The Extinction Files Box Set

by A. G. Riddle

  Lin led their group up the paved walkway toward the cave mouth as the last rays of sunlight retreated over the hills. The entrance to the cave was rectangular and framed with timbers, like an open doorway into a grassy hill. Large mature trees towered on both sides.

  Inside, they flicked on their lanterns. The two SEALs were the only guards they had brought with them. Their defensive plan relied entirely on the troops surrounding the entrance and visitor center.

  The temperature dropped quickly as they ventured deeper into the cave. The narrow passageway soon opened into a large chamber with a long glass case that held stones and informational cards. There was a small alleyway to the right, another vast chamber to the left, and two large openings dead ahead. One wall held colorful silhouettes of handprints in red and black, as if the Altamirans were waving at them across thousands of years. Other walls held paintings of what looked like horses, goats, and wild boars. On the ceiling was a large mural of a herd of steppe bison.

  Peyton found the art breathtaking, almost otherworldly. The others also appeared to be transfixed—except for Lin, who had set her lantern on the long glass case and taken the book from her pack. Peyton was a little worried about the moisture in the cave affecting the rare tome, but with the fate of humanity on the line, she decided to let it slide.

  “Now then,” Lin said. “Peyton found the map to Altamira at the start of chapter one. I think the symmetry of our expedition and the story is lost on none of us. Alice follows the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole, landing herself in a large room with many doors. Those doors are either too large or too small. She grows and shrinks, in both cases too much so to fit through the doors and passageways. Altamira has over a thousand meters of known tunnels, and they indeed shrink and expand. The going ahead will likely be difficult.”

  “You’ve been here before?” Peyton asked.

  Lin didn’t look up. “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “A long time ago.” Peyton sensed that her mother was eager to avoid further questions.

  Lin gently turned the pages to the sheet of trace paper at the start of the second chapter. She peeled it back, revealing the illustration beneath.

  The title below the illustration read, THE POOL OF TEARS. The first line of the text read, “Curiouser and curiouser!”

  Lin had acquired a map of the cave’s tunnels in the visitor center. She pulled it out now and placed the trace paper over it. “As I thought,” she said. “It’s another map.”

  She led them to the back of the room, where an alcove branched to the left and a wide passageway lay to the right. They took the passage, and kept left at a fork. The walls and ceiling were adorned with more paintings, animals in flocks and some alone. They had walked about three hundred feet when Lin stopped and studied the trace paper atop the map.

  “It’s close.”

  She held her lantern up and searched, walking slowly. She eyed a narrow opening in the wall. “Through here.”

  They had to stoop and then crawl. The rock grew damper the farther they traveled. Suddenly, the tunnel opened into an irregular-shaped chamber, like a skewed pentagon.

  “Dead end,” Nigel muttered.

  Lin walked along the perimeter of the room. “Doubtful.”

  “In the book,” Avery said, “Alice grows tall and hits her head on the ceiling. Her tears pool, and when she shrinks, she swims out.”

  Peyton studied her, surprised.

  Avery shrugged. “My dad used to read it to me.”

  “Cute,” Nigel said. “What does it mean?”

  Lin had stopped at a small indentation in the stone wall. “Bring a canteen.”

  Adams stepped over to her, canteen uncapped and held out.

  Peyton peered around him. In the lantern’s dim light, she saw Lin reach into a ledge and grab a small object. A figurine of a mouse.

  “Alice meets a mouse as she swims through her own tears,” Avery said.

  Lin nodded absently and tipped the canteen slightly, pouring water into the crevice where she had found the mouse. She paused every few seconds and listened. Peyton listened too, hearing only water trickling beyond and dripping. But after the seventh time Lin stopped pouring, a click sounded beyond the stone wall.

  Peyton understood then: the crevice must lead to a tank that, when filled, activated a mechanism that unlocked the hidden door.

  Lin pushed against the wall. It gave, revealing a hidden room beyond.

  Chapter 29

  Conner peered through the peephole in the front door. X1 soldiers stood outside, two on the stoop, two others cupping hands at their temples and gazing through the bay window.

  The man on the stoop activated his radio. “One forty-five is empty.”

  They walked across the lawn to the next home. They were simply evacuating the street, clearing residents in the path of the fire.

  Conner exhaled. He would have to wait for the troops to move on—and for Desmond’s memory to complete. But they were safe for now.

  Yuri was waiting in the hotel when Desmond arrived, sitting in an armchair by the floor-to-ceiling windows. Desmond sat in the other chair, ignoring the fact that he was soaking with sweat from his morning run.

  “I see it, Yuri. All of it. I know what it means.”

  As usual, the older man’s voice was emotionless. “Start at the beginning, Desmond. It’s important. This is your final test.”

  “Test before what?” Desmond wanted to hear him say it.

  “Admission to the Citium. And the things you want.”

  “The things you promised me? Peyton. My brother.”

