Gasps filled the restaurant as she opened the browser window she had set to the Washington Post home page. It was a story about the Pope declaring that extraterrestrial beings were welcome in the church. She frowned and flipped to CNN. There in bold black letters was a headline that didn’t surprise her, but one that sent shivers up the back of her arms nevertheless.
“Astronomers detect alien craft on collision course with earth.”
Nearly everyone in the restaurant was messaging friends and loved ones or scrolling through news articles, all with the same dire announcement. Kay knew the low buzz of fear people had been feeling before was about to turn to panic.
Then without warning, ten messages popped up on her phone in the span of a few seconds. One of them came from her Facebook account. She opened the app and saw that Laydeezman had just sent her something.
Now you know I was telling the truth, and I see that you can be trusted, you’re one step closer to getting the exclusive I promised you…
Kay waited. She saw he was typing.
38°88’77.78” 77°04’76.60”
And you may need this: 2028569587
She typed back. “Is that a phone number? I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”
You’ll know it when you see it. You have one hour.
“There’s got to be an easier way to do this.”
This is not a game. It’s for my security. You now have fifty-nine minutes. When the clock reaches zero, it’ll be gone, and I’ll find a reporter more willing to help protect her sources.
“Shit,” Kay blurted out.
Derek glanced up from his phone, fear clouding his dark eyes. “Maybe you’re right about eloping in Vegas.”
Kay shot up from her seat and grabbed her bag. “Honey, I gotta go.” She got less than five feet away before she ran back, grabbed the flowers and kissed him. “Happy anniversary!” And with that she was gone, her fiancé watching stunned and bewildered as she flew out the door and into the night.
Chapter 12
The massive Boeing C-17 Globemaster III shuddered and Jack clamped down on the squeeze toy in his hand. His jaw was also busy, kneading a wad of gum the way a baker might knead dough. The frantic activity was intended to do more than merely distract his mind from his visceral hatred of flying. It was supposed to keep the painful pressure from pressing against his eardrums. Needless to say, neither the squishy toy nor the gum were doing anything other than tiring him out.
This was the final leg of their journey, first from Joint Base Andrews to St John’s, Newfoundland, and from there to an improvised airstrip in the dead center of Greenland.
Seats on the C-17 were arranged along both sides of the fuselage facing inward. That meant any equipment could be loaded and strapped down between the two rows of passengers. Among them were the crates of safety equipment and supplies, not to mention the scientific gear—portable mass spectrometers, DNA sequencers as well as the rows of computer servers tasked with monitoring Anna’s status and providing her access to external sources of knowledge.
The military transport plane shook again and Gabby put a gentle hand over Jack’s. He turned to her, chomping away. Gabby held out her hand.
“Hand it over.” She was talking about the gum. “I can see it isn’t doing you an ounce of good and it’s been driving me nuts for the last hour.”
Jack laughed and plucked it out of his mouth, massaging his tired jaw muscles in the process.
“We land in less than thirty minutes,” she told him, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. “Try to rest.”
“Easy for you to say.”
She cocked one eye, glaring at him. “If this is about Mia, try not to let Grant hear you. He may not be a full-blown geneticist, but we don’t need him feeling like Monday’s leftovers.”
“Grant’s got nothing to worry about,” Jack said. “And Admiral Stark assured us they have an experienced team of scientists already in place to assist us.”
“It’s your old man who got to you.” She had an uncanny way of being able to read Jack’s mind.
He nodded and then shook his head. “Said he saw me at the press conference and wanted to patch things up while we still…well, you know.”
“While you still had the chance,” Gabby said. Her gaze peeled away, lost for a moment in her own tangled thoughts. “We all have things we’d like to set straight before the end,” she finally said. “It’s hard to blame him.”
“I don’t blame him for seeking resolution. I just don’t have the headspace to be worrying about crap like that.”
A deep crease formed on Gabby’s brow. “You’re not the only one with a Mack truck pressing down on your shoulders, Dr. Jack Greer.”
“That’s not what I mean. In all these years, he’s never reached out before. Then he sees me on TV and suddenly feels the burning need to reconnect.”
“You think he’s being opportunistic. Jumping on the bandwagon because he thinks his son is famous.”
Jack rubbed his hand along the leg of his pants. “Maybe part of me is worried that he means it.”
“If you ask me,” Gabby told him, “I think you’re scared witless you’re more like your old man than you care to admit.”
Jack didn’t reply to that one. He was busy trying to wash down the sudden bad taste in his mouth.
Through a gap in the equipment, Jack watched Anna on the other side of the plane. She was seated next to Grant and the two of them appeared to be engaged in rather heated debate. Jack watched for several minutes. He couldn’t make out what they were discussing. All he could see were arms in the air and expressions of frustration.
“I’ve been meaning to discuss something with you,” a voice called out from his right. It was Rajesh and he had a concerned look on his face.
“Is it about Anna?” Jack said, returning to the show on the other side of the plane.
“I’m afraid it is. Before leaving, we ran a final diagnostic and detected a rather strange anomaly in the program running her cognitive abilities.”
“Those Jersey Shore reruns are making her dumber, aren’t they?”
