He’d honestly thought that by now his team of scientists would have laid bare all of the secrets frozen beneath them. It had been almost too easy boring straight down through the ice and immediately seeing the inhuman skull covered with sediment. He’d almost believed it was his destiny to be the first to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life. Ever since that night in the cornfield, it had felt as though every decision he’d made throughout the course of his life had conspired to bring him to the bottom of the world, where all signs pointed to the proof he sought.
And here he was now, with that evidence within his reach, and yet, for the life of him, he couldn’t seem to grasp it.
“There,” Friden said, and slid his chair back from his workstation. He gestured toward the monitor with a flourish.
Richards stared at the image for several seconds before he finally spoke.
“What is it?”
“Exactly. I can tell you what it was, and I have a pretty good idea of what happened to it, but I haven’t got the slightest idea why.”
Richards dragged over a stool from the station beneath the Class II biological safety hood, which allowed for the sterile preparation of slides and solutions, and perched on top of it. The image on the screen reminded Richards of a plasma globe in the sense that what almost looked like bolts of lightning radiated from a spherical mass. It was misshapen on one side, where it appeared as though its insides had leaked out.
“What you’re looking at is a species of archaea, a microscopic single-celled organism capable of surviving in environmental and temperature extremes that kill all other forms of life. We collected this one from the lake below us. It’s the same species we found fossilized on the Vigarano meteorite from Italy. Until this morning, none of these buggers had produced any of these filamentous appendages. Then, all of a sudden . . .” He zoomed out and the screen filled with a dozen similar bacteria. “. . . boom! All of them shoot out these feelers and attach themselves to everything within reach.”
“They look like cocoons.”
“Kind of. I would have said they look more like nerve cells connected by a web of dendrites. Regardless, no sooner was this reaction triggered than their cellular membranes collapsed and their cytoplasm leaked out.”
“Triggered?”
“There’s no other explanation. Some external stimulus had to have caused the transformation. So I started thinking about every little variable that could have provoked it. Did I do anything differently when I prepared the samples for the slides? Did I spill anything on them or otherwise add an element of unpredictability? And then it hit me. It wasn’t anything I did.”
“So what caused it?”
“Let me show you.”
Friden swiveled around to face the table under the hood, where he’d prepared several slides.
“The SEM gets incredible detail, but it’s not able to image living organisms. A light microscope can, at the expense of magnification and resolution, which means we have to stain the archaea to better see them.”
He switched the monitor from the SEM to the light microscope and clipped the slide to the mount. A few twists of the dials and the image came into focus. Tons of fluorescent green dots stood apart from what looked like a nebula.
“Each of those green dots represents an individual organism. If you look closely, you can see them move in little spurts.”
“What’s the significance?”
“Right, right. I’m getting to that.” Friden hopped up and looked around the room as though searching for something. “I do my best thinking while I’m moving. Gets the juices flowing, you know? So I was pacing the corridor when Mariah comes barreling down the hall and nearly runs me over.”
Dr. Mariah Peters was a geologist Richards had hired to map the terrain beneath the water and ice. Her previous work at Gunung Padang, the largest megalithic site in Indonesia, was crucial in determining that a hill thought to be the neck of an extinct volcano was actually a manmade building. It was her familiarity with volcanic rock and her wizardry with ground penetrating radar that allowed her to visualize the pyramidal structure beneath the layers of ash and soot that had accumulated on it from the eruptions of a nearby volcano. And considering the unstable geological nature of Antarctica, there was no one better suited for the job. In fact, she was the first one to document the nearly undetectable irregular infrasonic pulsations coming from somewhere beneath the ice.
“You know how she has that sonar drone down in the lake? The one she’s using to map the bottom? Anyway, it’s programmed to alarm if it malfunctions, so this alarm is going off and Mariah is all panicked, right? So I ask her what’s going on and she says there’s something wrong with the hydrophonic array that picks up the sounds that bounce back to the unit from the ground. There’s this huge spike in the signal, right? Only it’s not a malfunction at all. The sound waves are actually being amplified by some sort of hollow chamber, which causes them to reverberate or resonate or whatever. The point being that this happened at the same time I was preparing my slides.”
“What did she find?”
“She’s still working on it. Can we get back to me?”
Richards gestured for him to proceed.
Friden finally found what he was looking for and pulled an MP3 player from underneath a mess of notes and candy wrappers. He put both earbuds against the slide, one to either side of the microscope lens.
“The sound waves they use to map the lake floor are approximately one kilohertz. That’s essentially the sound range between the eighteenth and twentieth frets on the high E string of an electric guitar, so I played this solo from Metallica’s “The Unforgiven.” It’s got this nice long bend on the twentieth fret. I’ve got it primed at the right spot. Just watch what happens.”
He unpaused the song and a high-pitched note erupted from the earbuds, sending sonic vibrations through the liquid medium on the slide.
On the screen, the green dots became fuzzy as filaments branched outward, seemingly connecting all of the dots together into a giant irregular matrix, before suddenly becoming hazy and losing definition.
