by A. G. Riddle
“Impossible.”
“She said there was a third person that joined your expedition—a soldier. She colluded with him to change the genome. She said his name was Ares.”
Janus just stood there, silently.
“Dorian has Ares’s memories. He’s captured Kate—that’s what Shaw’s mission was. I’m sure of it now. There were rumors at the Immari base in Ceuta. Dorian brought a case out of the structure in Antarctica. It created some kind of door. He’s taking Kate there. She’s in danger.”
“If what you say is true, Mr. Vale, we are all in danger. If they reach the portal, if she is delivered to Ares, every person on this planet, and many more, will likely perish.”
CHAPTER 90
St. Paul’s Catacombs
Rabat, Malta
David stepped to within arm’s length of Janus. The soft yellow light from the cube lit both their faces from below, giving the impression of two men sitting around a campfire, their faces lit from flashlights held just under their chins.
“Help me save her,” David said.
“No,” Janus replied, his tone now sharp and urgent. “You will help me save her.”
“What—”
“You have no idea what you are involved in, Mr. Vale. This is larger—”
“So tell me. Believe me, I’m ready for answers.”
“First, I require your pledge that you will follow my orders—that you will do what I say, when I say.”
David stared at him.
Janus continued, “I have observed that in high-stakes, high-stress situations, you prefer—or rather, demand—to be in charge. You have trouble taking orders—and taking risks, especially when lives are on the line, particularly Kate’s. This is a liability. It is not your fault. It is perhaps a result of your past—”
“I’ll pass on the psychoanalysis, thanks. Look, if you promise you’ll do everything you can to save her, I’ll do whatever you tell me to.”
“Believe me, I will do everything in my power. But I fear our chances are not good. Seconds will count, Mr. Vale. And we start now.”
Janus stood, held out his hand, and the glowing cube flew from it, diving into the stone wall. A cloud of dust radiated out from the center.
David stood and watched. The cube moved deeper into the tunnel, chewing through the stone like a laser.
David touched the wall. It was smooth—just like the hollowed-out path outside the structure in Gibraltar, the darkened tunnel he had walked out of. I really am way out of my league here, he thought.
“So that’s how you did that…”
“This little quantum cube has gotten me out of quite a few jams on my travels.”
David glanced back at the dust cloud floating out of the smooth tunnel. “Yeah, well, thank goodness for… quantum cubes…”
On the ground, Milo stirred slightly. David walked over to him and knelt. “Will he be all right?”
“Yes.”
David rolled Milo over. “How do you feel?”
Milo opened his eyes slowly. “Smushed.” He coughed, and David helped him sit up.
“Just take it easy, we’re getting out of here.”
“We?” Janus asked.
“Yes. We’re not leaving him here.” David stopped short and shook his head. This new command paradigm would take some getting used to. “Or rather, I respectfully submit, for your consideration, that we should bring him along. He is a member of the Immaru. He found the Ark before us. His knowledge could be useful, and he could help us.”
Janus walked closer and inspected the teenager. “Incredible. After all these years. How many of you are left?”
Milo looked up. “Just me.”
“A shame,” Janus said. “Yes, please join us…”
“Milo.”
“A pleasure, Milo. My name is Arthur Janus.”
Milo made the best bow he could manage from the sitting position.
At the opening to the room, the cube was cutting deeper into the new tunnel in the stone catacombs. The yellow light it emitted was fading as the cube moved farther away. David wondered how long it would take for the cube to reach the surface, and more importantly, if he could make it to Kate in time.
Kate had stopped struggling with Shaw and the guards at her side once the helicopter had lifted off. Where could she go now? She was trapped until they landed. Then what? Could she make a break for it?
They had strapped her in tight to the seat, and zip-tied her hands for good measure.
She stared at Dorian, who sat across from her. He seemed to have perfected the half-smile, half-smirk he always wore. It seemed to say: I know something you don’t, something bad is going to happen to you, and I’ll break into a full grin when it does.
She wanted to strike him. Shaw sat beside Dorian. He stared mildly out the helicopter’s window, like a kid amused by his first plane ride.
“You killed Martin.”
Shaw glanced up at her, as if he had just realized she was still there.
“You did,” he mumbled.
“You broke his neck—”
“He was dying the moment Orchid failed. You prolonged his agony, Kate.”
It was a lie. “Why, Adam?”
He tore his eyes away from the window for the first time. “I knew if he came to, he would recognize me, expose me. I’d assumed he would die without my help, but Chang’s therapy, it made him better. When you left to… join David, it was the first chance I had. I did what I had to—to complete my mission. Nothing personal.”
Dorian leaned forward. “Don’t listen to him, Kate. We both know this is personal. Has been for, what, seventy thousand years now?” He smiled. “That’s your big blind spot, isn’t it? People. You never can get a read on anyone. You’re clever as hell, but you never see the big betrayal coming. I just, God, I love that about you. It’s hilarious.”
Kate closed her eyes and willed herself not to react. She could feel the anger rising inside her. How could he always get under her skin? He manipulated her so easily. The monster seemed to know where every one of her buttons was. He pressed them with such ease, grinning the entire time, knowing exactly how she would react.