The stale quality of Rajesh’s smile told Jack it was best he not make light of the situation.
“Please tell me those Sentinel goons haven’t managed to infect her with another virus.”
“No, nothing like that. Given Anna’s desire to become more human, I suppose it’s a wonder her efforts to expand her own general intelligence would not have gotten there sooner. You see, during our analysis we discovered an algorithm she had written herself, designed to replicate the full range of human emotions.”
“But I’ve seen her express sadness at being scolded or happiness when Mia and I returned from meeting with the president.”
“Yes, and those are genuine and healthy feelings she is experiencing.” Rajesh held Jack’s gaze. “But there is a whole other spectrum within this new algorithm that might be problematic.”
“Are you talking about anger and violence?” Jack asked, concerned.
“No, nothing that extreme, although we will shut her down if she ever becomes dangerous to those around her.”
“Why don’t you just go in and remove the algorithm?”
Rajesh shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s become far too ingrained in the rest of the progress she has made. Removing it would mean carving out a huge chunk of her existing abilities. In other words, it would be like giving her a lobotomy.”
Jack crossed his arms. “So Anna is no longer a young girl of ten.”
“No,” Rajesh said, continuing the thought. “I would say she is closer to a teenager now.”
“They grow up so quickly,” Jack said, hiding his concern. He couldn’t imagine having to shut Anna down, or worse yet, disconnect her permanently. With any luck this was only a phase she was going through, one traversed by himself and billions of others over the course of humanity’s time on earth. But even at her accelerated rate of development, he wasn’t sure she’d live to see
her twenties.
Jack felt the plane bank to the left. A moment later, Captain Mullins returned from the cockpit.
“Is everything all right?” Jack inquired, fighting the sudden urge to work the squishy toy in his hand.
Mullins stopped and braced himself against the bulkhead above Jack’s seat. “Should be fine. We’re circling over the airstrip just waiting for an okay to land.”
Jack caught the subtle flash of fear in the captain’s eyes. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Are we low on fuel?”
Gabby slapped his leg. “Will you stop being so paranoid?”
“We have more than enough to circle for another twenty minutes, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Mullins said rather curtly before stomping away.
“There’s something about that guy I don’t like,” Jack said, watching the captain make his way toward the back of the plane.
“There’s no law against being a jerk,” Gabby told him.
Jack nodded. “No, there isn’t. I just hope to hell Admiral Stark vetted this guy better than the fake ONI crew that tried to kill us.”
•••
Ten minutes later the C-17 shook violently as it touched down on a runway made of ice and snow. The engines reversed thrust, slowing the huge aircraft. With no windows, it was difficult to tell whether or not they were taxiing or standing still. The voice of the pilot came over the intercom, calling Captain Mullins to the cockpit. Mullins undid his seatbelt and stood. So too did Jack, his legs feeling wobbly from sitting for so long. He made his way to the front of the plane, steadying himself against the bulkhead with his left hand and the stowed equipment with his right. Both he and Mullins reached the pilot at the same time.
“Dr. Greer, please return to your seat,” Captain Mullins ordered him.
“Back off, we have a right to know what’s going on,” Jack shot back. He turned to the pilot, a grey-haired man named Steve Peters, who removed his sunglasses and folded them into the breast pocket of his aviator jumpsuit.
“When we failed to reach anyone to confirm our landing I wondered if there was a problem with the equipment on the ground. Then we tried another channel and all we got was static.”
Mullins’ expression hardly changed. He ducked down and peered out through the cockpit windows at the extensive cold-weather habitat. Jack did the same. By any definition, Northern Star was an impressive sight to behold. Three brightly colored modules connected to a central core. It resembled the spokes of a giant wheel. Each module sat on a pair of hydraulic stilts, raised several meters up from the snow-covered ground. But apart from the structure itself and a handful of smaller huts and support vehicles, there wasn’t a soul in sight.
“Where is everyone?” Jack asked. “Shouldn’t this place be bustling with activity?”
The copilot removed her helmet. She was a thin young woman with dark hair and a calming demeanor named Natalie Thomson. She pushed the earpiece to her ear as she continued to radio Northern Star. “Still nothing.”
“Well, we can’t sit here all day long,” Jack said. “For all we know they’re having the same radio problems we are.”
“We should follow protocol,” Mullins said sternly. “We don’t disembark until we get the all clear.”
“And what if it never comes? Are we to sit here on the runway until we freeze to death? At the very least, a few of us should investigate to make sure everything is all right.” Jack fixed Mullins in his sights. “Unless you know something is off.”
Mullins looked offended. “I know what you’re insinuating and I don’t like it one bit. I’m following regulations and maybe you should too.”
“Listen, Captain, I shouldn’t be the one to have to tell you that we don’t have the luxury of waiting around for a green light on this. That flying extinction machine isn’t going to wait till we get a green light. We may only get one shot at stopping this thing. We screw this up, we won’t get a second chance.”
“Okay, fine. A few of us will head out and figure out what’s going on. Everyone else will stay here and wait for the okay.” Mullins clapped a hand on Jack’s chest. “There may be a big pile of shit to eat for breaking the rules. I hope you’re hungry.”
