by A. G. Riddle
“What happened?” Harvey asked.
Nigel was lost in thought. Was the case reacting to the radiation? Was it some kind of signal, like guiding lights flashing in the night? Or an SOS, a proverbial tap-tap-tap with subatomic particles?
Nigel was a nuclear engineer—he focused primarily on nuclear power systems, though he had worked with nuclear warheads a bit in the eighties and on the nuclear power systems on submarines in the nineties. Particle physics was way outside his wheelhouse. A part of him wanted to call in another expert, someone with a background in particle physics, but something made him hesitate.
“Harvey, let’s alter the radiation regimen. Let’s see what the case does.”
An hour later, Nigel finished his third Coke and began pacing the floor. The latest group of particles the box had emitted could be tachyons. Tachyons were theoretical, mostly because they could move faster than light, which isn’t possible according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity. The particles could also conceivably make time travel possible.
“Harvey, let’s try a new regimen.”
Nigel began programming the computer while Harvey manipulated the joystick and the robotic arm. The young man was surprisingly good at it. Maybe video games, and youth in general, are good for something, Nigel thought.
Nigel finished programming the radiation protocol into the computer and watched as the device spun up inside the clean room. Nigel had a theory: Perhaps the case manipulated Chameleon particles—a postulated scalar particle candidate that had a mass that depended on its environment. Chameleon particles would have a small mass in space and large mass in terrestrial environments, making them detectable. If it was true, Nigel could be on the verge of discovering the basis of dark energy and dark matter and even the force behind cosmic inflation.
But Chameleon particles were only half his theory. The other half was that the case was a communications device—that it was simply guiding them, telling them what types of particles it needed to do whatever it was going to do. The case was asking for specific subatomic particles. But why did it need them? Were they “ingredients” to build something, or a combination to unlock it? Nigel believed they had found the key, the radiation regimen the case needed. Maybe it was a sort of Atlantean IQ test, a challenge. It made sense. Math was the language of the universe and subatomic particles were the proverbial writing stone, a kind of cosmic papyrus. What was the box trying to say?
The computer screen lit up. Massive output—neutrinos, quarks, gravitons, and particles that didn’t even register.
Nigel looked through the window. The case was changing. The shiny silver exterior turned dull, then tiny pits popped up. It was as if the polished surface was turning to sand. Then the grains of sand shook in place briefly before sliding to the center, where a vortex formed.
The dark vortex was eating the case from the inside out. Then the case collapsed completely and the room filled with light.
The building exploded in a flash of white light that instantly consumed the six office towers around it before spreading out for miles around, pushing down trees and scorching the earth. Then the light instantly receded, collapsing back to the point where it began.
The night was dark and still for a moment, then a tiny thread of light floated up from the ground, like a phosphorescent string, swaying in the wind as it rose. Tendrils sprouted from the thread of light and linked with other threads until they became a mesh, and the mesh weaved so tightly it became a solid wall of light, arched at the top and about twice as tall as a normal door. The gateway of light shimmered silently, waiting.
CHAPTER 21
The Church of St. Mary of Incarnation
Marbella, Spain
Kate perched on the edge of the cast-iron tub in the bathroom, waiting for the hair dye to soak in.
Martin had insisted on overseeing the operation, as if Kate might try to skip out on the dye job. Knowing the whole world was after her was a strange, yet compelling, motivation to alter her appearance. However… the logical, ultra-rational part of her mind screamed out: If the whole world is looking for you, dyeing your hair won’t save you. Then again, it wasn’t like she had anything else to do, and it couldn’t hurt her either. She twisted a strand of her now-brown hair between her fingers, wondering if the transformation was complete yet.
Martin sat across from her on the tile floor, legs straight out, his back against the solid wood door of the bathroom. He typed away on the computer, occasionally pausing to contemplate something. Kate wondered what he was doing, but she let that go for the time being.
Other questions circled in her mind. She wasn’t sure where to start, but one thing Martin had said still bothered her: the plague had infected over a billion within twenty-four hours. That was hard for her to believe—especially given that Martin and his collaborators had been secretly preparing for the outbreak for decades.
