by M. G. Harris
His first brief experience of that ancient gallery had left a profound impression upon him; since that day whenever he’d closed his eyes for anything more than a few moments he’d been unable to quell the images which at once flooded his consciousness, his memory unable to contain anything but the most fleeting semblance of what seemed by the day more like a vision, an insubstantial phantasm.
But as he stood once more within the octagonal space, the endless symmetry of the symbolism and architecture imposed itself. Under closer observation, Jackson could see now that not only were the lids of the sarcophagi – or caskets – engraved with long cuneiform inscriptions, but so was the base of the altar. In the top of the altar were seven very narrow slots, hardly three millimeters thick. The Adaptor sat in the same position as before.
“There’s something I want to show you,” Connor told him. He picked up the Adaptor with a gloved hand, held it lengthways in his palm, then appeared to squeeze gently, rubbing his thumb gently along the side of the artifact. He seemed to be concentrating, as though threading a needle. After a second or so there was a tiny sound, like a small pop of pressurized gas escaping. At one end of the Adaptor, a square leaf of material appeared to slide out, emerging from the apparently seamless structure of the article. It was about one inch square and about two millimeters thick.
“We think that this little pop-out fits into a tiny groove here, buried within the larger groove into which the Adaptor slots when it is in position.”
“The question is,” Jackson murmured, thinking aloud, “How can an amino acid sequence be used to activate the Adaptor?”
“Any ideas?” asked Connor.
Jackson thought a few moments longer. “Just one,” he said. “And I can test it right now.”
“Good,” Connor said. “Because we need to activate this chamber.”
“Why?”
“I told you we’d found traces of human remains in the chamber. Well, in three of the caskets, there are more than traces. Three of those caskets are occupied, Jackson. And whoever is inside has been there for thousands of years.”
Jackson stared in amazement. Connor’s implication was utterly clear. “But the chambers are over seventy thousand years old. It’s not possible for someone to survive that long in suspended animation, surely!”
“Maybe so. But I think there might be survivors.” Jackson’s reaction to this seemed to trigger something in Connor. “That’s what DiCanio wants, isn’t it? That’s why she wanted the Adaptor, that’s why she’s been after you. She wants to activate the chamber in Mexico. Maybe there are survivors of this ancient civilization there, too.”
“The ‘long-lived awakened man.’”
“Right – the ‘masters who came from heaven and earth.’ Fairly portentous, when you think about it. What do you think ‘frightening splendor’ means?”
“Something that I don’t think will work on you and me.”
Connor turned to him, stalling. Jackson just grinned. Finally, he had his brother hanging onto his every word. “The ‘Eastern mind-control shit’, remember? The same molecule, when you inject it, gives you the power to influence people.”
“The ‘frightening splendor makes men weak’.”
“Right. It’s too much for it to be a coincidence.”
“So they’re spelling out some kind of prophecy – in chemicals?”
Jackson shook his head. “I think it’s more like they named those glyphs after their words for the amino acids in that molecule.”
“The molecule came first?”
“It’s like, the basis for their genetic superiority. If they really were the ‘masters’ then they were accustomed to being in power. Their words of power came from this molecule.”
“But the power won’t work on us . . .”
“If I’m a descendant, then so are you.”
“Weird. We’re going to try to wake up our super-great grandparents.”
“Let’s hope they’re pleased to see us.”
“Let’s hope we’re not too late.”
This time it was Jackson who paused, holding back his brother. “Too late? For what?”
“Those ancients had to have a pretty important reason; all this trouble to keep their people alive for all that time.”
“Such as what?”
“Global catastrophe, brother. Don’t tell anyone, but it might just be that the ancient Mayans were right.”
Jackson stared. “The . . . Mayans?”
“DiCanio’s guy on the pier at Doha Corniche, the American towelhead? His image was captured by nearby CCTV. His name is Simon Martineau. He’s wanted by the FBI, amongst others, usually travels under an alias – Simon Madison. Earlier this year, Madison interfered with an operation we had to recover an ancient Mayan document, a codex. It was once owned by the pilot who crashed the incredibly advanced aircraft that we captured.”
“Hafez Kazmi mentioned a ‘Madison’,” mused Jackson. “He seemed to think he might be immune to the Adaptor bio-toxin, too.”
“Makes sense that they’d know about the bio-toxin,” Connor said. “They seem to know quite a bit about this ancient technology.”
“The ancients that are still around, even now?”
“If not them, then some folk who know how to build their technology.”
“What’s in the codex?”
Connor shook his head and shrugged. “I’m not sure we’ll ever know. Someone beat us to it.”
“Madison? DiCanio?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“What – there’s someone else looking for the codex?”
Connor became hesitant. “We’re aware of another group, based in Mexico. That’s the limit of what I can tell you without putting you under non-disclosure.”
“Does this codex have something to do with the ancient chambers?”
“We don’t know how, but it’s all connected. 2012, Jacko. That’s what this is about. Those ancients knew something about the Mayan calendar end-date.”