  “Yes.”

  Desmond stood. He felt like a PhD student defending his thesis. In many ways, that’s what Yuri’s bizarre training had been like: grad school for some master of the universe course.

  “Western Europe took over the world five hundred years ago. They had an advantage none of the rest of the world understood. They had you, Yuri.”

  “I’m old, but I’m not that old.”

  “Not you per se—but people like you. The Citium. Scientists. Thinkers.”

  “Start at the beginning, Desmond.”

  “All right.” He took a moment, gathered his thoughts. “There have been three pivotal events in human history. These… anomalies created the world we live in. Your three questions—their purpose was for me to find these events and understand them. And I know why. Because they are the key to understanding the future—what’s going to happen to the entire human race.”

  Yuri nodded. “Go on.”

  “The first event occurred somewhere between seventy and forty-five thousand years ago. Somewhere on Earth, a human developed a new ability. A cognitive breakthrough. They possessed a mind that thought differently. That human had the ability to imagine something that didn’t already exist. Our predecessors created tools, but those were mostly reactive, incremental steps that were almost obvious. This event signified the birth of fiction—a mind that could literally simulate a reality that didn’t exist. A reality radically different from the human’s own. This human could render possible futures, imagine what life would be like if something existed. That was the transcendental mutation.”

  “Evidence?”

  Desmond smiled. “All roads lead to Australia. That’s what your first question was about: concrete evidence, perhaps our earliest, of a human imagining a fictive future and making it a reality. Not just painting it on a cave wall. Somewhere in South Asia, roughly fifty thousand years ago, a prehistoric human, whose name we will never know, stood on a beach, stared at the ocean, and imagined something they had never seen before, a device that had never before existed on Earth: a boat. An invention that would carry their people to a land they had never seen, a place they didn’t know for a fact was even there. We know only that this person did in fact build that boat or raft and crossed vast expanses of open sea with their people. And they landed here, in Australia, becoming the first human to ever set foot on this continent.

 
; “The reward was unimaginable. Big game. An endless buffet of animals that were attuned to their environment, but were completely unprepared for the invaders. And that’s the irony of these intrepid Australians—the original colonists of this continent. They missed the second revolution: agriculture. They feasted on the megafauna, contributed to the Quaternary extinction event the Beagle found evidence of. But when the food was gone, their populations stayed small. Fragmented, each tribe adapting to its environment. They plateaued. When the next invaders arrived, fifty thousand years later, they were the prey.”

  “Why?”

  “Agriculture, and the cities it brought with it, brought further changes to human brains, and especially culture. Beginning twelve thousand years ago, for the first time in history, our ancestors planted roots, literally and figuratively. Instead of chasing game and gathering their sustenance, never knowing where their next meal would come from, we had a sustainable source of calories, renewable and controllable.”

  “Consequences?” Yuri asked.

  “Massive. Human society saw its biggest change in history. Up until this point, all of our ancestors had been tribal. Small groups, mostly migratory. We were at the mercy of our food supply. Every human on Earth coasted on fumes, literally chasing our next meal to feed our over-sized brains.

  “But those enormous brains should never have existed. They’re a mystery, a biological anomaly.”

  “Explain.”

  “The human brain uses way too much of the caloric energy a human takes in. For millions of years, the brain would have been an evolutionary disadvantage—that is, up until this transcendental mutation, the advent of imagination, came about. Imagination, fictive simulation, is what propelled our species across the planet—literally—and enabled us to conquer it. But for thousands of years after we developed fictive simulation, we were still struggling to survive—and to power the massive resource hog.”

  Yuri raised his eyebrows. “Resource hog?”

  “In the extreme. Consider this. Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. Life, in some form, has existed for 3.8 billion years—beginning with single-cell prokaryotic life, bacteria perhaps. Since then, the history of life on this planet has been a series of fits and starts—a biological roulette wheel testing combinations that would ultimately arrive at this device, the human brain, a biological computer, something that by the laws of nature shouldn’t exist. The human brain consumes twenty percent of the calories we ingest, but it accounts for only two percent of our weight. No species in the history of the planet has ever dedicated so much of the calories they consume to their brains.

  “But the advantage it provided was unimaginable. We are the first species to ever command the planet, to imagine what it could be and reshape it based on the images in our minds.

  “And it was agriculture that enabled this intellectual revolution to scale up. Grain and livestock provided a renewable, sustainable source of power for our biological computers. Cities networked them together, enabled minds to share ideas and focus on innovation like never before. And this revolution—the advent of cities—came with consequences, some bad, but some very, very good. Before agriculture, our ancestors had never organized themselves in permanent, high-density settlements. The formation of cities resulted in a concentration of brainpower. It’s like…”

  Desmond grasped for an analogy and found one from his own past. “It’s like the personal computer. In the eighties, they got more powerful all the time. But they were isolated. They sat in our homes, running programs and games, but their data stayed local. That changed when local area networks became ubiquitous. The servers stored data, clients ran productivity programs, and workers could collaborate and share ideas. Efficiency went up. The speed of commerce accelerated.”

