by Nick Thacker
“So why Santorini?” Sarah asked. “What’s special about this place?”
Mrs. E cleared her throat. “One of the companies our corporation has been providing runway investment for has created an artificial-intelligence-aided search function that Juliette and I had been discussing.”
She turned to Julie, who was nodding along. “For example, in this case, we had it search through map data and compile potentialities.”
“Potentialities? How does that even work?” Reggie asked.
“It is image-based,” Julie said, growing more animated as she explained. “By overlaying images of maps — anything that might be tagged as a ‘geographic pictograph,’ actually — that are scraped from other web searches, and then comparing and contrasting their unique features, the algorithm can interpret drawn, illustrated, and imaged results.”
Ben nodded, then put his elbows out in front of him on the table. “So… how does it work?”
Mrs. E grinned, showing a huge set of brilliant white teeth. “Basically we can search keywords — ‘mountainous,’ ‘oceanic,’ ‘peninsula,’ etcetera — as well as filter by those results — size in area, delineated by feet, miles, kilometers. Or by region, biome characteristics, human habitation over time, or more. Think of a ‘smart’ search engine that only exists to cross-reference history with its geographic and anthropologic details, all superimposed on a modern Mercator projection.”
Ben shrugged. “So… magic. Got it.”
The others laughed. “What I discovered, after Julie helped me compile the algorithm, was nothing short of a breakthrough,” Mrs. E finished. Normally the woman sitting diagonally from Ben was straightforward, all business, but he thought he could sense a bit of a flourishing excitement from her. She was a soldier, a woman who could have been easily written off as a ‘grunt’ based on her massive, muscular frame and short hair, but he knew better. Mrs. E was almost as brilliant as her husband. The husband-wife pair had grown their communications company into a worldwide conglomerate. They’d remained in complete control until a few years ago when they had begun to hand off the reins to others to manage the day-to-day operations, and instead had begun using their wealth to invest in fledgling tech companies, promising science and research, and, of course, the CSO.
Mrs. E shifted in her seat and leaned toward Ben, scanning left and right across the faces of the group. Her voice lowered to nearly a whisper, heightening the effect. “We believe the island of Santorini is the exact island described by Plato in Timaeus and Critias.”
Ben saw Sarah lean forward in the booth. “Explain,” she said, her voice shaky.
Mrs. E pulled out her phone, swiping around the screen for a few seconds.
Julie looked at Mrs. E, her own phone ready in her hand. “First, should we hear the original text? In Plato’s own words?”
Ben nodded, sensing that the tension he’d felt in the past ten or so hours was finally going to be resolved.
“I’ll pull it up,” Julie said.
Ben smiled. “Well I think it’s probably helpful to get another drink, in that case. Hold that thought?”
37
Ben
REFRESHED AND TOPPED OFF AFTER to a trip to the restroom and hotel bar, Ben sat back down at the round booth and looked around. “Did you wait for me?” he asked.
Mrs. E nodded. “We did. I was just sharing a bit more with the group about the algorithm we used.”
“Well, sorry I missed that.”
“Anyway, I will get back to it. Plato’s words describing Atlantis: ‘For it is related in our records how once upon a time your State stayed the course of a mighty host… and it was possible for travelers of that time to cross from it to the other islands and from the islands to the whole of the continent over against them which encompasses the veritable ocean...’”
She looked up to see that everyone was still tracking with her, just as Sarah spoke. “So Plato is referencing a great nation, right?”
Ben nodded. “Sounds like it. Who is he referring to when he says ‘your state?’”
“I know this one,” Sarah answered. “And it’s a great question. Since there was a lot of ‘he said, she said’ stuff going on about Plato’s words since his time, it’s hard to know for sure. But we’re almost positive the ‘State’ we’re seeing here is Athens. Essentially Plato used this dialogue, or at least this section of the dialogue, as a way to brag on Ancient Greece, so it’s likely he’s paying homage to his ancestors.”
Mrs. E nodded and continued. “Right. But the real question is: what is this ‘great nation’ Plato is talking about? Not Athens, but the other one in the story.”
Again, Ben jumped in. “Atlantis?”
Reggie smiled. “That’s the obvious answer, isn’t it?” He paused and Ben saw the sly grin on the woman’s face as Reggie continued. “Which tells me that the right answer is not the obvious one.”
“Well,” Mrs. E said, “Plato is writing down a story that was told to him by a man who heard it from a man who’d visited Egypt many years prior. Egypt is relevant in the story, but we still believe the ‘state’ referenced is Athens. And the story, ultimately, is about Atlantis, but the syntax of the language — and this is based on linguists’ research, not mine, as I can’t speak Greek — doesn’t line up. It’s a weird conundrum.”
“I can attest to that,” Sarah said. Everyone looked her direction. “I don’t speak Greek either, but my father studied it years ago. He always had a fascination with the syntax of the language. How it was sometimes impossible to accurately translate Greek to any modern language. And he definitely said that was true about the way the great Greek philosophers wrote, especially Plato.”
“You have heard this before?” Mrs. E asked.
