Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  “Or how about the Great Pyramid here in the middle, which was built during a twenty-year period in the Fourth Dynasty, and involved the precise placement of more than two million stone blocks weighing an average of one-and-a-half tons each, with some surpassing eighty tons. That’s an average of more than three hundred a day, or roughly one every five minutes if they worked around the clock. Not only that, it was built at the geographical center of the Earth’s landmass and has eight sides instead of four—a common misconception—which can only be appreciated from the air at dawn and sunset on the spring and fall equinoxes, just like the way the shadow of the serpent creeps down the steps of the Temple of Kakulcan in Chichen Itza on those same days. On top of all of that, it was built to align precisely with the cardinal points of the compass and, with the adjacent pyramids of Menkaure and Khafre, replicate the exact arrangement of the stars in Orion’s belt. The same holds true for the ceremonial buildings in Teotihuacan and the Thornborough Henges in northern England.”

  He clicked through the images as he described them. Several featured lines drawn between the structures and the angles between them in a side-by-side comparison with Orion’s belt.

  “Then there’s Angkor Wat in Cambodia and the Serpent Mound in Ohio, both of which were designed to mimic the constellation Draco. We’re talking about ancient civilizations with no formal training in either architecture or mathematics building structures of such exactness and complexity that we couldn’t replicate them even with today’s technology were we given twice as long to do so, people who formulated the concept of precession—the way a spinning top wobbles around its axis due to the forces of gravity—and had an intimate understanding of the solar system more than six thousand years before Columbus proved the Earth wasn’t flat, a revelation that occurred a mere twenty years before an Ottoman admiral and cartographer named Piri Reis created the map that led me here.”

  Evans pushed his plate aside and poured another cup of coffee. There wasn’t enough left for another cup, so he started another pot while Richards switched to an image of a hand-drawn map. It was yellowed and the edges were tattered, but he could still decipher the hooked tip of South America and the coastline of Antarctica.

  “This map was drawn in 1513. It’s a compilation of several others, including Columbus’s maps of the Americas. The crucial fact that you need to remember is that Antarctica wasn’t officially discovered until 1818, and by then it was completely covered with ice. The coastline on this map was compared to a seismic profile made through the ice sheet by the Swedish-British Antarctic Expedition of 1949 and found to match so perfectly that the cartographical department of the United States Air Force investigated and concluded that the Piri Reis map had to have been made before the continent was buried beneath the ice. It was a gentleman named Charles Hapgood who initially brought the map to their attention and subsequently formulated his theory as to how this could have happened.”

  “Crustal displacement,” Evans said.

  “Exactly. But you probably haven’t heard about his discovery of the Oronteus Finaeus map, which was drawn in 1531 and features the entire shoreline of Antarctica without the ice. The Bauche map of 1737 actually shows terrestrial details. Mountains, rivers, and lakes, several of which match bodies of water we’re only now finding down there.”

  “You lost me,” Jade said.

  “The science of navigation wasn’t discovered until five thousand years ago and seafaring vessels weren’t common until the first millennium BCE. So if you figure that even the most aggressive theorists speculate that this continent has been under ice for ten thousand years, who had the ability to create these maps back then?”

  Evans was at a loss. He understood the implications, but, for the life of him, couldn’t come up with a viable explanation.

  “Now fast-forward to the 1930s and the sudden interest of the Nazis in Antarctica, which stemmed from the scientific ministry’s quest to find the origins of the Aryan race. The Ahnenerbe, as it was known, believed that the Aryans were the survivors of the lost city of Atlantis, and that they escaped through the Hollow Earth to find sanctuary in the hidden city of Agartha, the entrance to which was supposedly somewhere beneath our feet.”

  “That’s absurd,” Kelly said.

  “The whole foundation of their ideology was absurd, but you have to understand that these people believed with the kind of veracity that rallied an entire nation to fight a war that changed the course of modern history. Whether they found what they were looking for or not is irrelevant, because they found something. Now what that something was we can only guess. There are rumors that this is where they developed their Foo Fighter program and launched their first flying saucers. Other stories suggest that they found or built a fortress where they could lick their wounds until they were strong enough to again take on the world. Regardless, what we do know is that two submarines from the notorious ‘Fuhrer’s Convoy’ surrendered to authorities in Mar Del Plata, Argentina in 1945. On board were heavily bandaged passengers and Nazi relics worth millions of dollars. Among them was this . . .”

  Richards clicked to the next slide.

  Evans’s pulse thundered in his temples.

  “What in the name of God is that?”

  21

  JADE

  “That, my dear boy, is an anthropometric face cast,” Richards said. “It was a common tool utilized by early anthropologists in the study of indigenous peoples, whereby a subject breathed through straws inserted into his nostrils for several hours while layer after layer of plaster were painstakingly applied to his face.”

  Jade was familiar with the practice. It was a part of the sordid history of her profession and represented roots they tried to hide, if not actively cut out. Forensic anthropology was born from the minds of scientists who traveled the world with calipers and charts, measuring and cataloguing the physical differences between populations and races. Early pioneers like Bruno Beger, whose findings on the 1938 Ernst Schäfer Expedition to Tibet were considered revolutionary at the time, returned to Germany and utilized his newfound knowledge to help the SS identify Jews by their physical characteristics and was later convicted of accessory to eighty-six murders for his role in selecting and preparing victims for the Jewish skeleton collection at Auschwitz.

