and climate change, our minds bound by primitive selfishness while wielding tools we can’t possibly understand. He thinks this will transform us all for the better.”
“And you?” asked Milo. “What do you believe?”
“I believe in the first people,” said Bridget. He watched as she gazed into the blackness of her mind, eyes blank. “Eve took nothing from the cave. She gave her people only knowledge. She didn’t stay to explore her inner mind until death; she didn’t drug her tribe with some molecular neuro-mimic. She was the first shaman, the first medicine woman, the teacher of all teachers to come.”
“And I believe DeWar stayed because he didn’t have anyone to leave for,” said Milo as he reached out to squeeze Bridget’s soft hand. “I do.”
CHAPTER 39:
MEDICINE WOMAN
Milo held Bridget on the sandy beach of the cavern’s lonely island as she slept. Time passed like a dream, their sinewy, muscled forms intertwined under the illumination of the gathering golden ropes. He allowed his vision to drift up the rainbow walls of fossil layers, the thousands of petrified organisms around him tickling his brain with words like metazoan, Ordovician, and trilobite. Playful hallucinations of armor-plated placodermi fish and the first reptiles of the Carboniferous period swam across the walls, their forms remembered from textbooks and coursework so many lifetimes ago.
Bridget stirred within his arms, her lean body pressing into his. Yes—someone to return for, someone for whom he’d willingly sacrifice his passage through the gates of infinite insight, maybe even enlightenment itself.
She was awake now—for how long he did not know. The doctor frowned, again visibly forcing herself to use plain-spoken English and not her full range of languages and equations, as though already preparing to reenter the world above. It came more easily now, with Bridget once more sounding like herself.
“Did you dream?” Milo struggled to constrain his question into simple words, insisting that his mind translate.
“Everything—I dreamed everything,” began Bridget. She attempted to explain in words twice, three times, each beginning with a stuttering false start until she gave up. From her lips and hands spilled a beautiful soliloquy in words of a half-dozen languages, all exactingly placed within a spiraling algorithm of logical extrapolation. She’d spent her brief dream not just within her own mind, but her body, cell by cell, neuron by neuron, exploring the webbed connections within and without, traveling upon the face of intersecting biological function—neurology, immunology, genetics, and ecology. Her journey was a vision of bodies and minds and the world around them, an examination of the threads that connected them all, thick and delicate alike.
“We have to get back to the others,” said the doctor, finding her words once more. “I know how to help Joanne.”
Milo looked across the unimaginable length of the great expanse, visualizing the vast graveyard in the darkness below. Now far from the deepest glowing chamber, he and Bridget had again reached the suspended rock, its heavy bulk wedged between the grooved, towering walls as it had fallen a million years before. Milo free-climbed the thirty feet of nylon ropes connecting the passageway to the rock, immune to the psychological pull of the nothingness below.
And then his headlamp fell upon Charlie, who had holed up in a sleeping bag that leaned against one of the walls in the darkness. He’d wrapped a T-shirt around his nose and mouth, his naïve protection against the pathogen. But Milo had to admit he was courageous—despite the danger, Charlie had remained by Joanne’s side, unwilling to leave her to the sickness.
Joanne was in rough shape. She’d balled herself up in a sitting position in a pool of bloody spatter and pink drool, barely conscious. Motionless, her bloodshot eyes and flushed skin radiated feverish heat from her curled body. Dried vomit collected on the dry stone and the corners of her mouth.
Charlie held up a single hand before his eyes, shielding himself from Milo’s feeble light. Bridget pounced on him without warning, grabbing his face to inspect it closely. She held his cheeks tight between her palms as her thumbs pulled down the bottoms of his eyelids. She nodded approvingly to Milo—miraculously, Charlie wasn’t infected. And yet something about Bridget’s animalistic diagnosis disturbed Milo; it appeared her medical insight was now irreparably interwoven into her intuitive, instinctual subconscious.
The doctor opened the flap to her pack, spilling out a small pile of the flightless albino locusts from the great chamber. Most had survived the perilous underwater journey and now crawled in every direction as they attempted to
escape.
Bridget crunched a single locust between her teeth before feeding the other half to Charlie. He chewed, slowly eating the insect despite his surprise. Charlie visibly brightened—the influx of protein had reactivated dormant energy reserves within his body.
