Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  “What brought you here, honey?” Tan Guy asked in a soft, reassuring voice and placed his hand on her forearm.

  She closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and composed herself.

  “The president of the university called me into his office and showed me this picture. He said he also received a seven-figure donation in exchange for—how did he phrase it?—borrowing my expertise. I thought he was joking, but he made it clear just how serious he was by personally driving me back to my apartment to pack.”

  She set her iPad on the table, enlarged a thumbnail image to fill the screen, and turned it so they could all see.

  Roche was better prepared this time and kept his expression studiously neutral.

  “What is it?” Green Eyes asked.

  “It’s a crop circle.”

  “You mean like little green men?” Tan Guy said.

  Roche barely resisted the urge to punch him in the throat.

  “I don’t know anything about that, but I do know what this symbol is.”

  Roche’s heart raced when she tapped the picture he’d photographed himself. The one of a crop circle resembling a star with rings at its points, and a sixth point in its center.

  “Sound waves aren’t just an auditory phenomenon. They’re physical waves in the electromagnetic spectrum, like light and X-rays, only with much longer wavelengths. While they don’t have mass, per se, they do interact with matter. In fact, every sound has a different wavelength, so it affects matter in unique and characteristic ways. Think of the way a subwoofer makes your chest vibrate. The air in your lungs essentially creates a hollow chamber for the sound waves to resonate.”

  “Like a high-pitched tone shattering a glass,” Tan Guy said.

  “That’s how human hearing works,” Green Eyes said. “Tiny hairs on the basilar membrane in the cochlea detect auditory vibrations and the brain interprets them as sound.”

  “Exactly. We use a modality called cymatics to create visual representations of sounds at different wavelengths to demonstrate their interactions with matter by exposing a very shallow tray of water directly to a given tone. This creates little designs—for lack of a better term—that we call ‘standing waves.’” She swiped her screen to the next image, which showed a sample of water illuminated by a blue light. It was pentagon-shaped and looked almost like a flower. There was a perfect star in the center, at the points of which were spherical blebs of water. It was identical to the crop circle. “This here? This CymaGlyph corresponds to a tone of 22.2 Hertz, which is the exact same sound my equipment picked up from the Cascadian Subduction Zone immediately prior to the tsunami off the coast of Oregon.”

  The day after the crop circle formed, Roche thought. He remembered hearing the breaking news on the radio while he was taking his daily measurements of germination rates. For the life of him, he couldn’t see how her sound image was related to his crop circle, but there was no way he could chalk it up to mere coincidence.

  “Well,” Tan Guy said. “I guess now that we’re more confused than we were when we boarded this infernal plane, anyone want to take a stab at where we’re headed?”

  “Troll Station,” Roche said. They were the first words he’d spoken in hours and came out rougher than he’d expected. He cleared his throat. “It’s a Norwegian research station on the Princess Martha Coast of Queen Maud Land.”

  “Antarctica?”

  “How do you know?” Green Eyes asked.

  A ringing sound arose from beneath the table with the PCR results spread out across it. Tan Guy looked at each of them before realizing with a start that the sound was coming from his backpack, which he pulled out from under his seat and balanced on his lap. He unzipped the main pouch and pulled out an iPad. In the center of the display was a FaceTime logo and a button to answer the incoming call.

  He tentatively hit the button and the face of the man responsible for gathering all of them on this plane streaking toward one of the most inhospitable regions on the entire planet appeared on the screen.

  11

  KELLY

  25,000 feet above the Southern Ocean

  “Greetings everyone. I’m thrilled to see you all made it. My name is Hollis Richards, and I’m sure you have a lot of questions. Rest assured, they will be answered to your satisfaction in due time. I just wanted to reach out and thank each of you personally for dropping everything and getting on a plane without knowing exactly where you were going. I know it couldn’t have been easy taking that leap of faith. Believe me. I apologize for the secrecy, but I have no doubt you’ll understand completely when you reach your destination.”

  “Which is where, exactly?” the lady with the emerald eyes asked.

  Richards smirked. His image briefly froze before jumping to a slightly different location.

  “You’ll find out soon enough, Dr. Liang.”

  “Troll Station,” the guy next to Kelly said.

  “Very good, Dr. Evans. I’m surprised, though. I would have wagered that it would be Mr. Roche who figured it out.”

  Evans glanced at Roche, who subtly shook his head.

  “Just a lucky guess,” Evans said.

  “I don’t believe that for a second, but that’s neither here nor there. I suppose it’s only fair that you get to keep your secrets, too.” Richards smiled into the camera and seemed to look directly at Kelly. He reminded her of a cross between the guy from the Dos Equis commercials—the Most Interesting Man in the World—and Santa Claus. She could tell he was enjoying holding his knowledge over their heads. “How are you doing, Ms. Nolan? I’m sure you’ve had enough air travel for a while.”

  She forced her hand into a fist to halt the incessant tapping. Her fingernails bit into her palm.

  “For a lifetime,” she said.

