The Extinction Files Box Set

by A. G. Riddle

In the winter of 2003, Desmond spent every waking minute in the library overlooking San Francisco Bay. Yuri arrived weekly, and Desmond always had a new wrinkle to his answer to the mysterious question.

  “We walked upright. Primates don’t. Chimps. Bonobos. Gorillas. It’s more than just appearance.”

  Yuri sat quietly under the multi-level chandelier, waiting.

  Desmond continued. “Walking upright had a huge impact on our evolution. The female birth canal became narrower at the exact same time that our brains were getting larger. This obstetric dilemma had a huge impact on our offspring. We developed openings in the skull called fontanelles that essentially allow babies’ heads to compress during birth. The anterior fontanelle actually stays open for two years after birth, allowing the brain to expand further. That’s completely different from chimpanzees and bonobos. In their offspring, brain growth occurs mostly in the womb. The anterior fontanelle is closed at the time of birth. Their brain growth is already done.

  “Which is why, if you compare our babies to those of apes, the apes’ babies are far more developed. You’d have to gestate a human baby for eighteen to twenty-one months to achieve similar development at birth. Compared to other species, our offspring are born almost completely helpless. They need their parents, so those parents bond with them. As a result, we form villages, social structures to protect our young. Family units. Evolution met that biological challenge—that obstetric dilemma—with a cultural, societal solution. One that makes us human.”

  He waited, hoping, but Yuri shook his head.

  “It’s a piece, but not the key, Desmond. Dig deeper.”

  Desmond did. He read day and night. Christmas came and went. Months passed. Then New Year’s. Looking out the window, he expected to see the Golden Gate Bridge coated in snow, but it was the same shade of red he’d seen the first time he’d come here. He’d never get used to seeing the years turn without snow on the ground. San Francisco, despite its latitude, seemed to exist in a bubble. The winters were mild and the summers were dry, as if it didn’t observe the rules of nature.

  February rolled around. Valentine’s Day. It always reminded him of Peyton. He wondered if she had met someone. If she was happy. If Lin had been wrong. A part of him hoped she was. Another part hoped she wasn’t.

  The next day, Yuri sat in the library, waiting.

  “Communication,” Desmond said. “On the Beagle, they examined Neanderthal fossils. Their throats were different. They couldn’t make sounds like us. So they never developed complex language. We did.”

  “You’re getting closer.”

  Yuri walked out, and Desmond threw a book at the wall.

  Huan ran in. “Sir?”

  “Just getting my exercise, Huan.”

  “Can I get you any—”

  “No. Thank you.”

  Desmond changed in his room and rode the elevator to street level. He ran through Telegraph Hill, past Union Square, and out of the financial district. Somewhere in the Mission District, he stopped thinking about the question.

  The answer came to him not long after.

  He called Yuri the next morning. “I’ve got it.”

  “I’m on my way,” the older man said.

  Instead of sitting, as he usually did, Yuri stood, the morning light beaming in through the towering window.

  “Story,” Desmond said.

  Yuri sat.

  “Fiction. That’s what we had that they didn’t.”

  “Continue.”

  Desmond threw open a book with expedition notes from the Beagle. “This is from a place in Spain. It’s called the Cave of Altamira. These paintings were made thirty-five thousand years ago.”

  “Steppe bison,” Yuri said.

  “You’re familiar?”

  “I was there when we excavated it,” he said quietly. “But they aren’t fiction. These beasts existed at the time the artists painted them.”

  “True. Our real breakthrough was imagination—specifically the ability to imagine something that didn’t exist.” Desmond stood. “The Neanderthals had fire. They buried their dead, cared for their sick. Walked upright like us. Made stone tools. But these were mostly reactive adaptations. We imagined. In our mind’s eye, we saw things that didn’t exist. We imagined what the world would be like when they did exist.