Milo concentrated, preparing to make himself understood to Charlie. “Are you okay?” he said, his voice strangely deep and uneven.
Charlie squinted at him before answering. “Yeah,” he finally said after a long pause. “Lots of time to think down here, work through some shit. Seriously considered jumping off this rock after the lights went out. One last epic rush, you know? But every time I got ready to do it, I kept on coming with just one more reason not to. Like maybe seeing my dad again. Or birthdays with my little nieces and nephews. Sunrises off Baja Mexico, hang gliding in La Jolla, shit like that. Jesus Christ . . . I figured you two were never coming back. Where the fuck have you been?”
Milo tried to speak, to come up with a way to describe the demolition and reconstruction of his mind, traversing the void, DeWar, his vision of the early hominids—but couldn’t.
“Never mind,” said Charlie with a sigh. “Doesn’t matter. By the way, you guys are acting super weird right now—like you have to think about what you say really hard before you say it.”
“Talk to me about Joanne,” said Bridget. “How bad is she?”
Charlie gestured over to Joanne. “You’re seeing the worst of it now,” he said. “She’s in trouble, bad trouble. Barely moving, throwing up. Sometimes she cries a little.”
“And Dale?” asked Milo.
“He came by maybe a day ago, not that time means anything on this goddamn rock. Stuck around just long enough to gank the last of my supplies and make a run for the surface. Wouldn’t even tell me what happened to his arm. Thanks for the bugs—you guys got any more light?”
“You’re looking at it,” said Milo, pointing to his single fading headlamp. “We’re down to our last battery. It’s on the lowest setting—we have a couple of hours left, tops.”
“That’s not nearly enough to get to the surface,” groaned Charlie, squeezing the bridge of his nose in frustration. “Won’t even get us out of the anthill.”
Silence fell among the foursome as Bridget turned her attention back to Joanne, tracing a path away from the guide’s collapsed body. Spotting a small pool of dried blood, Bridget chipped it from the rock with her fingernails, rubbed it into a powder between her palms, and inhaled deeply, the red dust sucked into her nose and mouth.
“What the fuck are you doing?” demanded Charlie. “Are you insane?”
Bridget considered him with narrow, confident eyes. “It’s old blood,” she said. “Old, dead blood holding old, dead virus. My immune system will recognize the threat and develop antibodies, inoculating me against the pathogen. The Chinese protected themselves against smallpox with this method hundreds of years before the first European vaccines.”
“But how—” began Charlie. Bridget cut him off.
“I see it,” she hissed. “Turn off the light—I can’t help her—not yet. I have to wait for the immunity to gain a foothold first.”
As Milo reached up to turn off his headlamp, Bridget stared unwaveringly at Joanne, squatting and rocking on her heels as she took in every mumble, twitch, and sigh. And then the light went off, leaving Milo to count his heartbeats alone in the darkness.
Seventeen hours of darkness passed before Bridget spoke again.
“I need light,” she announced.
Milo clicked on his headlamp, the dull glow of the final battery barely reaching the edge of the suspended rock. But it was enough to illuminate the four cavers: Charlie slumped against a sheer wall, Joanne still curled in her filthy sleeping bag, Bridget crouched in wait as Milo stood over them all.
“The virus isn’t even alive, not like us,” said Bridget, her finger tracing a single crook-like pattern into the dust beneath her feet. “It’s just a single strand of loose RNA, a scrap of floating genetic code. The code gets inside cells, reprograms them to make more of the virus.”
And then she jerked her head up, looking to Joanne.
“Joanne’s temperature has skyrocketed—she’s locked in a cytokine cascade,” Bridget continued. “The fever is a feedback loop within her immune system. Her capillary walls are breaking down, bleeding her from the inside out. She’s dying.”
“What will you do?” whispered Milo.
“I have to get her fever under control first.” Bridget cocked her head as she again considered Joanne’s motionless form. “Keep it from cooking her brain from the inside out. And then I have to make sure she doesn’t bleed to death internally. If this works, she might—might—have a chance.”
Charlie spoke. “Using what? You saw it yourself—we are out of supplies, out of light, and out of time.”
“She has to fight this virus from within. All I can do is try to guide her. Charlie—I need you to build a fire.”