She cleared her throat. “A billion infected within twenty-four hours?”
“Mm-hm,” Martin murmured without looking up from the laptop.
“That’s impossible. No pathogen moves that fast.”
He glanced up at her. “It’s true. But I haven’t lied to you, Kate. You’re right: no known pathogen moves that fast. This plague is something different. Listen, I’ll tell you everything, but I want to wait until you’re safe.”
“My safety isn’t my biggest concern. I want to know what’s really going on, and I want to do something. Tell me what you’re hiding. I’ll find out eventually. Let me at least hear it from you.”
Martin paused for a long moment, then closed the laptop and exhaled. “All right. The first thing you should know is that the Atlantis Plague is more complicated than we thought. We’re just now understanding the mechanism of action. The biggest mystery has been the Bell.”
The mention of the Bell sent a shiver of fear through Kate. The Immari had discovered the Bell in Gibraltar in 1918. The mysterious device was attached to the Atlantis structure Kate’s father had helped the Immari excavate. The moment the Bell was uncovered, it had unleashed the Spanish flu on the world—the most deadly pandemic in modern history. The Immari had eventually dug around the Bell and removed it so that they could study it. Dorian Sloane, the head of Immari Security, had used bodies of recent Bell victims to seed the world with the Atlantis Plague, recreating the outbreak in an attempt to identify anyone with genetic resistance to the Bell. His end goal was to create an army to attack the Atlanteans who had created the Bell.
“I thought you knew how the Bell worked, the genes it affected,” Kate said.
“We thought so too. We made two critical mistakes. The first was that our sample size was too small. The second was that we were studying bodies with direct contact with the Bell, never re-transmission. The Bell itself doesn’t emit an infectious agent: there’s no virus or bacteria. It emits radiation. Our working theory has been that the Bell radiation causes a mutation in an endogenous retrovirus, essentially reactivating an ancient virus that then transforms the host by manipulating a set of genes and epigenetic tags. We believe this ancient virus is the key to everything.”
Kate held her hand up. She needed to process. Martin’s theory, if true, was incredible. It indicated a completely new kind of pathogen and even a new pathogenesis—radioactive, then viral. Was it possible?
Retroviruses are simply viruses that can insert DNA into a host’s genome, changing the host at a genetic level. They’re a sort of “computer software update.” When a person contracts a retrovirus, they are essentially receiving a DNA injection that changes the genome in some of their cells. Depending on the nature of the DNA inserted, getting a virus could be good, bad, or benign, and since every person’s genome is different, the result is almost always uncertain.
Retroviruses exist for one purpose: to replicate, to produce more of their own DNA. And they are good at it. In fact, viruses make up the majority of all the genetic material on the planet. If one added together all the DNA from humans, every o
ther animal, and every single plant—every non-viral life form on the planet—that sum total of DNA would still be less than all the viral DNA on Earth.
Viruses didn’t evolve to harm their hosts—in fact they depend on a living host to replicate, and that’s exactly what they do: find a suitable host and live there, replicating benignly, until the host dies of natural causes. These reservoir hosts, as scientists refer to them, essentially carry a virus without any symptoms. For example, ticks carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever; field mice, hantavirus; mosquitoes, malaria, West Nile virus, Yellow fever and Dengue fever; black rats, bubonic plague; pigs and chickens, flu.
Humans are actually reservoir hosts for countless bacteria and viruses that haven’t even been classified yet. About twenty percent of the genetic information in the nose doesn’t match any known or cataloged organism. In the gut, forty to fifty percent of all the DNA is from bacteria and viruses that have never been classified. Even in the blood, up to two percent is a sort of “biological dark matter.” In many ways, this biological dark matter, this sea of unknown viruses and bacteria, is the ultimate frontier.
Almost all viruses are harmless until they jump to another host—a life form different from their natural hosts. The virus then combines with a completely new genome and causes a new and unexpected reaction—an illness.