  “You asked me about the early Australians. Why did they reach the island when the Neanderthals never had? When the Denisovans never had? Imagination. They imagined a device that would carry them across the sea. A raft maybe, perhaps a simple boat. And they created it, and sailed. They found a land with abundant calories to power those massive brains, those biological computers that rendered new realities in their minds, simulations of the future they could choose from.”

  Yuri smiled. It was a genuine gesture, unlike anything Desmond had ever seen from the older man. “Yes, Desmond.”

  “So… that’s it? What you wanted me to find?” Desmond said. “The quintessential human trait: imagination, fiction, simulation. Powered by energy our brain could use.”

  “Yes. It’s what makes us completely different from any species before us on this planet. It has been the singular key to all of our progress. And it’s part of a pattern. It points to the path of our species.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will.” Yuri stood. “When you answer one final question.”

  Desmond shook his head.

  “Patience.” Yuri took a step away. “The pieces will fit together. But first, I have something for you. A reward.”

  “What kind of reward?”

  “A trip.”

  “Where?”

  “It would seem, for you, that all roads lead back to Australia.”

  They left that night, on a private plane, chartered from SFO. They flew for seventeen hours, playing chess on the table between the plush seats, taking turns sleeping on the couch, Desmond asking questions occasionally, Yuri always brushing them off.

  To Desmond’s surprise, it was night when they landed. They had flown into the sunset, their path rotating with the Earth.

  Yuri said nothing about their destination, though the airport directories told Desmond he was in Adelaide. The last time he had walked through this terminal, Peyton had been with him, on a journey to retrace his past, hoping he found resolution. That had failed. Was Yuri trying the same thing? The outcome would be the same.

  He had been here exactly one other time—as a child, on the day he left Australia for America. Another woman he loved had held his hand that day: Charlotte, towering tall above him, her smile the only light in the darkness of his life.

  That darkness had never truly ended. And as he followed Yuri through the airport, he wondered if it ever would. If he was on a fool’s errand. If there were truly answers here. But Lin Shaw had assured him that he could be with Peyton. That was all he wanted. That was enough for him to follow Yuri’s road, wherever it led.

  A car was waiting outside the airport. The drivers were professionals—dark suits, bulges under the armpits. Desmond was surprised, but he sat in the back and said nothing. They stopped in the country, outside a cemetery in a small town Desmond knew well. A drizzling rain had begun, and the sun was rising over the hills as they stepped out and weaved through the grave markers, Yuri carrying an item covered in a black trash bag.

  “Do you know what today is?” Yuri whispered.

  Desmond realized instantly. “The anniversary. Twenty years since the bushfires.” The fires that had killed his family—and changed his life.

  Yuri’s pace slowed, and he pulled the black bag off the item he carried, revealing a wreath. He handed it to Desmond as they came to a stop.

  Desmond stood there a long moment, the heat of the sun warming his face, a summer breeze blowing past him. He stooped, placed the wreath on the grave marker, and read the names. Alistair Anderson Hughes. 16 February 1983. Elizabeth Bancroft Hughes. 16 February 1983.

  “Look closely,” Yuri whispered. “For what you d
on’t see.”

  Desmond glanced back at Yuri, studied the man’s impassive face, then focused on the grave markers. There were two, where he expected to see three: larger ones for his parents and a small one for his infant brother. “Conner,” he whispered.

  He looked back at Yuri. “He’s buried elsewhere?”

  “That would be an assumption. We don’t make assumptions. We form hypotheses. And test them.”

  “Two possibilities,” Desmond said. “He’s buried elsewhere—or he isn’t buried at all.”

  “Correct.”

  Desmond rose. “What do you know, Yuri?”

  Yuri turned and walked back toward the car, the sun on his back. It took every ounce of will Desmond possessed not to run and tackle the man and hold him down until he revealed exactly what had happened to Conner. The two gun-wielding men looming at the car were only a minor deterrent; Desmond would have fought an entire army for the answer. But he knew Yuri would never yield under force. He was made of the same stuff as Desmond: strength forged in fire.

