Subhuman

by Michael McBride

  It was divided into three rows. The top two featured low-amplitude sound waves, while the third displayed smears of red, blue, and yellow that he recognized as a spectrogram. It appeared to have caught Kelly’s eye, as well. She nibbled on her lip as she studied it, her fingers fretting restlessly at her side.

  “Can you zoom in right there?” Jade said. She tapped the image of the submerged chamber of bones. “A little more that way. There. That skull isn’t like the others. It doesn’t show any sign of cranial deformation.”

  “We’ve found more ordinary skulls than misshapen,” Richards said. “I’m afraid we’re just interested in the latter.”

  “They’re human,” Anya said. “Based on the breadth of the zygomas and the mandible, they appear to be of aboriginal South American origin. The Inca had similar facial architecture.”

  “That means there were two distinct hominin species living here at once,” Evans said.

  “We’re still waiting on carbon dating for confirmation, but that’s our working hypothesis.”

  “What about those?” Mariah asked, and pointed at a cluster of animalian skulls.

  “Some sort of deer maybe?” Dreger said.

  “Has anyone bothered to perform any pathological assays on the remains?” Jade asked. “If we’re dealing with some sort of mass burial, we need to be incredibly cautious. An impromptu mass interment could signify the presence of a nasty pathogen none of us have the antigens to ward off.”

  “That’s one of the reasons we wanted your expertise,” Connor said from the doorway. He’d inserted himself into their midst so quietly that even Roche hadn’t heard him. “Dr. Friden’s working on isolating any potential viral involvement as we speak.”

  “And has been for the better part of a month,” Mariah said.

  “Surely no virus could have survived for millennia in water that cold,” Evans said.

  “A pithovirus was brought back to life after being frozen in the Siberian permafrost for thirty thousand years,” Jade said. “That’s one of our greatest concerns about global warming. There’s no telling what kinds of horrific germs are preserved in the ice or what effect they’d have on our modern immune systems if they survived the thawing process.”

  “Do you think that’s what happened here?” Connor asked.

  “I don’t want to speculate. If Cade’s right and this wasn’t designed to be a permanent tomb, we can’t afford to dismiss any possibility out of hand.”

  “If Cade’s right?” Evans said.

  “Would you be able to determine if they were infected with anything?” Richards asked.

  “If the pathological process affected the integrity of the bone,” Jade said. “Sure. But I wouldn’t be able to tell you what kind of microorganism was responsible without analyzing the DNA.”

  “We already have PCR results and a full genome,” Anya said.

  “That’s a start. Are you at least taking standard precautions—?”

  “What’s that sound?” Kelly interrupted. Her fingertips blurred against her thumb.

  “What sound?” Evans said. “I don’t hear anything.”

  Kelly tapped the monitor with the sound waves.

  “That sound.”

  Roche caught Mariah share a knowing glance with Richards, who watched Kelly carefully when he asked, “What does it look like to you?”

  “It’s obviously an infrasonic sound wave. At first I thought it was a whale’s song, but it’s too rhythmic, and considering the lake is freshwater, completely impossible. Maybe an unstable fracture in the bedrock? Have you been able to triangulate its origin?”

  “We believe it’s coming from inside this structure here,” Mariah said. She pointed at what Roche had initially thought to be a mountain.

  “That makes sense.”

  “How so?” Richards asked.

  “Look at the spectrogram.” Kelly tapped the colored row beneath the sound waves. “These dark red bands represent the sound. See how they appear hazy near the end, almost like they’re dissipating?”

  “Yes?”

  Kelly turned to Mariah.

  “Can you subtract the sound itself?”

  “Subtract the sound from the recording of the sound?”

  “Right.”

  “The only thing left will be background noise.”

  “Can you do it?”

  Mariah stared at her for a moment before nodding to herself. She leaned over Dreger’s shoulder and typed several commands into the computer. The red bands vanished with the next cycle, leaving behind little more than a reddish haze where the end of the line had been.

  “See that?” Kelly said. “That’s an echo.”

  “I should have recognized it,” Mariah said.

  “Don’t beat yourself up. When you work in the Pacific Northwest, you learn quickly that not only do you have to account for an acoustic wave, you need to account for its echo, which is easier said than done on a rocky coastline like we have in Oregon.”

  “You’re suggesting the sound is echoing from inside the structure,” Connor said.

  “No, I’m telling you the sound is echoing from inside the structure. Look at the residual waveform. It’s hardly detectable, but I’d wager a vital organ that if you amplify the signal you’ll find the waveform is nearly identical to that of the original sound.”

  “The structure’s hollow.” Richards was barely able to contain his excitement. “You’re certain?”

  Roche crossed his arms over his chest and cocked his head. It seemed they’d finally found the missing piece of the puzzle.

  “What is it?” he asked, and studied Richards’s reaction for any hint of deception.

  Richards glanced at Mariah and was about to respond when Evans beat him to it.

