by A. G. Riddle
“Cole?” the other man called from the next room. David could hear the dirt grinding beneath the soldier’s boots. He was walking slowly now, like a man marching through a minefield, where any step could be his last.
As David rose to his feet, the man burst through the doorway, his gun pointed at David’s chest. David lunged for him. They collapsed to the ground and fought for the gun. David slammed the man’s hands into the dirty floor, and the gun skidded to the wall.
The man repelled David off of him and began crawling for the gun, but David was on him again before he got far, gripping the man’s neck with the crook of his elbow in a tight stranglehold. He placed the heel of his hand on the man’s upper back to get more leverage. He could feel his prey’s airways close. Not much longer.
The man flopped back and forth and clawed at the arm around his neck. He reached down, trying to grasp… what? His pocket? Then the man had it—a knife from his boot. He stabbed back at David, connecting with his side. David heard his clothes rip and saw the blood on the knife, which was coming at him again. He slid to the side, barely missing the second jab. He moved his hand from the man’s back up to his head, and using the cross-grip with his arm around the man’s neck, he ripped hard. A loud snap rang out, and the man slumped to the floor.
David rolled off the dead mercenary and stared at the ceiling, watching two flies chase each other.
32
Immari Jakarta Headquarters
Jakarta, Indonesia
Martin’s men had taken Kate deep underground, then led her down a long corridor that opened onto what looked like a large aquarium. The glass window was at least fifteen feet tall and maybe sixty wide.
Kate didn’t understand what she saw. The scene beyond the glass was clearly the bottom of the Bay of Jakarta, but it was the creatures moving about that puzzled her. At first she thought they were some sort of illuminated sea creatures, like jellyfish, drifting down to the bottom then floating back to the surface. But the lights were wrong. She walked closer to the glass. Yes—they were robots. Almost like robotic crabs, with lights that swiveled like eyes, and four arms, each with three metallic fingers. They burrowed into the ground, then emerged with items in their mechanical hands. She strained to see. What were the items?
“Our excavation methods have come a long way.”
Kate turned to see Martin. The look on his face gave her pause, worried her. He looked tired, dejected, resigned. “Martin, please tell me what’s going on. Where are the children who were taken from my lab?”
“In a safe place, for now. We don’t have much time, Kate. I need to ask you some questions. It’s very important that you tell me what you treated those children with. We know it wasn’t ARC-247.”
How could he know that? And why did he care what she had treated them with? Kate tried to think. Something was wrong here. What would happen if she told him? Was the soldier, David, right?
For the past four years, Martin had been the only man, the only person, whom Kate could allow herself to fully trust. He had always been distant, buried in his work—a legal guardian more than an adoptive father. But he had been there for her when she had really needed him. He couldn’t possibly be involved in the kidnapping. But… something was wrong here…
“I will tell you about the therapy, but I want the children back first,” she said.
Martin walked over, joining her beside the glass wall. “I’m afraid that’s not possible, but you have my word: I will protect them. You have to trust me, Kate. Many lives are at stake.”
Protect them from what? “I want to know what in the world is going on here, Martin.”
Martin turned, walking away from her, seeming to ponder. “What if I told you there was a weapon, somewhere in this world, that was more powerful than anything you can imagine? A weapon capable of wiping out the entire human race. And that what you treated those children with is our only chance at survival, our only means to resist this weapon?”
“I’d say that sounds pretty farfetched.”
“Does it? You know enough about evolution to know that it’s not. The human race isn’t nearly as safe as we think it is.” He motioned toward the aquarium wall, toward a robot floating down. “What do you think is going on out there?”
“Digging for treasure? A sunken merchant ship maybe.”
“Does this look like a treasure hunt to you?” When Kate said nothing, he continued. “What if I told you there was a lost coastal city out there? And that it was only one of many around the world. Around thirteen thousand years ago, most of Europe was under two miles of ice. New York city was covered by a mile of ice. In the span of a few hundred years, the glaciers melted and sea levels rose almost four hundred feet, wiping out every coastal settlement on the face of the planet. Even today, almost half the human population lives within a hundred miles of the coast. Imagine how many people lived on the coast then, when fish were the most reliable source of food and the seas were the easiest method of trade. Think of the settlements and early cities that were lost forever, the history we’ll never recover. The only surviving record we have of this event is the story of the Great Flood. The people who survived the deluge from the glaciers were keen to warn generations that came after them. The story of the Flood is a historical fact—the geological record proves it—and the story appears in The Bible and all the texts we’ve recovered before it and after it. Cuneiform tablets from Akkadia, text from Sumeria, native American civilizations—they all tell of the Flood, but no one knows what happened before it.”
“That’s what this is about? Finding lost coastal cities—Atlantis?”