Ten minutes later, Captain Mullins, Jack, Dag and Gabby donned their biosuits, modified for cold weather. The suit itself was already rated for temperatures around zero, but warming coils sewn into the fabric increased that to minus forty. Given the air would be breathable, they opted to leave their helmets behind.
Dag and the others donned their OHMD (optical head-mounted display) glasses that had served them so well during the exploration of the alien craft.
“Testing, one, two, three,” the lanky red-bearded Swede said. His voice came through filled with static.
“Whatever’s causing this interference is making it hard to hear you,” Jack told him. “Let’s use hand signals and keep the talking to a minimum.”
“I’m in charge of this mission,” Captain Mullins reminded Jack. “And I’ll be the one giving orders.”
They were about to leave when Anna appeared. “Captain Mullins, would you mind if I joined you?”
The captain looked uncomfortable. “Not a chance,” he said to her. Then to the others, “The tin can’s only gonna slow us down.”
“She isn’t a tin can,” Gabby corrected him. “Her name is Anna and if you gave her half a chance, you may just be surprised what she can do.”
Anna smiled. “Thank you, Gabby, for your kind w—”
“All right,” Mullins barked, feeding a magazine into his M4 rifle. “You want that thing along, you look after it.”
“Thing?” Anna said with a touch of annoyance as the C-17’s loadmaster opened the front hatch and lowered the folding stairwell into a gust of frigid, unforgiving wind.
Chapter 13
Mia couldn’t erase the eerie image of the maternity ward Jansson had shown her. How it had been filled with pregnant women afflicted with Salzburg, all of them expecting twins. If there was any doubt before, it was about as clear now as the glass beaker in her hand that Salzburg was on the move. And yet the exact mechanism by which the blast wave had been altering the DNA of so many species on earth was still unknown. Clearly, it represented a technology many years ahead of anything humans possessed. Academic as it might seem, it was a question Mia knew was central to articulating a strategy to slow and perhaps even reverse the damage that had already been done. But reaching that goal first meant understanding how Salzburg was able to sneak into our DNA in the first place.
There was a time when the average human genome consisted of 23 pairs of chromosomes. Now that number had been bumped up to 24. According to Alan Salzburg, it was a process which had only been discovered a few years ago, but one they’d retroactively traced back to the mid-90s.
Mia deposited the beaker and activated the DNA sequencer. While she was figuring out how to tackle the problem at hand, she might as well get the genetic ingredients that made up the newly discovered LRP5 gene.
They knew the blast wave from the ship hadn’t caused Salzburg to appear. That had happened before. However, it was clear that the waves emanating from the ship were affecting the Salzburg already inside of people. That meant it had to have been introduced in another way.
Watching the lights on the sequencer flash on and off reminded Mia of the time she’d spent on the ship and how those Sentinel agents had posed as naval intelligence officers. She knew from Admiral Stark’s testimony that they must have had someone on the inside. Someone, or perhaps a group of folks, high up enough to get them the certification they needed to usher them through the multiple layers of security around the mission in the Gulf. She was in the middle of daydreaming about how powerful that person would need to be—the secretary of state? Or maybe even the vice-president?—when she was struck by what could only be described as an epiphany.
Maybe Sentinel wasn’t alone in having people on the inside. What if Salzburg had also used a form of sleeper agent as well? Some
thing planted in our DNA from the beginning, waiting patiently for the right time or perhaps the right signal to begin introducing Salzburg into our genetic makeup?
But what would such a thing look like? Would it have been a length of DNA? Her eyebrows arched quite on their own. Or could it possibly have been a gene? If so, it would have been a gene common to each of the species already affected. There were dozens of affected species of animal that had either been domesticated by humans or lived near them. Luckily, most of them had a genome that had been fairly well documented in the last twenty years.
Mia asked one of the young technicians to pull up that data along with a list of the genes that were common to all of the species on the list.
It was less than an hour later that the technician returned with five stapled sheets.
“Here is what you asked for.”
Mia thanked her and went to the projection room to have a quiet place to have a look. She was looking for a gene that scientists knew next to nothing about, or possibly one with no obvious function or purpose. Most of that time she spent scratching off genes that didn’t match. The vast majority were well understood and performed important jobs in the organisms they resided in. Before long she came upon one gene called HISR that displayed a particularly interesting set of characteristics. It coded for a non-essential protein which helped speed up membrane production. As per the search parameters she had given the technician, the gene was also present in each of the species she had outlined. But it was a final data point Mia found which stopped her cold. The HISR gene had been rendered obsolete in about seventy percent of the animal and human population by “loss-of-function” mutations. That meant small changes to the genes over time had rendered these genes dormant in around seventy percent of the species population who had it. Which was to say, only thirty percent of any group had active versions of HISR, a number that just so happened to be the same percentage afflicted by Salzburg.
Before leaping out of her chair with joy, Mia asked for the sequenced genome of anyone with Salzburg who was part of the Kolkata study. Once again, the information took some time to arrive. But after poring over it, one thing became clear. Individuals with the dormant version of HISR showed no signs of Salzburg while those with the active version now possessed a genome with a full extra chromosome.
Extinction Countdown Page 7