She tried to focus, tried to block him out. In the darkness, a voice called, “He betrayed us.”
Kate opened her eyes. She was in a steel room that held four standing tubes. A Neanderthal stood motionless in one. She was in Gibraltar, in the chamber her father had found in 1918. This was the last memory, the one she hadn’t quite been able to reach. Seeing Dorian, his words, had triggered it.
“Did you hear me?” the voice called again.
A video appeared inside Kate’s helmet. A head in a helmet just like hers: Janus. He was the other member of the Atlantean science team, her partner.
“Did you—”
“I heard you,” Kate said. She was leaning against a table at the center of the room. She turned around to face Janus. She had to tell him.
“I—” she stammered. “Yes, Ares has betrayed us—”
Another blast rocked the ship.
“—But I helped him.” Inside her helmet, the video feed of Janus disappeared, and she again stared at the mirrored reflection from his helmet. Apparently Janus didn’t want Kate to see his reaction. “He told me he wanted to help. To make them safe. All of us,” she added quickly.
“He used you—and our research. He must have the gene therapy he needs to build his army.”
Kate watched Janus pace across the room to a control panel. He worked it quickly.
“What are you doing?” Kate asked.
“Ares will try to take the primary ship. He needs it to transport his army. I have locked it down.”
Kate nodded. On her helmet display, she watched the commands scroll by. Each line seemed to bring more memories, more comprehension. The ship they stood in now was simply a local lander. They had come here on a larger science ship, capable of deep space travel. Their protocol was always minimal footprint and minimal visibility. They di
dn’t need the ship while they were conducting experiments on the planet’s surface, and they didn’t want it to be seen. They had hidden it on the opposite side of the planet’s only moon, burying it deep. The portal doors on the lander provided instant access to the ship if they ever needed it, but Janus’s commands were locking the ship down now—it would be closed to any remote control from Gibraltar or Antarctica. They couldn’t get back to the ship now and neither could Ares, at least not through a portal door.
Janus continued manipulating the controls. “I’m going to set some traps as well, in case Ares does somehow make it to the ship.”
Kate watched the commands scroll by. Another explosion rocked the ship, this one much more violent than the last.
Janus paused. “The ship is breaking up. It will be ripped apart.”
Kate stood there, not sure what to do.
“Has Ares administered his therapy yet? Has he transformed them?”
Kate tried to think. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
Janus worked the panel feverishly. Kate saw a series of DNA sequences flash by. The computer was running simulations.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“The ship is going to be destroyed. The primitives will find it. I am modifying the time-dilation devices at the perimeter to emit radiation that will roll back all our therapies. They will be as they were before we found them, before the first therapy.”
That was it—the Bell was Janus’s attempt to reverse all the Atlanteans’ genetic interventions. Except, in this memory, thirteen thousand years ago, when Janus was programming the Bell, he was looking at the wrong genome. The primitives, as he called them, wouldn’t find the ship until 1918, when Kate’s father would dig it up under the Bay of Gibraltar. Janus wasn’t counting on the time difference, the delay in finding the Bell, the genetic changes that would occur. And Kate knew there would be two very big changes—the “deltas” from Martin’s chronology, the two outbreaks of plague in the sixth and thirteenth century. Yes, those must have been Ares’s interventions, the administration of the therapy Kate had helped him create. Why had it come so late? Why had he waited twelve thousand years? Where had he been? And where had Janus been? He was alive here in the past and he had been there in the future.
The ship shuddered again, throwing Kate against the wall. Her head slammed into the helmet and her body went limp. She couldn’t see anything. She heard footsteps. Janus’s voice echoed in her helmet, but she couldn’t make out the words. She felt him lift her up and carry her.
CHAPTER 91
St. Paul’s Catacombs
Rabat, Malta
David switched on a lantern and focused on Janus. “Answers. I want to know what we’re dealing with here.”
Janus glanced at the rounded stone tunnel the hovering cube was slowly carving.
“Very well. We have a bit of time. Submit your first question.”
Where do I start? David thought. “You saved me. How and why?”
“The how is beyond your scientific grasp—”
“Well dumb it down for my primitive hominin brain, which apparently seventy thousand years of Atlantean intervention hasn’t perfected.”
“Clearly. The how is somewhat related to the why. I shall start there. I will also need to give you a bit of background. I said before that you did not actually see me in Antarctica. You saw my avatar. Have you surmised why?”
“You were in Gibraltar.”
“Yes. Very good, Mr. Vale. Your Dr. Grey actually figured out a great deal of the Atlantean history on this planet. It was shocking for me to read his chronology. It was quite accurate, despite the gaps in his knowledge, things he could not know.”
“Such as?”
“What he described as ‘A$ falls’—the fall of Atlantis, the destruction of our ship off the coast of Gibraltar. It was an attack. As you know, there were two of us. Scientists who had traveled the galaxies studying human evolution on countless human worlds.”
“Incredible,” David mumbled.
“This world, your species, is what is incredible. Our species is old. Long ago, we turned our focus to other worlds, and in particular, to any world that harbored human life. It became our obsession. One question in particular dominated our expeditions, the greatest question of all: where did we come from?”