Jackson was silent, thinking of what DiCanio had told him about the origin-date of the gene they shared: roughly 3000BC. The Mayan calendar start date was in 3114BC. Had that been when the last survivors had been revived? Was the Mayan calendar end-date the marker for another landmark event?
Connor rubbed his hands, stuck them into his trouser pockets. The desert air cooled sharply as night fell. “Those ancients left survivors and technology to help us,” he said. “You can’t even touch their technology unless you have some sort of inherited, protective factor. Yeah – we’ve learned a lot about this whole 2012 situation from the inscriptions in the chamber, but not enough. Without that codex, without at least a chance to talk to these ancient survivors, we’re helpless.”
“DiCanio wants to revive the ancients in the chamber in Mexico. Maybe she’s trying to help?”
“There you go, seeing all sides of the argument. You’ve met the woman. You really think she’s in this to save the world?”
Jackson thought for a minute. DiCanio and her associates had come across as brilliant, fiercely intelligent and determined idealists. At the dinner in Switzerland, he’d felt a degree of sympathy with them, if truth were told. Idealists wanted to change the world. Hypnoticin might give DiCanio the means to achieve this. Jackson recalled, with discomfort, the exhilaration of those moments when he’d used hypnoticin. Was it possible that such power could ever be used in a benign fashion?
“I think she wants to save the world, yeah. But she may also want to change it.”
Connor grasped Jackson’s arm near the bicep. He pointed at the insignia on his own jacket. “Then you’d better remember: this is who we serve today, Jacko; the US of A. That’s how we save the world.”
The Original Parents
The chamber must have been buried at least thirty yards below the ground. There was no sign of a natural cave system: the rock walls were clean, showed signs of having been cut. Jackson found himself wondering how the location had been chosen. There wer
e five chambers, according to Agent Fletcher. Were the others close by? What was their purpose?
Connor told him, “The other chambers are scattered across the planet. We figure it’s a redundancy system.”
“In case some chambers were destroyed?”
“There would be a lot of possible outcomes, over seventy thousand years. You’d need several types of redundancy: more than one chamber, enough survivors in case some didn’t make it.”
“Seventy thousand years, though. It’s hard to imagine how you could resuscitate any kind of brain activity after that long.”
“That’s what our science guys figured,” agreed Connor. “But if the chamber was used as a hibernation complex, there’s no reason why the caskets have to be used for the entire period of time. Maybe they only last for a few thousand years at a time.”
“That could work,” Jackson said. “Someone would have to be revived every so often and then re-hibernated. You could appear to be practically immortal, skipping through the millennia, living just a few days in every thousand.”
“You’re saying they’d have to be revived every few thousand years?”
“I’m guessing some kind of suspended animation could last a few thousand years. However much you slow down the metabolism, there’s always going to be a finite amount of aging. A system where you revived a few people every few thousand years might be safer.”
“Like a kind of daisy chain.”
“Five chambers. Each one with twenty-one caskets. That’s quite a bit of redundancy in the system.”
“Jackson – only three of the caskets in this chamber are occupied.”
“Three?” He considered for a moment. “If all you need to pass on is genes and knowledge, two should be enough.”
“Two?”
“The original parents. Adam and Eve. Or like in Noah’s Ark. Male and female.”
Connor gave a soft laugh. “The Ark?”
“Why not? We’re in the right place for it. The Sumerian legend says that Eridu was destroyed by a giant storm.”
Picking a spot that was well-lit by the arc lamp; Jackson knelt on the ground, took a folded sheet of vinyl from his pocket, spread it and smoothed out the wrinkles and creases. The rectangular plastic was about the size of a tea-tray. He began to empty the contents of his pockets onto the sheet; a mechanical pipette, some small plastic test-tubes with lids in a blue polyvinyl rack about three inches square and a screw cap polypropylene tube of a biochemical solution. He proceeded to set up a series of dilutions of the peptide solution that had been shipped in earlier that day.
Connor crouched down. “What are you doing?”
“There’s a technique known as Surface Plasmon Resonance,” replied Jackson, eyes on his work. “It uses the binding event between two proteins to generate a tiny electrical current. The amount of current is determined by the strength of the binding. You bind one protein to a hard matrix, usually on some kind of silicon chip. Then you flow a solution of the second protein over it. When you get binding, you get a change in the current. Now, in theory, you could use such a system to introduce an exquisitely sensitive lock-and-key mechanism. It would use very little energy and be extremely precise. So, to answer your question, what I’m doing is getting ready to test whether this peptide, whose amino acid sequence code is written on the surface of the Adaptor, is in fact the key which unlocks some activation mechanism.
“I’m starting with some really low dilutions. If the process is real sensitive, then too much of the peptide will overload it, it could sorta blow a circuit. The peptide might bind so tight that we’d never get it off, we’d never be able to try again.”
Connor interrupted, “Whoa, whoa, you say you’re gonna do something potentially irreversible?”
“Hey, find me the precise instructions for how much of the peptide to use, and we’ll be fine!” Jackson said angrily. “What’s that? You don’t have them? OK. Let’s do it my way. Trust me Connor; this is what I do.”