  They rode back to Adelaide in silence, to a hotel in the City Center area. Desmond’s suite was large, with a living room and a desk with a laptop and internet access.

  “Answer one more question,” Yuri said, “and you’ll be a member of the Citium. And I’ll help you discover what happened to Conner.”

  Desmond knew this wasn’t a negotiation, that Yuri wasn’t making an offer. These were his terms. He sat at the desk. “The library is back in San Francisco.”

  “You won’t need it for this question. Just the internet. And your intelligence. The answer to this final riddle is in plain sight, though few see it.”

  Desmond took a pen and pad from the desk.

  “In July of 1405,” Yuri began, “a Chinese fleet under the command of Zheng He departed from Suzhou for a tour around the Pacific Ocean. The scale of the expedition was massive. Over three hundred ships, almost twenty-eight thousand crewmen, mostly military. They visited much of Southeast Asia, including Brunei, Java, and Thailand. They stopped in India, the Horn of Africa, and Arabia.

  “China in 1405 was home to sixty-five million people. England had only two million. China was the largest economy in the world at that time. India was second. And the Chinese fleets were much more advanced than those of any European power. Their largest ship was four hundred feet long and had a four-tiered deck. By comparison, Christopher Columbus’s largest ship, the Santa María, was roughly fifty-eight feet long.

  “In 1400, if you were asked to guess which nation would colonize Australia, you probably wouldn’t have looked to Western Europe. Yet it was the Dutch who landed there first—in 1606. And Britain who established the first colony—in 1788. Why? It’s not an isolated incident. Western European nations came to dominate the world—economically, militarily, and culturally. Why? What made the British and Spanish explorers so different?”

  Chapter 25

  Conner returned to the hidden room in Lin Shaw’s home with a duffel bag and carefully placed the items inside it. His instincts told him that the pictures, and especially the map, could be useful at some point. They might even hold the key to understanding the motive behind Lin’s betrayal.

  A voice came over the comm. “Zero. Unit two. We’ve got incoming X1 troops. They’re evacuating the homes along Santa Cruz.”

  Conner raced to the living room. Through the bay window, he saw that the wildfire had grown, and was expanding by the minute.

  “Status?” he whispered, nearly paralyzed.

  “Sir?”

  “The fire!” he roared. “You idiots. What is the status of that bloody fire you set?”

  A pause. “We did a drone flyover ten minutes—”

  “Status!”

  “It’s contained south of Sand Hill. They’ve set up a firewall around Stanford.”

  “We’re not at Stanford, are we?”

  “No, sir. North of Sand Hill, the fire is rolling through the neighborhoods. It’s too big to stop.”

  Conner froze. “How long until it reaches us?”

  “Twenty minutes. Maybe a little more or less.”

  Conner raced back to the garage. Dr. Park was still sitting in the van with the rear doors open. A screen displayed Desmond’s brain wave patterns.

  Park had apparently been listening to the radio exchange, and anticipated Conner’s question. He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Doctor.”

  “It’ll be close.”

  “How close?”

  “Minutes. I’d say it’s fifty-fifty we get out before the fire.”

  Conner wanted to retreat then and there. But he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. He looked at his brother lying on the hospital bed. He was helpless, at the mercy of the coming fire, just as Conner had been a long time ago.

  Desmond had tried to save him that day. He had failed, but he had saved Conner twenty years later. Conner now had to do the same for his older brother—and the memories buried in the Labyrinth were his only hope of that.

  He activated his comm. “Units two, three, and four. Fall back to West Atherton. Take up covered positions. Unit one, converge on my position and prepare to leave. And stay out of sight.”

  Ten minutes later, the temperature was rising in the home. Conner sat in the garage, sweating, focusing on his breathing, trying not to imagine the inferno marching toward him.

  To his surprise, a knock sounded on the front door.