  “It’s a pyramid.”

  “More than that,” Richards said. “It’s the largest pyramid on the planet. We estimate its total volume to be just under three million cubic meters.”

  “That’s what, twenty percent larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza?”

  “What’s inside?” Roche asked.

  “That’s the problem,” Dreger said. “We can’t find a way in.”

  “What do you mean?” Evans asked.

  “There’s no entrance. At least as far as we can tell.”

  “What about through one of the other buildings?”

  “That’s what we were trying to do when we found the tomb.”

  “It’s not a tomb,” Evans said.

  “It’s a room full of dead people. What do you want me to call it?”

  “Definitely not a tomb.”

  “We’re overlooking the key component,” Roche said. “These structures were built before the lake was here. You have to factor the water out of the equation. This village was built on dry ground in the bottom of a valley surrounded by tall cliffs, like the ones near the elevator. Whatever sound it’s making would have fallen below the threshold of hearing. The only reason we’re able to detect it now is because of the water, right?”

  “What’s your point?” Connor asked.

  “Let him finish,” Richards said.

  “My point is why would anyone build something that would create a sound no one could hear?”

  “The flooding is responsible for the production of the sound,” Kelly said. “That would explain the lack of symmetry in the repetitions.”

  “So if the water is causing it—”

  “Then it’s finding a way into the pyramid that we’re missing,” Richards said. He took a breath and appeared to be about to speak before losing his train of thought. His expression changed before their very eyes from one of excitement to extreme concentration. “You’ll all have to excuse me. I have preparations to make.”

  “Preparations?” Evans said.

  “Mr. Dreger?” Richards said. “Will you please alert me the moment you find anything?”

  “You got it.”

  Richards stepped out from in front of the monitors and made his way toward the exit
. Roche watched the live feed from the camera as the borescope slithered over a jumbled mound of bones and focused on the back wall of the chamber, where characters had been carved into the stone. He recognized them immediately and masked his surprise before anyone noticed.

  “And the rest of you?” Richards paused in the doorway and turned to face them. “Try to get some sleep. We have a big day ahead of us tomorrow. We’re going to need those brains of yours firing on all cylinders if we’re going to get into that pyramid.”

  He turned and hurried down the corridor with Connor at his heel, the echoes of their footsteps drowning out their whispered conversation.

  23

  KELLY

  Kelly was so lost in thought that she wasn’t aware she’d passed her room until she was halfway up the stairs leading back into the main complex. She shook her head and descended back into the hallway, where she found Roche waiting outside her room.

  “Got a second?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  She stopped outside her door and waited for him to say whatever he had to say.

  “Inside?”

  He must have seen the discomfort on her face.

  “No, no. Nothing like that. I just want to run an idea past you and I don’t want to do so out here.” He inclined his chin toward the security camera mounted near the ceiling. “We can go someplace else if you’d rather.”

  “I think we should probably just call it a day. I’d be happy to discuss anything you want after a good night’s sleep.”

  There was something about him that made her uncomfortable, although she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. He was awkward in the same oblivious way of a lot of academics she knew, but he was quite clearly not from the hallowed halls of any credible institution. He carried himself with a rigidity she associated with the military and had eyes that always seemed to be watching. While he seemed harmless enough, the whole crop circle thing hinted at the possibility that there just might be something wrong with his brain in a way she ascribed to conspiracy theorists and people who taped over the cameras on their computers and cell phones.

  She opened her door and slipped inside, leaving it open just wide enough so as not to appear as though she were closing it in his face, while giving herself the ability to do just that.

  “I need to talk to you about standing waves. Specifically the images. What did you call them? Cyma-graphs?”

  “Glyphs. Greek for symbols. CymaGlyphs.”

  “The picture of the crop circle you received? I took it in England the day before the tsunami in Oregon.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “All of this would make a whole lot more sense if I were. How familiar are you with the standing waves for other sound frequencies?”

  “I have experience with some of the more common frequencies, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert by any stretch of the imagination.”

  “Have you ever seen one like this?”

  He held up a drawing scribbled on a piece of scratch paper. She recognized it immediately.

  “Where did you see that?” she asked.

  “Can we discuss this somewhere else?”

  Kelly stared at him for a long moment before opening the door and stepping out of the way. Roche entered and waited uncomfortably to be invited into the small room. She gestured for him to take a seat at the small table that doubled as a desk.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Kelly slid her backpack from the corner of the bed so she could sit between him and the door. She clenched her hands into fists so as not to betray how nervous she was.

  Roche dug his cell phone out of his pocket, set it on the table, and turned it so she could better see. He set the drawing beside it.

  “I drew this image after seeing it on the wall inside the burial chamber or whatever it was.”

  “You don’t want to call it a tomb, that’s for sure.”

  Roche smirked. It was a small gesture, but a human one that helped her relax, if only a little.