“Yes,” Sarah rolled her eyes. “It was one of my dad’s favorite topics.”
Julie was laughing now, sipping her drink. “Come on, spill it. You’ve got me in suspense.”
Sarah nodded. “Sorry. I can’t resist a good mystery, though. Got that from my old man. And part of me still thinks this is his way of giving me yet another mystery to solve. All of this cryptic Plato stuff, Atlantis — I’m not sure if he’s playing around or not.”
Ben understood what she really meant. I hope this is all just a game.
He had a feeling it was not a game.
Sarah continued. “Basically, it’s extremely difficult to parse the ancient Greek in a way that translates to anything substantive in any modern language, so there’s a bit of guesswork at this point. Where do we put commas, periods, semicolons, for example? We all know how crucial punctuation can be in understanding written language.” She paused, then laughed. “My dad had a way of explaining that, too. He used to show me an old drawing. The title of it was Commas Save Lives, and there were two short sentences beneath the title: ‘Let’s eat, Grandpa,’ and, ‘Let’s eat Grandpa.’”
The group chuckled while Mrs. E continued the retelling and explanation of Plato’s manuscript. “The part that does seem quite explicit and easy to understand comes next. In Critias, Plato gives us actual measurements of this island:
“‘an island comprising mostly of mountains in the northern portions and along the shore, and encompassing a great plain of an oblong shape in the south extending in one direction three-thousand stadia, but across the center, it was only two-thousand stadia. Fifty stadia from the coast was a mountain that was low on all sides…’
“He then mentions a ‘central island’ that was five stades in diameter.”
“So Plato actually tells us exactly what this island looks like?” Reggie asked.
“He does.”
Ben frowned. “What are we missing, then? Those are pretty specific measurements, right? Why can’t we just look around the world for an island that matches the descriptions he gave us?”
Ben realized he knew the answer to the question as soon as he’d asked it. If it had truly been that simple, researchers and geographers would have been able to pinpoint the ‘co
ntinent’ of Atlantis long ago. He was about to protest when Reggie shifted in his seat.
“I’m going to guess that’s exactly why we’re here,” he said, looking at Mrs. E. “I’d bet good money you think Santorini is one of islands that didn’t get flooded.”
“Yes,” Mrs. E said. “I have read the passage over and over again until it was memorized. We were just trying to find something tangible we could extract from Plato’s otherwise ‘untrustworthy’ work. Something that might point us in the right direction. When I thought of Sarah’s letter from her father, something clicked. He opened the letter with a quote from Plato, remember? ‘We are twice armed if we fight with faith.’ I kept trying to understand why he referenced Plato.”
“He’s the one who wrote about Atlantis,” Julie offered. “That’s why we started researching all of this in the first place.”
“Right,” Mrs. E said. “But I wondered if there was anything else to it. Why he’d invoke the words of an old, ancient philosopher in just a letter to his daughter. How antiquated, right?”
“Because he’s old?”
Mrs. E smiled, but shook her head. “He was not just giving us a clue as to what he was studying, he was giving us a clue as to where it might be.”
Sarah frowned. “How’s that?”
“It is not about the fact that Plato is old. It is how old he is. Give or take a few hundred years, Plato wrote those words two-thousand years ago.”
“Yeah, that’s old,” Ben said. “What’s the point?”
“Because Plato himself was invoking a much older writer. He was writing about a time, during Atlantis’ reign, approximately 9,000 years before him. That’s 11,000 years, give or take, before now.”
Reggie’s eyes widened. “I get it. Geography.”
Sarah nodded along. “Right. It’s my father’s life’s work — archeology, geology, and history, all coming together. Who’s to say the islands that we have today are the same islands that were around back then?”
“Precisely,” Mrs. E said. “The Earth is constantly changing, going through cataclysmic events. Scholars generally agree that these events happen every ten thousand years or so, and they can even completely reshape the landscape in a certain area.”
Julie and Ben smiled, and Ben began to understand. “Right,” he said. “Atlantis supposedly sunk beneath the sea, right? In ‘one day and one night,’ or something like that? Which begs the question — why should we be looking for an island in the first place?”
“Exactly,” Sarah said. “Based on all this, we shouldn’t be looking for an island. We should be scouring the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. And that’s where most of the professionals and amateur sleuths have been focusing their attention: finding raised areas of the Atlantic Ocean that could be shaped like Atlantis, searching for underwater cities, and the like.”
Mrs. E jumped in. “So we decided to program the search algorithm to search records that were historically appropriate — anything that referenced prehistoric time. Things like ancient Egypt, Greece, Macedonia, etcetera. We told it to look for shapes that matched Plato’s description, with a twenty percent margin of error, based on what we knew of the globe at least 9,000 years before Plato’s time.
“And to make things interesting, we added in whatever geologic records we could gather that studied that time period and fed that to the program.”
“So you were able to search images of the entire world, as it existed 11,000 years ago?” Reggie asked.
“Yes.”
“And that’s why we’re here?” Ben asked. “Because Plato gave us everything but the exact coordinates of Atlantis, and they pointed to this location?”
Mrs. E nodded, a flash of color coming to her face as her obvious excitement grew.