  “It will be worth it. Trust me. And just so you don’t think I’m all bad, I’ll leave you with a parting video I’m quite confident you’ll enjoy. See you all in about . . .” He glanced at his watch. “. . . five hours. Try to get some sleep in the meantime. You’re going to need it.”

  There was a clattering sound as he turned his laptop toward another monitor, which initially blurred with wide horizontal bands before the picture resolved. The time and date stamp in the corner indicated that it had been recorded at 16:18 on September 11th, nine days ago. The numbers in the opposite corner were paused at a point more than two hours into the recording.

  At first, Kelly couldn’t tell what was happening. It was too dark and the lone beam of light swung in a manner that made her stomach queasy. She recognized the splashing sound of someone slogging through water. When the beam finally settled, she let out a startled gasp.

  The camera focused on the ground at the edge of a body of water of indeterminate size. The shallows were murky with disturbed sediment that sparkled in the light. The rocks at the bottom were furry with algae, while those above the surface bore the stratified markings of high tide. And in the transition zone rested a skull, turned slightly away from the camera with only a portion of its forehead, cheekbone, and upper jaw breaching the surface. It had a strangely conical cranium. Although with the way it was broken, she could only guess as to how large it had actually been.

  “It has to be thousands of years old,” Liang said.

  “Forget how old it is,” Evans said. “It shouldn’t even be there.”

  The camera zoomed in on the face. The light reflected from the standing water in its hollow socket. Ripples abruptly formed at the edges, concentric rings that dissipated as quickly as they appeared.

  The screen went dark before reverting to the FaceTime logo.

  Kelly and the others sat in an uncomfortable silence marred by the buzz of the propellers, the drone of the engine, and the hiss of air blowing through the vents.

  Kelly thought about the ripples. Had there been any around the skull itself? She couldn’t remember seeing any, but the camera had been zoomed in so far that they would have been at the very edge, if they’d been there at all. She’d grow
n up in Astoria, so she knew all about rocky shorelines. There’d been no salt residue, which meant the body of water in the video had been freshwater and of considerable size for it to reflect the influence of tides, but there hadn’t been anything resembling waves. The surface had stilled quickly after the cameraman stopped moving. There had to be another source for whatever force caused the ripples that had caught the cameraman’s attention.

  It suddenly hit her that she was probably there for just that reason.

  If that were the case, then what kind of unstable environment was she potentially walking into? More important, why her? She’d gotten lucky predicting that earthquake, and everyone knew it. That she’d recognized a pattern was undoubtedly more a matter of coincidence than actual skill. Her methods needed further testing. Truth be told, she was still overwhelmed by the fact that had she not taken action, thousands of people would have died. Even with her intervention, five people had drowned that night, and their lives weighed heavily upon her conscience. She’d been over and over the data and concluded that there was absolutely nothing she could have done differently, a fact that was of precious little comfort.

  Kelly realized that everyone was looking at her and glanced at her hand, which was doing its thing again.

  “Sorry.” She tightened it into a fist again and squeezed it between her thighs. “It has a mind of its own.”

  She’d had MRIs of her head, cervical spine, and brachial plexus in hopes of finding whatever anomaly of the nervous system caused what essentially amounted to an extraordinarily complex tic, but the scans hadn’t revealed anything useful. No amount of trying could replicate the motions and she could make it stop anytime she wanted. It simply started when she found herself in a situation outside of her direct control. Her psychiatrist had called it a physiological manifestation of acute anxiety, at the core of which was surely some repressed psychological trauma fighting its way to the surface, despite Kelly’s insistence that there had been nothing even remotely traumatic about her childhood.

  Her mother had simply referred to it as “fretting”—a cute reference to the nervousness and the fact that it looked like she was playing an air guitar—while she’d come to think of it as a background program running on a computer, a screensaver of sorts that kicked on when she experienced stress. It was during the process of searching for a way to make it stop that she’d discovered the field of seismology. She’d learned early on that the tracts of nerves that carried both conscious and unconscious commands from the brain to the rest of the body could be peripherally stimulated by external magnetic fields, and that stimulation could produce an electrical current strong enough to trigger the neural pathways. The earth itself generated a large magnetic field that constantly exerted a tremendous amount of force and, in the process, produced an omnipresent infrasonic hum that interacted with the human body, despite the fact that no one could hear it.

  Further research had shown her that sound vibrations traveling through any material from air to water and wood to metal produced mechanical energy. There were crystals—quartz, topaz, and even sugar—that utilized what was known as the piezoelectric effect to convert that mechanical energy into electricity, which served as the foundation for astonishing new technologies that could capture the power of the waves and the wind, and—she firmly believed—harness the inexhaustible energy produced by the earth’s own magnetic field, much like she suspected her hand did. Especially at fault lines where the tectonic plates actively moved against one another, creating enormous fluctuations in the magnetic field like the one that had caused the tsunami. A single event of that magnitude could theoretically provide enough electricity to light the entire West Coast for several years.

  Kelly glanced up to find the crop circle guy, Roche, openly studying her.

  “You saw something on the video,” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  “What did you see?”