  He brought the screen on his phone to life and enlarged a thumbnail image of a crop circle taken from some height above a green field.

  “This was taken in Woodborough Hill, England, around the turn of the century.”

  Both his drawing and the photograph featured a small circle at the center of a much larger circle, like a fat donut, through the bulk of which spiraling lines passed in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions so as to create oblong triangles of increasing size toward the perimeter. The picture reminded her of the bottom of a pinecone. She’d studied the design in graduate school, although in an entirely different context.

  “Based on your expression,” Roche said, “I’m pretty sure you’ve seen it before, too.”

  Kelly nodded and took a moment to formulate her thoughts, which diverted her concentration and allowed her fingers to do their thing. Roche watched them with open curiosity unplagued by the judgment she’d seen in the eyes of so many.

  “Most people don’t realize that the atmosphere and the ocean share a complex mathematical relationship. The winds, the tides, the currents. None of them are randomly oriented. While there is certainly an underlying element of chaos, nature itself maintains a very rigorous sense of order. That’s the whole foundation of the oceanic and atmospheric sciences, the sole reason we’re able to generate anything resembling predictive models and forecasts, without which we wouldn’t be able to anticipate the formation of a hurricane with enough time to clear its path. Every natural system is at its heart an equation for which there is no perfect, rational answer, like pi or phi, which is known as the golden ratio and defines a logarithm that produces the most common spiral in nature.”

  “I’m familiar with the concept. Nearly all crop circles utilize the golden ratio in some way. It’s considered sacred geometry, if you subscribe to the whole New Age school of thought. A lot of researchers in my field speculate that advanced extraterrestrial life would use something universal like the laws of mathematics as a means of first contact since there is likely no correlation between our languages.”

  “Do you believe crop circles are made by aliens attempting to communicate with us?”

  “I’m not sure what I believe, let alone that this whole golden ratio thing is anything more than an attempt to impose order upon chaos.”

  “There really is more to it than that, though.” Kelly rummaged in her backpack for a pen, flipped over his paper, and drew a spiral that started small in the center and grew wider with each turn. “Think of a nautilus shell, a chameleon’s tail, the seeds of a sunflower, a spiderweb. All of these living beings naturally create spirals that adhere to this mathematical equation. We deal with it every day in the oceanic sciences in the form of whirlpools, hurricanes, and even the curl of a breaking wave. Every aspect of the universe—from the microscopic double helices of a strand of DNA to the vast Milky Way galaxy itself—conforms to the golden ratio. What you have here is not only the application of the golden ratio to nature, but the physical representation of a specific sound.”

  He nodded to himself.

  “You already knew that, didn’t you?”

  “I was optimistic, but I didn’t know for sure. You could say my training is in mathematics, too, at least as it pertains to the recognition of patterns and probabilities. I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said earlier. If one crop circle matched the design of a standing wave, who’s to say that others didn’t? It took maybe five minutes to find this crop circle from Avebury, England, in 2005.”

  He minimized the image on his phone and opened another photograph of a crop circle that looked like someone had rolled a giant die in the middle of a field and it had landed on the number five, only the outermost dots were contained within large circles. He swiped to the next image and the CymaGlyph of a standing wave labeled 396 Hz. The way the sound interacted with the volume of water caused it to bulge upward in five distinct sections.

  The patterns were almost identical.


  “This one’s from the same area, only a decade earlier.”

  The next image resembled the stereotypical web of a spider flattened into a field of wheat. The corresponding CymaGlyph, labeled 741 Hz, looked just like it, although how any sound could produce such a complex pattern in water was simply miraculous.

  “I think someone is attempting to communicate using sound,” he said.

  “I’ve seen those standing waves before,” she said. “Same with the one you drew. They’re the most commonly taught because they correspond to the Solfeggio frequencies. You know, the major scale? Do-re-mi-faso-la-ti-do? The one that looks like a spiderweb? That’s so. The box with the circles is the first do. The one you drew is mi and matches the standing wave at 528 Hz, which, whether you believe in such things or not, corresponds to a frequency that a growing number of biochemists believe is capable of helping to restore damaged DNA.”

  “Do you believe that’s possible?”

  “Believe what? That sound can be used to alter DNA or that aliens are trying to communicate with us?”

  “Take your pick.”

  “I find it hard to believe that sound can have any sort of physical impact on something as small as DNA, but I guess when it comes right down to it, that’s exactly how radiation gives you cancer, and it’s essentially sound with a much shorter electromagnetic wavelength. As far as aliens trying to communicate with us? Surely there would be much easier and more direct ways of doing so.”

  “That’s my opinion, too, but suddenly we’re dealing with an awful lot of coincidences, aren’t we? I mean, what are the odds we’d be looking at the physical representations of sounds we associate with speech?”

  Kelly opened her mouth, but no words came out. He was right, but it was a huge leap from geometry and physics to first contact.

  “Thanks for your time,” he said and rose from the table.