“That right there,” Friden said. “That’s where their membranes rupture and the cytoplasm leaks out.”
“Why?”
“The resonance at that particular sound frequency caused these microorganisms to essentially fulfill some sort of biological imperative in a matter of seconds. Something preprogrammed into their DNA.” He looked at Richards as though waiting for the lightbulb to go on over his head. “You still don’t get it. How about this? Inside of every cell is a fluid called cytoplasm. Sound waves like sonar pass through this fluid, but not without interacting, in this case with the chromosomal DNA floating freely inside that fluid. This interaction somehow stimulated the genes to accelerate the growth rate of its fimbriae—those finger-looking thingies—but in the process altered the chromosomes to such an extent that the plasma membrane and the cell wall ruptured.”
“But first it activated some portion of the DNA that it wasn’t currently utilizing.”
“Bingo.”
“So what are the implications?”
“That’s what I intend to find out.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Varying the frequency maybe?” He removed his earbuds from the slide, unclipped it, and was about to set it back with the others when someone banged frantically on his door. He dropped the slide and it shattered on the floor.
The door opened before either of them could answer. Mariah stuck her head in. Her dark hair was mussed and her brown eyes were wide with excitement.
“You have to see this,” she said and ducked back out into the hall.
“The hell, Mariah? Can’t you knock like a regular person?” Friden said. He picked up the broken glass and set it back under the hood. It wasn’t until he saw the droplets of blood pattering the stainless-steel countertop that he realized he’d been cut. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Get a bandage,” Richa
rds said.
“‘Get a bandage.’ Are you serious? That’s how you show concern for an injured employee?”
“I have a hunch you’ll survive.”
Richards hurried to catch up with Dr. Peters. By the time he reached the corridor, she was already back in her lab, where he found her studying a row of monitors mounted above her immaculate workstation.
“This.” She tapped a computer monitor with a pixilated square shape composed of varying shades and concentrations of gray and black. Several parallel lines radiated from one side, as though it were photographed in motion. “This right here. Do you have any idea what this is?”
“It’s the bottom of the lake,” Richards said.
“This is a map of the data points corresponding to the amplitude of the reflected sonar waves plotted on a grid. The black objects are solid surfaces that reflect the sonic impulses at ninety degrees, meaning they’re horizontal. Everything else is at an angle somewhere between horizontal and vertical—the X and Y planes—and represented by these varying shades of gray. In a nutshell, three-dimensional objects displayed in two dimensions. Now look at this image over here.”
She directed him to the adjacent monitor. Bands of different width crossed the screen, the uppermost of which was thinner and lighter in color. At the top was an indistinct triangular shape that appeared to cast a shadow.
“This is a visual representation of the raw data, just like you’d see during an ultrasound in a doctor’s office. It’s essentially a cross-section of the ground from top to bottom. Now watch what happens when I combine the two sets of data to produce a three-dimensional re-creation.”
She typed commands on her keyboard and an image appeared on the third screen, this time clearly representing the bottom of the lake and the structures buried beneath the thick layer of sediment.
“Now do you see?”
Richards leaned closer to the screen, where, despite the limited resolution, he could clearly discern several manmade structures. Most of them were rectangular and in different stages of collapse, but it was the largest one in the center that captured his attention.
“My God,” he whispered. “It’s a pyramid.”
“And that low-pitched hum we’ve been monitoring? It appears to be coming from inside of it.”
8
EVANS
El-‘Amarna, September 20—today
Until a representative from the Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities arrived to supervise the formal excavation, there was nothing more Evans could do. They’d photographed and digitally recorded the cave from every conceivable angle, plus they’d used a FARO laser scanner to create a 3-D model so lifelike it was hard to distinguish the virtual walkthrough from the real thing. It had already been twenty-four hours since Evans had personally spoken to Tihrak Mamoun, the Minister of State, whose job it was to micromanage every aspect of archeology in Egypt and preserve what remained of one of the world’s most majestic heritages, which was why it was so surprising that there hadn’t been a representative on-site first thing this morning as promised. While Evans had no intention of violating any of the terms of his agreement with the government and risk forfeiting all future rights to dig in Egypt, he’d never known the ministry to leave anything to chance.
He’d already sent photographs of the gnawed bones to a forensic odontologist for her analysis, but without the indentations from which to mold a cast, she could only speculate. Digital images of the designs carved into the ceiling found their way to one of Andrea’s colleagues in the astronomy department at Yale, who excitedly confirmed the precise positioning of the stars corresponding to a date more than three thousand years ago using a computer-generated overlay. Samples of coprolite were ready to be bagged and shipped back to Cairo for dietary analysis. There were even bones belonging to an extinct species of oryx that half a dozen zoologists and geneticists were nearly tripping over themselves to secure. There were so many mysteries that needed to be explored, chief among them the unclassified hominin species with the conical head, but there wasn’t a blasted thing anyone could do until an official representative of the Egyptian government finally showed up.