Mrs. E straightened, taking a final sip of her lime and seltzer water. “Yes, Ben. That’s correct. And the program only took an hour to figure it out, with less than a three-percent margin of error. Plato was describing, without a doubt, the island of Santorini.”
38
Julie
JULIE UNDERSTOOD THE CONCEPT: use artificial intelligence to aid in creating an algorithm that could search any existing maps of the ancient world for an island. An island that would have existed many millennia before Plato’s time but matched his description.
She’d helped Mrs. E build the algorithm, then the woman had gone silent as she’d analyzed the results and collected the data.
But to her, it still didn’t completely add up. “You’re telling me that Plato described the exact geology of Santorini, and that’s why we’re here? Why has no one else considered it yet? And more importantly — there are people here. In Santorini. How could they not have noticed that they live in Atlantis?”
“Well,” Mrs. E said, holding up a hand. “Santorini isn’t exactly Atlantis. It’s just the closest thing to it.”
Julie pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose. I hope this isn’t all a waste of time. The technology Mrs. E had used to deduce their location was fascinating, but if it didn’t actually help them find Sarah’s father, it was all for naught.
Mrs. E continued, unfazed. “Remember, Plato’s words were describing a place that existed 9,000 years before his time. He was describing an island that, by the time Plato had even heard of it, had been underwater for thousands of years.
“So Santorini is only one portion of this larger island,” Mrs. E said, still smiling. “We are here because our journey — your father’s journey, Sarah — begins here.”
Sarah nodded. “You sure about that?”
“It has to be here,” Mrs. E said. “Whether or not Plato was describing the mythical ‘Lost Continent of Atlantis,’ he was absolutely, without a doubt, describing the island that used to exist in this area.”
“Can you show us?” Reggie asked.
Julie was intrigued, and glad Reggie asked. Seeing it on a map would be a much better way of visualizing what Mrs. E and her husband had discovered. She waited in anticipation as Mrs. E grabbed one of the napkins from the center of the booth. She looked around awkwardly for a moment.
“I do not carry a purse,” she said. “Does anyone have a —”
Before she could finish, Sarah had handed her a pen. Mrs. E thanked her and began to draw. First, she sketched the island they had landed on.
“This is Santorini, or Thira, as it’s called in Greece,” she said. “It’s a set of a few islands — one larger, circular one split into two sections that we’re on now, and one smaller one in the middle. It’s easy to spot the volcanic ring here, and how the island itself was formed over time.”
She pointed out the major cities that currently existed, dotting the areas around the coastline around the island.
“There’s an old volcano in the middle, called Nea Kameni, and this smaller island,” she said as she sketched in the smaller island that existed in the open waters next to the curved archipelago, “used to be a part of the archipelago itself.”
“That’s Thirasia,” Sarah said, jumping in. “There are about three-hundred people currently living there. It’s small, out of the way, and pretty much the epitome of Greek countryside living.”
“Sounds like you’ve been there,” Reggie said.
“I have, when I was just a kid,” Sarah said. “We stopped in Santorini and took a boat out to the island, just to visit. My father had some talk to give or some other work somewhere on the islands, so it was just a quick layover.”
Mrs. E was about to continue drawing, but then looked up at the others around the table. “You know what? This is probably easier. Let me just pull it up on my phone.” She fumbled around a bit on her phone, then laid it flat on the table. Julie could see on the screen an image of a map, zoomed in to the area northwest of the tiny island of Santorini.
Julie leaned closer and saw at top-left corner of the screen the very edge of Greece, its capital city of Athens barely visible.
“This whole region is the area known as the Cyclades, a gro
up of small Greek islands in the Aegean Sea, off the coast of Athens.”
Julie looked at the map, seeing the tiny blobs of white and green, surrounded by endless blue. She silently read the names: Mikonos, Tinos, Andros, Siros. There were countless more, each smaller than the last, forming a huge array of dots set atop the Mediterranean.
“11,000 years ago, however,” Mrs. E said, “the region didn’t look anything like this.”
She copied the map onto her napkin, roughly sketching the islands and outlines of the individual Greek states. When she finished, she looked up.
“It turns out that 11,000 years ago, the area of the Cyclades had a much different geography.”
She sketched in some of the surrounding area that collected a handful of the islands into a single, unified group:
Julie stared down at the drawing. Mrs. E had drawn, very roughly, a triangle. There was a curved, skinny section that stretched up from the top of the triangle toward Athens, and the outermost islands in the group formed the two bottom points at the base of the triangle. The island of Santorini sat apart from the rest, southeast a bit. Santorini looked like the detached head of a larger, two-dimensional creature.
“This is what the Cyclades area looked like approximately nine millennia before Plato.”
Mrs. E began circling areas on the map she’d just drawn. “It was called the Cyclades Plateau because this area in the center —” she pointed to the narrow, long section between two islands — “was exactly that. Before the waters rose, it was a large, flat plateau. Plato even references it directly: ‘an island comprising mostly of mountains in the northern portions and along the shore, and encompassing a great plain of an oblong shape in the south extending in one direction.’