That was the ultimate danger with viruses, but Martin wasn’t talking about these infectious viruses that entered a human body from the outside; he was describing the activation of a past infection, a dormant set of viral DNA that originated inside the human body, buried inside the genome. It was like contracting an infectious virus from oneself—a sort of DNA Trojan horse that activated and began to wreak havoc on the body.
These human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs), as they are known, are essentially “viral fossils”—the remnants of past infections that changed the host genome, were integrated with the DNA of the host’s sperm, and were transmitted to future generations. Scientists had recently discovered that up to eight percent of the entire human genome was composed of endogenous retroviruses. These fossil records of past viral infections also appear in our closest genetic relatives, living and dead: chimpanzees, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. They had been infected with many of the same viruses we had.
Kate turned the idea over in her mind. Endogenous retroviruses had been considered inert and essentially part of a large group of “junk DNA” in everyone’s genome. These retroviruses were not infectious, but they did influence gene expression and were passed on to future generations. Scientists had recently begun to consider the possibility that endogenous retroviruses could play a role in autoimmune diseases such as lupus, multiple sclerosis, Sjögren’s syndrome, even cancer. If the virus behind the Atlantis Plague was an endogenous retrovirus, it would mean…
“You’re saying the entire human race is already infected. That we were infected the day we were born—that the virus behind the Atlantis Plague is already part of our DNA.” She paused. “The Bell and the bodies from it only activated a dormant virus.”
“Exactly. We believe the viral components of the Atlantis Plague were added to the human genome tens of thousands of years ago.”
“You think this is intentional—that someone or something planted the endogenous virus—the Atlantis Plague—knowing it would be activated some day?” Kate asked.
“Yes. I believe the Atlantis Plague has been planned for a very long time. I think the Bell is simply an activation mechanism for a final transformation of the human race.”
“Why didn’t the transformation happen in 1918, with the first outbreak from the Bell? Spanish flu?”
“Because the human genome wasn’t ready then. As I said at the hospital, the human race is changing at an increasing rate, especially our brain wiring—that’s the real difference. The Atlantis Plague has one target: brain wiring. Depending on the host, the wiring either gets scrambled or arranged for some task. We believe that the human race has reached some sort of genetic tipping point—the human genome is finally ready for the planned final transformation. You’ve seen the survivors—they are the result. Some rapidly evolve, some devolve. What we don’t know is which one is the desired outcome. Are the Atlanteans trying to cause another Great Leap Forward—a final leap forward—or is it a great leap backward, a regression to a point before the introduction of the Atlantis Gene?”
“Have you isolated the virus behind the plague?”
“No, and that’s exactly what’s holding us up. We actually think there could be two endogenous retroviruses at work, like a viral war going on in the body. These two viruses are fighting to control the Atlantis Gene, possibly to change it permanently. In ninety percent of the infected, this viral war overwhelms the immune system and causes death.”
“Like the Spanish flu did in 1919.”
“Precisely. And that’s what we had anticipated—a traditional biological outbreak, transmitted in common ways: bodily fluids, airborne, et cetera. That’s what we prepared for.”
“Prepared how?”
“There’s a group of us—government employees and scientists mostly. Over the past twenty years, we’ve worked on a cure, in secret.”
Comprehension dawned on Kate. “Orchid,” she whispered.
“Orchid was our ultimate weapon against the plague—a cutting edge therapy modeled on the cure for HIV.”
“The cure for HIV?”
“Yes. In 2007, a man named Timothy Ray Brown, known later as the Berlin patient, was cured of HIV. Brown was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. His HIV-positive status complicated his treatment. During chemotherapy he battled sepsis, and his physicians had to explore less traditional approaches. His hematologist, Dr. Gero Hutter, of the Charite Hospital in Berlin, decided on a stem cell therapy: a full bone marrow transplant. Hutter actually passed over the matched bone marrow donor for a donor with a specific genetic mutation: CCR5-Delta 32. CCR5-Delta 32 makes cells immune to HIV.”
“Incredible.”