  Yuri stood to join Desmond at the window, smiling. Desmond was filled with energy. He felt that he was on the cusp of a breakthrough. Here, in the place where his life had disintegrated, he sensed that he was on the verge of making a discovery that would help him put it back together. Peyton. His brother. His own limitations.

  “The third seminal event that turned the history of humanity was another cognitive revolution. A new kind of software for operating the human mind. You asked how the Western Europeans were different from the rest of the world. Why the Spanish conquered Central and South America. Why the British flag flew across the world. The examples are incredible. In 1519, Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico with no more than 550 men. Within two years, he had defeated the Aztec empire, which had almost five million inhabitants. The Aztecs’ capital, Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, had over two hundred thousand residents, roughly the same size as Europe’s two largest cities: Paris and Naples. In the war, the Spanish and their allies lost a thousand men. The Aztecs, over two hundred thousand.

  “Pizarro conquered the Incan empire with even fewer soldiers—168.

  “The British in India were even more remarkable. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, India had over three hundred million inhabitants, yet the British ruled it with about five thousand officials and less than seventy thousand soldiers. Remarkable.”

  Desmond sat back down. “The key to this success? People like you, Yuri. Individuals dedicated to science.”

  “The Chinese and Indians had scientists.”

  “True. But science is only half of European colonists’ breakthrough. Capitalism is the other half. This combination of scientific capitalism is what drove them. Capitalism provided a platform—a societal construct, if you will—for distributing value across a population, in particular to reward minds that imagined and implemented things that brought advantage to others. Case in point: a Spanish conquistador who established a new trade route enriched himself as well as the monarchy that supported him and that monarch’s subjects. Even more to the point, consider the Dutch East India Company—one of the first joint stock companies in history. They issued shares to investors, gave them part of the profit, distributed the risk across a larger pool of people. This dual system is the most powerful construct to date: capitalism to manage risk and share rewards; science to expand efficiency and resources.”

  Desmond paused. “The Citium. It wasn’t just the atomic bomb they created. It was all the things before. In those archives in San Francisco, there are mentions of the electric telegraph, the steam turbine, and even bigger discoveries like gravity and natural selection. The world we live in is the product of scientific capitalism.”

  “The consequence?”

  “Globalization.”

  “Implication?”

  “Our fate is reflected in our most famous invention: the computer. Those local area networks that sprang up like cities in the eighties and nineties got connected at the turn of the century by the internet. Just like European colonization connected the globe. Globalization is to the human race what the internet is to computers—a method for sharing resources and ideas. Ideas can now move around the world in nanoseconds. We have a platform for enabling the strongest minds to transform their thoughts into reality—and deploy that reality for the good of the masses.

  “If you think about it, vision—fictive simulation—remains the most powerful human ability. Look at the Forbes list of the richest people. The individuals listed are very different, but they all share one trait: vision. The ability to imagine a future that doesn’t exist—to imagine what the world would be like if something changed, if a product or service existed. And these people’s fortunes were made because their visions were accurate—they correctly predicted that something that didn’t already exist both could be created and would be valuable to a specific group of people.

  “Take Bill Gates. He saw the power of the personal computer, but so did thousands of others. But his vision also told him that there would be many computer makers, and many software makers, and that there would need to be a ubiquitous operating system that every computer used so that it could run any software. That same sort of fictive simulation occurs every day in companies everywhere; righ
t now there are internet companies like Amazon and Ebay who are imagining what life will be like with their products. The question is whether their simulations are right. But if they are, they’ll be worth a huge amount of money. In every walk of life—business, politics, military, art, fashion, everything—the quintessential ability is simulating the future accurately.”

  Desmond stopped there, sure that he had satisfied Yuri’s great test.

  The older man sat back down. “Now tell me what comes next.”

  “What?”

  “Desmond, we are on the cusp of a fourth and final revolution. Consider this: in February of 1966, the Soviet Union soft-landed a space probe on the moon. Humanity has been launching programs ever since. NASA launched Voyager 1 in September of 1977. In 2012 it became the first satellite to reach interstellar space. At some point, Voyager will fall into the gravity well of a planet, or asteroid, or even another planet’s moon. Possibly a black hole. The point is that it will crash somewhere—maybe on a place like our moon, but orbiting another planet, very far away.” Yuri smiled. “And if that’s true, then why has it not happened here—on our moon, which is over four and a half billion years old? The greatest mystery in the world is why our moon isn’t covered with space junk.”

  “Space junk?”

  “Interstellar probes—like Voyager 1—from other sentient species across the universe, launched long before we evolved, launched long before there was even life on our world.”

  Desmond turned the question over in his mind. It was incredible. A mystery in plain sight—of staggering implications.