  “Whether or not this was cast from a living subject is a matter of some speculation,” Richards continued. “All we have to go on is the holes for the nostrils, which could merely have been neglected in the obvious haste involved with the casting, but we have no reason to doubt its authenticity.”

  She scrutinized the picture, looking for overt signs of forgery. The subject was simply too fantastic for it to be anything other than a fake. The mold was essentially an inverted face, which, when filled with clay or plaster, could be used to create a lifelike bust. The edges were worn and cracked and showed visible smear marks from the original application of the medium. Sections had crumbled to powder, leaving holes that would eventually erode the entire mold. If it was a forgery, the craftsmanship was flawless, but she could think of no other explanation for the features of the individual formed inside, which could have been cast directly from the remains of the girl she’d exhumed from the mass grave in Nigeria.

  “Why haven’t I seen this before?” Jade asked. “Anyone in the field would give an arm and a leg to have the chance to authenticate it, let alone create a cast from it.”

  “It came from what one might call a private collection, and we’ll leave it at that for now.” Richards smirked. “It was from this mold that we produced this . . .”

  He clicked the remote with a flourish and a face appeared on the screen. It had a narrow chin, pursed lips, and a tiny nose. The cheekbones were rounded and helped frame eyes that protruded from the sockets to such an extent as to nearly flatten the bridge of the nose. The brow line was high and the forehead elongated. The holes in the mold had left blemish-like imperfections. Everything about it was realistic, right down to the closed eyelids, whi
ch made the subject appear to be sleeping almost peacefully.

  “I had a roommate as an undergrad who could have sculpted this in a matter of weeks,” Kelly said.

  “We cast this in latex, and by doing so were able to replicate details nearly impossible for any sculptor to recreate.” He flipped through a series of magnified images. “The bases of eyelashes on the eyelids. Severely chapped lips here and . . . here. The impression of this vein in the forehead.”

  “Say it is real,” Jade said. “This individual could have been born with any number of deformities, all of which could have been exaggerated by removing the plaster while it was still wet. Like you said, you can tell by the edges of the mold and the periphery of the cast that it was a rushed job. Even if this is a true-to-life representation of the individual from which the mold was created, what point are you trying to make?”

  Richards smiled patiently.

  “Let me show you something.” He clicked through a series of images until he found what he was looking for. It was a mummified face like the one she’d been sent from Evans’s dig in Egypt. The similarities between the mummy and the bust were staggering. The following picture featured a skull, browned by time and thickened with accreted minerals. The three faces were shown beside each other and then superimposed upon one another. “We scanned all three of these examples into the computer and analyzed them using a program that compares more than a hundred structural markers on each face. Every single point of comparison was in the ninety-ninth percentile, meaning they only differed by standard individual deviation, no different than any three of us in this room.”

  “That still doesn’t answer my question,” Jade said.

  “We’re talking about three different sets of remains, found on three different continents, at three different points in time. What I’m saying is really quite simple. Anya back there—Dr. Fleming, I should say—found the skull in Russia, Dr. Evans shot the photo of the mummified body in Egypt, and any number of intelligence agencies can confirm that the submarine carrying the mold was in Antarctica before surrendering in Argentina. I believe they cast that mold from a recently deceased—if not actually living—individual descended from the same lineage as the other two, a lineage that somehow either survived the crustal displacement and was still extant on this continent three-quarters of a century ago or one whose technological knowledge surpasses our own and has the ability to travel at will over great distances.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Evans asked.

  “I’m not suggesting anything. I’m merely presenting the evidence that led me here and what I found when I arrived.”

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “The first thing we saw upon boring through the ice was a skull much like the ones Drs. Evans and Liang discovered independently on opposite sides of Africa. It was while investigating the best laboratory to sequence its genome when I discovered that Dr. Fleming had unearthed a similar specimen in Russia and was already a step ahead of me. A few telephone calls and a considerable donation later, not only did I gain access to the findings, but I also secured the services and discretion of the Brandt Institute. Within a week they confirmed my suspicion that the two were nearly identical.”

  “Nearly?” Jade said.

  “Their genomes differed by about half a percent, which corresponds to roughly the difference between any two human beings. The most exciting finding, however, was that carbon dating revealed them to be separated by at least eight thousand years, an enormous amount of time in terms of human evolution for them to remain so similar. When compared to modern humans, they also shared distinct similarities in terms of base pairings with native peoples from the same geographic locations.”

  “What about the additional chromosome?” Jade asked.

  Richards tapped the side of his nose.

  “Very good, Dr. Liang. What about that twenty-fourth pair?”

  He closed the file on the screen and opened a different directory, from which he selected a graph with tall bars grouped in pairs and numbered one through twenty-four, the last of which included an additional XY label to indicate the sex chromosome. Each numbered pair was a different length than the others, although identical to that of its partner, and pinched near the middle to show the position of the centromere. Color-coded horizontal bands filled them like stacks of poker chips. Jade immediately recognized that they were chromosomes for two distinct, yet biologically similar species, save for the fact that one had an extra column that the other didn’t.