  Desmond didn’t wait on Yuri to find Conner. In Australia, he hired the country’s best private detective to research what had happened to his brother after the fire. Then he hired the second best. Again and again, they hit dead ends. They requested money for lawyers to get public records, specialists to advise, but they made little progress. He pressed them harder.

  When he wasn’t searching for Conner, he pondered Yuri’s final riddle. At the heart of the question was how the world had come to be the way it was. Specifically, why had Great Britain colonized Australia instead of Russia, or China, Japan, or India? All were substantial powers in 1606 when the Dutch landed in Australia, yet none of the Asian nations had found the island continent. It was also Western Europe who colonized the Americas and the Pacific Islands, spreading their language and culture, and with it their system of laws and economic principles. Why?

  Desmond began with an obvious difference: religion. But when he presented his theory, Yuri simply shook his head. “This isn’t about religion.”

  Desmond dug deeper. He compared the geography and climate. Then he realized the key to this mystery might be found in the answer to the previous mystery. The human race had bested its competitors—the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and floresiensis—because it thought differently. How had the British, Spanish, and Dutch thought differently?

  The answer became clear immediately.

  Yuri sat in Desmond’s hotel room with his legs crossed and his hands in his lap. Desmond stood before the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the green expanse of trees and grass and walking trails that made up Victoria Park.

  “Capitalism,” Desmond said. “It powered the West—incentivized exploration, exploitation even.”

  Yuri nodded. “It’s half of the answer.”

  Desmond didn’t have the other half.

  When Yuri left, Desmond grabbed the lamp from the desk table, held it up to throw it at the door, but stopped at the last second. He wanted to have a drink.

  Instead he went for a walk. He was learning more than the facts Yuri had led him to. He was learning patience. And discipline.

  His phone rang. A thrill went through him when he heard the private investigator’s voice. The man’s name was Arlo, and the New Zealander spoke with a thick accent and gruff voice. “Think I got something, Desy.”

  They sat in a coffee shop off Grenfell Street, the steamers screeching in the background. Patrons with dogs crowded the small cafe, staring at laptops and paperback novels and, nonchalantly, each other.

  The shaggy-haired man laid a manila envel
ope on the round table and drew out a series of photocopies of handwritten notes on hospital forms. Intake details. Surgeries. Medications. The name on the forms was “Joe Bloggs”—the Australian equivalent of John Doe. Age estimated at twelve months.

  “Two days after the fire, a couple rescue workers came round to your old homestead, takin’ a survey an’ all that. Found this little guy under a flipped-over refrigerator of all places. Burned remains of a woman next to it—”

  “Please be quiet,” Desmond whispered.

  He read the hospital notes, each word a dagger cutting through his heart. The urge to get up and walk away was nearly irresistible, but it was second to his desire to read more and learn the truth.

  The ER doctor who had admitted the infant had placed him in the pediatric intensive care unit. Their primary concerns were noted: Severe dehydration. Third-degree burns on 40% of his body. Two instances of fourth-degree burns: right thigh and right triceps.

  Desmond stared at the final words: Prognosis poor.

  The care team administered fluids. Removed dead tissue. Dressed the wounds. Tried to get his weight back up.

  On the fourth day, the attending’s notes turned more positive. Still critical, but stable. Responsive to treatment.

  They moved him to Adelaide Children’s Hospital, where he convalesced for two months. He cried constantly when conscious. They sedated him and did their best to heal the burn marks across his face and body. The charge nurse’s words rang off the page: It’s both a blessing and a curse that he’s so young. At least he won’t remember the horror of his wounds.

  Arlo was getting antsy. “Oy,” he called to the barista. “’Bout an Irish coffee?”

  She muttered something Desmond couldn’t make out.

  Arlo leaned forward. “’E was a fighter, Desy.”

  Desmond turned the last page, which noted that the patient had been remanded to an orphanage outside the city.

  “Where is he now?”

  Arlo sat back. “Don’t know.”