“Atlantis is not what you think it is. My point is that there is so much below the surface, so much of our own history that we don’t know. Think about what else was lost at the time of the Flood. You know the genetic history. We know that at least two species of humans survived to the time of the Flood—maybe three. Maybe more. We’ve recently found Neanderthal bones at Gibraltar that are twenty-three thousand years old. We could find bones that are even younger. We’ve also found bones that were only about twelve thousand years old—dated to around the time of the Flood—less than a hundred miles from where we now stand, off the main island of Java, on Flores Island. We think these hobbit-like humans walked the earth for almost three hundred thousand years. Then, suddenly, twelve thousand years ago, they die out. The Neanderthals evolved six hundred thousand years ago—they had roamed the earth nearly three times longer than us when they died out. You know the history.”
“You know I do, and I don’t see what this has to do with kidnapping my children.”
“Why do you think the Neanderthals and Hobbits died out? They had been around a long time before humans walked onto the scene.”
“We killed them.”
“That’s right. The human race is the biggest mass murderer of all time. Think about it: we’re hard-coded to survive. Even our ancient ancestors were driven by this impulse, driven enough to recognize the Neanderthals and Hobbits as dangerous enemies. They may have slaughtered dozens of human subspecies. And that legacy shamefully lives on. We attack whatever is different, anything we don’t understand, anything that might change our world, our environment, reduce our chances of survival. Racism, class warfare, sexism, east versus west, north and south, capitalism and communism, democracy and dictatorships, Islam and Christianity, Israel and Palestine, they’re all different faces of the same war: the war for a homogeneous human race, an end to our differences. It’s a war we started a long time ago, a war we’ve been fighting ever since. A war that operates in every human mind below the subconscious level, like a computer program, constantly running in the background, guiding us to some eventuality.”
Kate didn’t know what to say, couldn’t see how it could involve her trial and her children. “You expect me to believe those two children are involved in an ancient cosmic struggle for the human race?”
“Yes. Think about the war between the Neanderthals and humans. The
battles between the Hobbits and humans. Why did we win? The Neanderthals had bigger brains than us and they were certainly larger and stronger. But our brains were wired differently. Our minds were wired to build advanced tools, solve problems, and anticipate the future. Our mental software gave us an advantage, but we still don’t know how we got it. We were animals, just like them, fifty thousand years ago. But some Great Leap Forward gave us an advantage we still don’t understand. The only thing we know for sure is that it was a change in brain wiring, possibly a change in how we used language and communicated. A sudden change. You know all this. But… what if another change is under way? Those children’s brains are wired differently. You know how evolution works. It’s never a straight line. It operates on trial and error. Those children’s brains could simply be the next version of the operating system for the human mind—like the new version of Windows or Mac OS—a newer, faster version… with advantages over the previous release—us. What if those children, or others like them, are the first members of a new branch emerging in the human genetic tree? A new subspecies. What if, somewhere on this planet, a group already has the new software release? How do you think they would treat us, the old humans? Maybe the same way we treated the last humans that weren’t as smart as us—the Neanderthals and Hobbits.”
“That’s absurd; those children are no threat to us.” Kate studied Martin. He looked different… the look in his eyes, she couldn’t place it. And what he was saying, all the talk of genetics and evolutionary history—telling her things she already knew… but why?
“It may not seem that way, but how can we really know?” Martin continued. “From what we know of the past, every advanced human race has wiped out every race they viewed as a threat. We were the predator last time, but we’ll be the prey next time.”
“Then we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“We’ve already crossed it, we just don’t know it. That’s the nature of the Frame Problem—in a complex environment, we simply can’t know the consequences of our actions, however good they may seem at the time. Ford thought he was creating a device for mass transportation. He also gave the world the means to destroy the environment.”
Kate shook her head. “Listen to yourself, Martin. You sound crazy, delusional.”
Martin smiled. “I said the same thing when your father gave me the same speech.”
Kate considered Martin’s claim. It was a lie; it had to be. At the very least it was a distraction, a play for her trust, an effort to remind her that he had taken her in. She stared him down. “You’re telling me you took those children to prevent evolution?”
“Not exactly… I can’t explain everything, Kate. I really wish I could. All I can tell you is that those children hold the key to preventing a war that will wipe out the human race. A war that has been coming since the day our ancestors sailed out of Africa sixty to seventy thousand years ago. You have to trust me. I need to know what you did.”
“What is the Toba Protocol?”
Martin looked confused. Or was he frightened? “Where… did you hear that?”
“The soldier who picked me up from the police station. Are you involved in it—Toba?”
“Toba… is a contingency plan.”
“Are you involved?” Her voice was steady, but she dreaded the answer.
“Yes, but… Toba may not be needed—if you talk to me, Kate.”
Four armed men entered from a side door that Kate hadn’t seen before.
Martin turned on them. “I wasn’t finished talking to her!”
Two guards took her by the arms, forcing her out of the room and down the long corridor she had traveled down to meet Martin.
In the distance, she heard Martin arguing with the other two men.
“Director Sloane said to tell you your time is up. She won’t talk, and she knows too much anyway. He’s waiting at the helipad.”