  “On the left we have Homo sapiens sapiens, modern man,” Richards said. “On the right, our magnificent cone-headed friend. As I’m sure you’ve already noticed, the latter species has an additional chromosome, one even smaller than the sex chromosome, labeled number twenty-four for the sake of illustration. All of the previous twenty-three pairs are of the same length and have the same base pair arrangement, with the exception of chromosomes five, eight, and eleven, shown in detail here.”

  He clicked the button, and a new image appeared.

  “They’re inverted,” Roche said.

  “Specifically these three sections here, here, and . . . here. The interesting thing about chromosomes, as I’m sure most of you know, is that they have what’s considered a ‘controller’ gene positioned at the very top. By inverting these sections and changing the ‘controller, ’ we end up with a completely different genetic expression, even though all of the genes themselves are exactly the same. An inversion event of this magnitude is essentially unheard of, which makes a case for spontaneous mutation as opposed to gradual evolution.”

  Evans stiffened beside Jade, who glanced curiously at him from the corner of her eye before speaking in a tone that betrayed her growing frustration.

  “Again I’m forced to ask: what about the extra chromosome?”

  “That’s just it. We simply don’t know. We can map the genes right down to nucleotide pairings, but we can’t tell what function it serves any more than we can wager a guess as to where it came from. That’s why I brought you all here. I need your skill and insight to figure it out.”

  Roche spoke for the first time. The sound of his voice surprised Jade, who had nearly forgotten he was in the darkened room with them.

  “You keep going on about evolution, and then you hint at the involvement of aliens. So which is it? Are you proposing we’re dealing with a discrete humanoid species or an extraterrestrial life-form?”

  “I know this must sound like the wishful thinking of an old fool, but in my lifetime I’ve seen many things for which there’s no logical explanation. Things that defy explanation. Two hundred years ago no one would have believed in the possibility that we descended from apes, let alone that we were only one of several lineages that did. Maybe that’s all this species is, too. Then again, maybe it isn’t. Protohuman remains are largely limited to geographic ranges, and yet we’ve found these elongated skulls on every continent, and near every major megalithic monument. Say what you will, but I firmly believe that all of this combined makes a case for the fact that some higher intelligence has been with our species from the start, a higher intelligence I believe to be alien in origin.”

  Evans laughed.

  “You had me right up until that last bit.” He deepened his voice. “‘A higher intelligence I believe to be alien in origin.’ Someone fit this guy for a tinfoil hat, would you?”

  “Then perhaps you can explain the extra chromosome, Dr. Evans?”

  “Sloppy handling of the samples? Contamination?”

  “No chance in hell,” Anya said.

  “No offense, kiddo, but these kinds of things happen to the best of us.”

  “Maybe to you.”

  Richards clicked the remote and a new image appeared on the screen. Jade stood so fast she bumped the table and spilled her cold coffee.

  “This screen grab was taken less than an hour ago,” Richards said.

  “Where?” Jade asked. Her heart was pounding so hard she could barely hear his
voice over it.

  “Why don’t I show you?”

  22

  ROCHE

  “We only just found our way into what we believe to be a burial chamber,” Dr. Mariah Peters said. “At this point we can’t even be sure exactly what we’re looking at.”

  Roche hung back from the others. He needed space to think. There was obviously something Richards wasn’t telling them. A critical piece of the puzzle simply wasn’t there. In his former life, he’d learned that the best way to conceal a vital detail was to hide it within a flood of information, which felt like exactly what Richards had done. He’d inundated them with the visual equivalent of a shock-and-awe campaign and set the hook so deeply there was no hope of extricating it. It was all he could do not to allow himself to be swept along with all of the others, which was growing harder by the minute.

  “It’s not a tomb,” Evans said. “I’ve explored countless burial chambers from any number of ancient civilizations, and while all cultures have different funereal practices, none of them show such callous disregard for the dead. This demonstrates complete and utter lack of reverence. It reminds me more of an animal’s den.”

  “Like the tomb you discovered in El-‘Amarna,” Richards said.

  “Exactly.”

  Roche leaned against the back wall. While the lab was reasonably large and well equipped, it hadn’t been designed to hold this many people. He was tall enough to see over the others, who crowded around the drilling engineer’s workstation, where Dreger operated the underwater drone with a joystick. There were three monitors mounted to the wall above the desk. The one on the left showed a digital elevation model of the bottom of the lake, although if he were interpreting it correctly, there were several buildings surrounding what looked like an oddly symmetrical submerged mountain. A thermal overlay had been applied to differentiate the temperature gradients, the majority of which fell along the blue and white scale. A red beacon indicated the location of the drone, the footage from which was displayed on the center monitor. The same grayish-green sludge he’d seen from the submersible covered fallen structural stones and more broken and disarticulated bones than he’d ever seen in his life. Despite the eyes of the dead that stared blankly into the camera as it advanced between them, it was the third monitor that intrigued him most.