Jackson dropped a small amount of the lowest dilution of the peptide solution onto the extended leaf. He then carefully inserted the Adaptor, fitting it into position. They waited for a second or two; nothing.
“OK, let’s try ten times that much,” Jackson said, and repeated the process using the next dilution of peptide. Again, nothing.
This happened repeatedly until Jackson had only one dilution left to try.
“We’d better hope this is the one.”
When he inserted the Adaptor, again nothing happened. With a sigh, Jackson was just about to remove it, when Connor stopped him.
He pointed to the central altar. “Look.”
Later, Jackson would attempt in vain to recall exactly the spectacle which he witnessed. Possessed of an ineffable quality, the next moments seemed scarcely transmittable by mere language. It began with a faint garnet-colored shimmering, which emanated from the inscriptions. The writing seemed literally to become projected in front of them. One of them – Jackson wasn’t sure who – had the presence of mind to switch off the arc lamp, plunging the brothers momentarily into darkness. The holographic writing glowed, sharp and defined in the pitch black, suspended in mid-air.
From above the central altar rose a small sphere; dazzlingly bright; Jackson couldn’t look directly at it and noticed that Connor too was shielding their eyes. It rose about one yard above the altar and then began to rotate. The speed increased with every rotation, until discrete pulses of energy broke free from its surface, like solar flares being pinched from the surface of the sun. Bright streams of pure energy were hurled free, every time closer to where Jackson and Connor stood.
They backed away, watching as the flares of light extended to the caskets. When they did, a hazy, particulate suspension began to emanate from the edges of the sarcophagi. After another minute or so, the doors began, slowly, to slide upwards, drawn back into hidden gaps in the ceiling.
The two brothers were still, reverently so. The air immediately around them crackled with static; there was a smell of scorching, bone-dry cotton, wafts of hot air. As the ceramic doors pulled away, three bodies were revealed in the sarcophagi. They were perched on stands, titled slightly backwards. All three were dressed in one-piece, pale-colored robes, the fitting snug against the contours of their bodies and covering them from neck to toe. Their arms hung loosely down by their sides, their hair was long, straggly and white. Two of the survivors were men; their thin, grey beards touching their chests. The third was a woman, barely more than five-feet tall, her skin dark, her frame delicate and slim. For several long moments, the three were as still as corpses. Then finally, the woman’s right hand twitched. It rose, painfully slowly, to touch her cheek. When she did so, her eyes opened. She blinked.
In the glow of the inscriptions which still hovered in mid-air, Jackson thought he saw his brother’s eyes glisten. A vertiginous feeling swept through him. He opened his mouth, tried to say something to Connor. But he couldn’t. Knowing that they had witnessed the secret, hypothetical rite which might lie at the center of every civilization known to the planet, Jackson felt an infinite sense of yearning, an infinite sense of awe.
End of the Line?
To: Marie-Carmen Valencia
From: Jackson Bennett
Subject: End of the line?
Well, I’m back in the dustbowl called ‘Iraq’. You have to see this place to believe the mess that twenty-five years of history have made of this part of the world. Just a short flight over in Bahrain and Qatar, they’ve got it all together. This was once the cradle of civilization. There’s been a whole lot of ‘decline and fall’. By the end of next year, all the troops are supposed to be moved out. Will things improve? It’s anyone’s guess.
I write and write, yet still; nothing from you. Where are you? I have to know.
When they brought me back here, I thought I was about to face some pretty serious accusations. But Connor and I made a deal: if I agree to be recruited as a special operative for the National Reconnaissan
ce Office, he’ll file paperwork to show that he recruited me from the beginning, as a double agent.
The rest, I’ll tell you in person, when I find you. Which I’m going to do. If I have to search the world, I’ll track you down: we have unfinished business.
J x
Connor watched Jackson finish the email. He handed him a cup of coffee.
“Take out the part about me filing paperwork to show you were a double agent.” There was a momentary pause after which he added, “And the part about working for the NRO.”
Jackson didn’t argue: there was no point. His brother was better informed than he of the lengths that the government would go to spy on its own people. Instead, he directed his attention to the progress of the recently revived survivors.
Connor sighed. “Two of them are not doing so good. The third, the female, is awake and talking. Agent Fletcher has been going in to debrief.”
“Amazing. Talking to a human being from a civilization so lost that we didn’t even know it existed. That’s got to be pretty bizarre.”
“Fletcher’s in her element. No-one knew how Akkadian or Sumerian would sound when spoken aloud; no-one’s spoken them for thousands of years. Turns out Fletcher’s accent is a little off, but she’s learning fast.”
“What do they speak? Akkadian? Sumerian?”
“Something even older. It seems to have been the progenitor language of both.”
“Does this survivor have a name?”
“She’s called ‘Ninbanda’. Fletcher likes her, I think, although the old lady is kind of alarmed at what’s happening to her pals.”
“Why?”
“Seems that if they don’t make it, we’re in big trouble.”
“We . . . ?”
“All of civilization. The 2012 thing.”
Jackson was silent. His thoughts were now almost entirely preoccupied with finding Marie-Carmen. It seemed grossly unfair that a shadow of catastrophe should fall at this particular moment of his life.