Charlie began to protest, only to be cut off by a disinterested wave of Bridget’s hand. He begrudgingly went to work, gathering a small pile of sodden clothes from Duck’s pack. He flicked a lighter once, twice, and then held the tiny glow to the clothes until they caught. The flames danced, adding motion and dimension to the tall chasm walls.
Bridget began to speak, her voice rising to a lilting tone. The words were familiar, flowing languages and equations, but spoken in a manner altogether more ancient, the notes resonating deep within Milo’s subconscious mind. Dizzy, he bent to his knees and covered his ears—this powerful, hypnotic meditation was not meant for him.
Slowly at first, and then faster and faster, Bridget chanted to Joanne, her body radiating heat and motion. The meditation extended first to minutes, than hours, as Bridget slipped into a standing trance-state, her eyes rolled back into her head, revealing only the whites in the flickering firelight. Bound by the words, Joanne violently flipped to her back and writhed, her muscles seizing and shaking.
And then Bridget seized Joanne by the face, heat boiling over as the doctor clasped her with one hand over heart and the other over spine, faces pressed together as Bridget sucked air from Joanne’s open mouth.
Just as quickly, Bridget dropped the cave guide and plunged her hands into the fire, sweeping them through the licking flames, cleansing herself. A pungent aroma of burning hair and skin wafted across the suspended rock as the fire slowly receded to embers.
Reeling from the seizure, Joanne shivered, half-crawling out of her sleeping bag. She whispered, asking for water.
Charlie walked to Joanne, passing a half-full canteen. She slurped it down in a single draught. Grasping the guide around the shoulders, Bridget presented the albino insects, gesturing for them to be eaten. After some convincing, Joanne finally took one into her mouth.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Milo. “That didn’t even look like medicine—it was like some kind of ritual.”
“She’s lost a lot of blood internally,” said Bridget. “And she’s not out of the woods yet. We were able to access her immune system—it will lessen the inflammatory response and reduce her fever. It should keep her out of septic shock, at least for the moment. The reduction in nausea will let her eat and drink, at least a little.”
“Why is she shivering?” asked Charlie, pointing.
“Her hypothalamus thinks she’s cold. It will constrict her capillaries, minimize further blood loss in her extremities. Joanne is still very sick, but this may give her body enough time to mount a defense, flood her system with antibodies, hopefully bring her viral load under control.”
“Incredible,” marveled Milo.
“The healers of ancient tribes—” said Bridget. “They could speak medicine directly to the mind. I can see it all, it’s all so clear. She won’t be able to move under her own power, but in a few hours we’ll be able to carry her and start traversing back to the main shaft.”
“You mean—we might be able to get out of here?” said Ch
arlie, hope entering his voice for the first time. But Milo shook his head. Charlie had spoken too soon. Within moments, the last of Milo’s fading headlamp flickered and died for the final time.
CHAPTER 40:
FIRE IN THE DARKNESS
2,475 feet below the surface
Charlie spoke first. “Now we’re all equally fucked,” he said.
Milo had to admit he wasn’t wrong. The darkness was all-consuming, almost liquid as it enveloped the four cavers in murky, impenetrable black.
“What now?” asked Milo, his voice echoing into the nothingness.
“I could get a fire going again,” said Charlie. “But we’ve just about run out of shit to burn.”
“A torch won’t get us anywhere near the surface,” said Bridget. “Joanne’s the only one who really knows what she’s doing down here. Our memories are good—hell, they’re perfect. But it’s not enough. Even a perfect mental model won’t get us out of the anthill in the dark. One stumble, one false footfall, one wrong passageway, and we’ll all end up dead at the bottom of an unmapped shaft. It took the last of our battery power to make it back.”
“We could return to the great chamber,” suggested Milo. “A torch might get us there if we moved fast enough. Down there we’d have light, heat, food. It’s enough to sustain life—at least for a while.”
Bridget shivered. “If you call that living. Even if we could find our way back, there’s nothing in the glow for us anymore. What could we do? How long could we possibly last?”
“I hate to say it, but we could be worse off,” said Charlie.
“How so?”
“At least on this rock we won’t starve to death ankle-deep in a puddle at the bottom of some unnamed tunnel. When the time comes, we can always take that long walk off a short ledge.”
“I don’t want to end up like Duck,” said Bridget with a shudder. “It was all so awful.”
“Maybe he was the lucky one. It went fast for him—painless. He probably didn’t even have time to realize how badly he fucked up.”
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