33
River Village Slums
Jakarta, Indonesia
David slapped Cole again, and he came around. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. The young man looked up through sleepy eyes that grew wide when they saw David.
He tried to draw away, but David held him. “What’s your name?”
The man glanced around, searching for help, or maybe an exit. “William Anders.” The man searched his body for weapons but found none.
“Look at me. You see the body armor I’m wearing? You recognize it?” David stood, letting the man take in the head-to-toe Immari battle gear he wore. “Follow me,” David said.
The groggy man stumbled into the next room, where his partner’s dead body lay, his head turned at an awkward, unnatural angle.
“He lied to me too. I’ll only ask one more time, what’s your name?”
The man swallowed and steadied himself in the doorway. “Cole. Name’s Cole Bryant.”
“That’s better. Where you from, Cole Bryant?”
“Jakarta Branch, Immari Security Select Forces.”
“No, where are you from originally?”
“What?” The young mercenary seemed confused by the question.
“Where did you grow up?”
“Colorado. Fort Collins.”
David could see that Cole was coming out of the haze. He would be dangerous soon. He needed to find out if Cole Bryant fit the bill.
“Got a family back there?”
Cole took a few steps away from David. “Nope.”
It was a lie. Very promising. Now David needed to make him believe.
“They go trick-or-treating in Fort Collins?”
“What?” Cole edged toward the door.
“Stop moving.” David’s voice was harder. “That feeling at your back, that tightness. You feel that?”
The man touched his lower back, trying to slide a hand into his armor. Confusion clouded his face.
David walked to a duffel bag in the corner of the room and threw the flap open, revealing several square and rectangular brown blocks that looked like Play-doh wrapped in Saran wrap.
“You know what this is?”
Cole nodded.
“I put a small row of this explosive up your spine. This wireless trigger controls it.” David held his left hand out, showing Cole a small cylinder about the size of two AA batteries put end to end. At the top was a round red button that David’s thumb held down. “You know what this is?”
Cole froze. “A dead man’s trigger.”
“Very good, Cole. This is a dead man’s trigger.” David stood and slung the duffel bag strap over his shoulder. “If my thumb slips off this button, those explosives will go off, and it will turn your insides into a gelatinous goo. Keep in mind, there’s not enough explosive to hurt me, or even penetrate your body armor. I could be standing right next to you, and if I were shot or came to any harm, the explosion would liquefy your insides, leaving your hard outer shell, just like a Cadbury Creme Egg. You like Cadbury Creme Eggs, Cole?” David could see he was really scared now.
Cole shook his head slightly to the side.
“Really? They were my favorite when I was a kid. Loved getting those things at Easter. My mom used to even save some to give me at Halloween after I got through trick-or-treating. Couldn’t wait to get home and crack one open. The thick chocolate shell, gooey yellow inside.” David looked away, as if remembering how delicious they were. He glanced back at Cole. “But you don’t want to be a Cadbury Creme Egg, do you Cole?”
34
Immari Jakarta Headquarters
Jakarta, Indonesia
Martin stepped out of the elevator onto the helipad. The sun had almost set. The sky was red and the wind at the top of the eighty-story building blew in from the sea, carrying the smell of saltwater. Ahead of him, Dorian Sloane waited with three of his men. When he saw Martin, he turned and motioned for the helicopter pilot to start the takeoff sequence. The engine fired, and the rotor blades started to turn.
“I told you she wouldn’t talk,” Sloane said.
“It won’t help.”
Martin straightened. “I know her far better than you do—”
“That’s debatable—”
“Say another word, and I’ll make you sorry.” Martin stepped toward Sloane, now almost shouting over the roar of the helicopter. “She needs time, Dorian. She will talk. I urge you not to do this.”
“You created this situation, Martin. I’m just cleaning it up.”
“We have time.”
“We both know we don’t—you said it yourself. And I was quite amused at the other things you said. I assumed you hated me because you hated my methods and plans.”
“I hate you because of what you did to her—”
“Which wasn’t a tenth of what she did to my family.”
“She had nothing to do with that—”
“Let’s agree to disagree, Martin. And let’s focus on the task at hand.”
Sloane grabbed him by the arm and led him away from the helicopter where it would be easier to talk. And, Martin thought, where Sloane’s men couldn’t hear him.
“Listen, Martin, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll delay Toba Protocol until we find out if this can work. You let us work on the girl, we’ll get what we need in one, maybe two hours, tops. If we leave now for Antarctica, we’ll have the information by the time we land. We could test a true Atlantis Gene retrovirus within eight hours. And yes, I know you’re looking for an entrance.” Martin began to speak, but Dorian waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t bother denying it, Martin. I have a man on the team. Within twenty-four hours, you and I could walk through the gates of the tombs together. No Toba. This is the only play you have. We both know it.”
“I want your word that she will not be harmed… permanently harmed.”
“Martin. I’m not a monster. We just need what she knows; I would never permanently harm her.”