Evans paced a figure eight around the lighting arrays erected in the center of the cavern. They dispelled everything resembling shadows and created an almost clinical workspace—were it not for the mounds of bones and the mummified corpse, of course, which seemed somehow smaller and less impressive. They measured the subject to be just shy of five-foot-nine, which marked him as taller than the average male of his time period by roughly the height of his elongated cranium. His fingertips had been filed down past the inguinal tufts and nearly to the first knuckle as a result of clawing at the earthen barricade and the stone walls in a futile attempt to escape. His most remarkable feature, however, was his teeth.
His incisors were spatulate and his canines longer than normal, although it was impossible to tell how much longer since the tips had broken off, presumably while trying to bite into the hard bones. There was no way to evaluate the chewing surfaces without a panoramic X-ray or by physically opening his mouth, but the edges showed advanced wear for his estimated age and several of the premolars and molars were cracked all the way down to the roots.
It was hard not to rush to judgment and call this an entirely new species, at least not until he was able to send tissue and bone samples to the lab for genomic sequencing. He could feel it, though. This was something special, something truly unique.
Evans’s entire career was built upon the idea of spontaneous genetic mutation, whether in response to environmental factors or through a fluke of nature. There was simply no other way to explain why so many protohuman species could arise from a common ancestor and have such different physical traits, let alone exist at the same time. Home erectus, ergaster, and habilis all walked the earth at the same time as their upright simian progenitors, Paranthropus robustus and boisei. Homo erectus, floresiensis, heidelbergensis, and neanderthalensis had coexisted with early Homo sapiens during the same 2,000-year span. Each represented a distinct evolutionary leap not just from its predecessors, but from its contemporaries as well. It wasn’t just survival of the fittest, it was a full-on melee.
With the exception of the occasional overlap of habitat and interbreeding, the numerous hominin species evolved into what essentially could be considered regional variants, in much the same way as modern races. Outside of skin color, there are relatively few anatomic and physiologic differences between races, all of which have followed a similar evolutionary blueprint, despite extended periods of geologic isolation from one another. Not so with early hominins, who, following the last ice age and within the span of modern man’s recorded history, registered phenomenal physical mutations that could neither be explained nor ignored, most noticeably the changes in the skull itself.
Seemingly overnight, modern man’s simian shelf vanished and his sloping forehead gave way to an upright frontal bone. His cranial vault doubled in size to accommodate a brain twice the size of those of any of the other hominin species, and yet somehow it has miraculously remained the same size for more than 20,000 years.
And here before Evans lay a man like him, and yet one whose deformed head possibly held a brain at least 50 percent larger than his, one who potentially represented the next and most logical step in human evolution, and whose DNA just might prove his theory of spontaneous genetic mutation and hold the key to unlocking mankind’s fullest potential.
For better or worse, he thought as he surveyed the piles of ravaged bones throughout the cave.
“Cade!”
Evans turned at the sound of his name, which had come from somewhere outside the tunnel. He had barely started squeezing through the hole when he heard the source of Andrea’s excitement.
“It’s about time,” he said, and scurried toward the grumble of tires on gravel.
He emerged to find a blue Toyota pickup truck with an oversized camper shell and the insignia of the Egyptian National Police idli
ng at the bottom of the ravine. A man wearing sunglasses and black fatigues climbed from the driver’s side door. The silver star on his epaulets marked him as a lieutenant.
Evans cast a discreet glance at Andrea, who appeared every bit as uncomfortable with this development as he was. The entire country was well on its way to becoming a police state in response to the advance of Daesh, but even so this felt like overkill. He expected a plain-clothed representative from the ministry to step out from the opposite side, yet the silhouette in the passenger seat didn’t move. It wasn’t until Evans was halfway down the rocky slope that he was able to shield his eyes from the sun well enough to see the second officer fiddling with the glove compartment.
Andrea made a move to join him, but he waved her back. She retreated to join her graduate students in the scant shade cast by the neighboring escarpment. They’d covered every major contingency, from shakedowns by crooked cops and thieves to a caravan of trucks flying the black flags of ISIS funneling into the valley. There were enough provisions inside the royal tomb to withstand a monthlong siege and a satellite phone programmed with the numbers of the six closest American embassies.
“Dr. Evans,” the lieutenant said in a thick Arabic accent. It was a statement, not a question. He knew exactly who Cade was. With the sun behind him, it was impossible to clearly see his features or what looked like a thin package in his left hand.
“That’s right.” Evans pulled off his work gloves and shoved them into the back pocket of his jeans. “What can I do for you?”
“We were dispatched at the request of Minister Mamoun, who sends his regards and apologizes for being unable to be here in person.”
Evans smiled and nodded to the officer in the truck, who inclined his chin ever so slightly in response. Neither man appeared to be an immediate threat. They merely appeared aggrieved, as though doing their best to remain professional while performing a task they felt was beneath them.
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