  “A ripple.”

  “A ripple?” Evans said. “Did you not see that skull? Do you have any idea what it means?”

  “We all saw the skull,” Liang said. “It’s the same mutation you and I both found in the field.”

  “It’s more than that. You all saw its features and proportions. They were undeniably human. Not just of the Homo genus, but Homo freaking sapiens. If that video was taken in Antarctica—”

  “As we’re meant to believe,” Liang interrupted.

  “Right. If we assume that video was shot in Antarctica, then there’s no way that skull should be there.”

  “Are you suggesting someone planted it there?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. Follow my logic. Homo sapiens didn’t appear until two hundred thousand years ago and didn’t migrate out of Africa until sixty thousand years ago. Don’t you see? Scientists claim Antarctica has been covered with ice since the Neogene Period, fifteen million years ago. Even with advances in shipbuilding, modern man didn’t even discover Antarctica until the nineteenth century. So either that skull is just a couple hundred years old—which any archeologist worth his salt can refute at a glance— or at some point during those sixty thousand years man found a way to cross the Southern Ocean, navigating glaciers and surviving the extreme temperatures, which would cause us to question pretty much everything we know about the history of mankind.”

  “There’s another alternative,” Kelly said. “What if Antarctica hasn’t been under ice for millions of years?”

  Evans cocked his head and looked at her as though seeing her for the first time.

  “There’s no point in speculation,” Liang said.

  Roche leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  “You’re right,” Evans said. “We need to approach this without any preconceptions. Maybe Mr. Talkative over there has the right idea. I, for one, could use a little shuteye.”

  Kelly knew she should try to sleep, but there was no way she was going to be able to turn her brain off. She leaned against the window and stared down upon the cold black sea, where the first glaciers drifted beneath the wispy clouds.

  12

  ANYA

  Troll Station, Queen Maud Land, Antarctica

  Troll Station was little more than a collection of industrial buildings scattered across the barren, snow-spotted tundra. Everything was painted bright red for those occasions when the furious storms kicked up out of nowhere and reduced visibility to the tip of your nose. Anya hadn’t been in Antarctica long enough to experience one, but she’d heard the stories. The old-timers had used the opportunity for outside training, tethering themselves together with climbing ropes and practicing limited search-and-rescue missions in the direct vicinity of the research station. The way they told it, it hadn’t taken very long for them to realize that if they ever needed to utilize those skills, they were in big trouble.

  Fortunately, right now it was smack-dab in the middle of what qualified as summer at the bottom of the world. The sun was out, and it was a balmy three degrees below zero, the perfect day to receive their newest arrivals. She’d barely left Chicago five days ago, and already it felt like that had been a different lifetime. Richards had thought it would be a good idea for her to be at Troll Station when they landed so she could share her experience acclimating. All of the other scientists had been with the team since its inception two years ago and had spent countless hours working under such cramped conditions, so none of them had been able to provide anything resembling helpful advice when she transitioned from living in the Windy City, which she’d always considered comparatively restrictive, to what essentially amounted to house arrest. Of course, their accommodations weren’t the only things that required a little extra time to get used to.

  Truth be told, she would have fought tooth and nail to get out of the station, if only for the morning. There were only so many hours in the day one could devote to research before starting to go a little stir crazy. She hadn’t realized how much the ordinary nuisances in her life contributed to her overall sense of well-being
. Driving to work. Going to the grocery store. Heck, even walking to the mailbox. They were luxuries she was no longer afforded. The Richards Group had spared no expense on their accommodations, but there was simply no substitute for the sensation of the sun on her face.

  She heard the approaching plane long before she saw the first sparkle of reflection from its fuselage.

  Anya still had a hard time believing that it was four in the morning and the sun was out. The Norwegians were still sound asleep, those who hadn’t made the pilgrimage to their summer station in Tor, anyway. She was happy enough not to deal with them this morning. For as nice as they were, she needed some time alone in her head before the return trip to the Drygalski Mountains, which was more than a little unnerving, at least the way Richards intended to take them.

  The red and white plane came in across the ice sheet covering the frozen sea. It buzzed the rooftop of the station and descended toward the ridgeline, where Richards and Connor waited near the packed-ice landing strip.

  She hiked up the bare rock slope to where the nunatak abruptly gave way to the seamless white that stretched inland for as far as the eye could see. The Drygalski Mountains were little more than a serrated blade against the horizon.

  The wind struck her squarely in the face when she stepped out into the open from the lee of the escarpment that swaddled Troll. The breeze might only have been blowing at a few miles an hour, but it felt as though it were coated with icy barbs that raked her bare flesh.

  She pulled her balaclava up over her mouth and nose and crunched across the grated snow to where Richards approached the plane with his arm raised in greeting. The pilot hadn’t even slowed the propeller blades, let alone opened the hatch. Their benefactor’s enthusiasm was contagious. Despite his many eccentricities, she couldn’t help but smile every time she saw him. He was the kind of person who just seemed to draw others to him and make them feel important, not because of him, but to him.