“Yes. At first we thought the Delta 32 mutation must have arisen during the Black Death in Europe—about four to sixteen percent of Europeans have at least one copy. But we’ve traced it back further. We thought perhaps smallpox, but we’ve found Bronze Age DNA samples that carry it. The mutation’s origins are a mystery, but one thing is certain: the bone marrow transplant with CCR5-Delta 32 cured both Brown’s leukemia and HIV. After the transplant, he stopped taking his antiretrovirals and has never again tested positive for HIV gain.”
“And it helped with Orchid research?” Kate asked.
“It was a huge breakthrough, opening up all sorts of research avenues. CCR5-Delta 32 actually protects carriers not only from HIV, but smallpox and even Y. Pestis—the bacteria that causes plague. We focused on it. Of course, we didn’t fully appreciate the complexity of the Atlantis Plague at the time, but we developed Orchid to a point where it stopped the symptoms. It was nowhere near ready for release when the outbreak occurred. It doesn’t fully cure the disease, but we had no choice. There was some element of the plague we couldn’t isolate. Another factor. But… we thought we could use Orchid. Containment became our goal. If we could contain the infected and suppress the symptoms, we could stop it, buy ourselves some time until we could isolate the endogenous retroviruses that caused the plague and manipulated the Atlantis Gene—the true source. That’s why… your work was so… intriguing.”
“I still don’t understand the transmission rate—radiation?”
“We didn’t either at first. In the first hours of the outbreak, something unexpected happened. The plague blew through every quarantine and containment protocol we threw at it. Kate, it was like wildfire, like nothing we had ever seen. Infected individuals, even in containment, could infect others over three hundred yards away from them.”
“Impossible.”
“We initially believed that we had problems with our quarantine procedures, but it was happening worldwide.”
“How?” Kate asked.
> “A mutation. Someone somewhere had an endogenous retrovirus, another ancient virus, buried in their genome. When it was activated, the whole world fell in hours. A billion people were infected inside twenty-four hours. As I said, our sample size was too small to find it; there was no way to know about this other endogenous retrovirus. In fact, we’re still looking for it.”
“I don’t understand how it could affect the transmission rate.”
“It took us weeks to figure that out. All our containment protocols—around the world—decades of planning, it all broke down in those first days. The Atlantis Plague couldn’t be stopped. Every time it entered a nation it exploded across the population. What we discovered we never would have imagined. The infected were actually putting out new radiation, not simply carrying radiation from the Bell in their tissues. We believe that the second endogenous retrovirus actually turns on genes that cause the body to change the radiation it emits.”
Kate tried to process what she was hearing. Every human body emitted radiation, but it was like noise, static, the subatomic equivalent of sweating.
Martin continued. “Every activated person becomes a radiation beacon, activating, infecting everyone around them—even if they’re in bio-containment tents. A person standing a mile from you with no person-to-person contact could infect you. There were no protocols for anything like it. That’s why governments around the world accepted universal infection—they couldn’t stop it. The focus became controlling the population so that the Immari and the survivors didn’t take over the world. They began building Orchid Districts and herding the surviving population inside them.”
Kate thought about the lead-encased building where she had done the experiments. “That’s why you used lead sheeting on the building—to stop the radiation.”
Martin nodded. “We were worried about another mutation. Frankly, we’re out of our element here. We’re talking about quantum biology: subatomic particles manipulating the human genome. The intersection of biology and physics. It’s way beyond our current understanding of either physics or biology. We’re just scratching the surface of what’s known. We’re way behind the game, but we’ve learned a lot in the past three months. We knew you and the boys were immune to the plague because you survived in China. We’re trying to isolate the retrovirus that causes the radiation. The ultimate fear was that radiation from the trial participants—from a new mutation—could leak into the camp and compromise the effectiveness of Orchid. If that happened, there would be nothing standing in the way of the plague. Orchid’s efficacy is slipping, but we need it; we need a little more time. I think we’re close to a cure. There’s one last piece. I thought it was here in southern Spain, but I was wrong… about a few things.”