“Evolution—”
“Is only the biological process. There is much more to the story; your science will reveal that one day. You already know that the universe supports the emergence of human life. In fact, the universe is strictly programmed for it. If any of the constants were even slightly different—gravity, the strength of electromagnetism, the dimensions in space-time—any of them, there would no human life. There are only two possibilities: either human life emerged because the laws of the universe support it by random chance; or the alternative: the universe was created to foster human life.”
David considered Janus’s statement.
“Our first assumption was that it was merely chance; that we existed because we were simply one of an infinite number of biological possibilities in an infinite number of universes that exist in the multiverse. Our theory was that we exist, because mathematically we must exist in some universe, given that there are infinite possible universes and we are a finite possible outcome. We exist in this universe because it is the only one our brains are capable of being aware of.”
“Yeah.” David had no idea what else to say to that.
“Then we made a discovery that altered our understanding, made us question our assumptions. We discovered a quantum entity, a subatomic substance pervading the universe. It was the greatest discovery in our existence. The accepted consensus was that this quantum entity was simply another universal constant, something that must exist in our universe to give rise to human life. But a group of us began to delve deeper into the mystery. Through thousands of years of practice, we learned to access this quantum entity, but we hit a wall—”
David held his hand up. “Okay, you got me. I give. I have no idea what a quantum entity is.”
“Are you familiar with quantum entanglement?”
“Uh, no.”
“Very well. Let me just say that we discovered that all humans are linked through the quantum entity. Some members of our society with an especially strong connection can even use the link to communicate over distances.”
David’s mind flashed to the dreams he’d shared with Kate.
“You find this hard to believe, Mr. Vale?”
“No. Actually, I do believe it. Go on.”
“We call this quantum entity that links all humans the Origin Entity. Investigating its creation, our creation, is our great work. We call it ‘The Origin Mystery.’ We believe the Origin Entity exerts influence over the entire universe, that it is both the origin point and the final destination for human consciousness.”
Milo nodded. “This is the creation story you gave us.”
“Yes,” Janus said. “Your minds had advanced so far, so quickly. You craved answers, in particular about your existence. We gave you the only answers we had, though we modified them so that you might understand them. And we gave you our code—a moral blueprint: practices that we have found bring us closer to the Origin Entity, practices we have found enhance the link, tying humans closer to each other and the harmony the Origin Entity offers. We also emphasized that every human life is valuable; every human is connected to the Origin Entity and could reveal more about the mystery.” Janus paused. “Much of our message has been lost over the ages, however.”
“Some still believe,” Milo said.
“Yes, clearly. Ultimately, our mission here has failed, but it began with such promise. In all the years of our investigations of the Origin Mystery, we had never seen a species like yours. We monitor all the human worlds. As a historian, you will appreciate this, Mr. Vale. On this planet, a relatively minor geological event three and a half million years ago caused a cataclysm that directly led to the emergence
of humanity. Three and a half million years ago, the collision of two tectonic plates elevated the seafloor of what is now the western Caribbean, forming the Isthmus of Panama. For the first time, the Atlantic and Pacific were separated, preventing the large-scale mixing of their waters. This set off a chain reaction that led to an ice age on this planet, which it’s still in. In West Africa, the jungles began to shrink. A number of species of higher-order primates lived in the trees there during this period. In the following years, savannas gradually replaced the lush jungles, driving those primates down from the trees and onto the grasslands. The sources of their vegetarian diet were largely gone. Many perished, but a small group took another path: they adapted. They ventured out onto the vast plains and began hunting new sources of food. For the first time, they ate meat, and it changed their brains. So did hunting. These primates, these prehistoric survivalists, grew smarter than any primates before them. They eventually made primitive stone tools and hunted in packs. This pattern—of climate disruption, of near-extinction in a rapidly changing environment, and then rebound, of adapting—would come to be the hallmark pattern that repeats itself over and over again during your species’ march to its current state. We came here to study you when you were still in your infancy, hoping a species with such a meteoric rise, evolutionarily speaking, could reveal something new about the Origin Mystery.
“We followed all of our usual precautions. We deployed a Beacon that followed the planet’s orbit.”
“A beacon?”
“A shroud—to keep anyone from seeing your development and to keep you from seeing any other human worlds. What you call the Fermi Paradox—the fact that human worlds must be abundant, yet you have found none—is actually a result of the Beacon. It filters the light you can see, and the light your world emits to anyone outside the shroud. We also followed all the other procedures. We buried our ship—”
“In Antarctica?” David asked.
“No. That’s a different ship. I’ll explain momentarily. We typically hide our deep-space vessel in a local asteroid belt or, in this case, a moon—for added security, just in case a probe gets by the Beacon. The universe is a dangerous place, and we have no desire to call attention to our subjects or ourselves. We deployed our lander to the surface and remained here. Our routine remained the same after that, just as it was on other planets: we collected samples, analyzed our results, and hibernated, awakening only at regular intervals to repeat our process. However, one hundred thousand years ago, we were awakened early by a distress call. Our home world was under attack. Another message followed shortly after. Our world had fallen in a day and a night to an enemy of unimaginable strength. We were instructed to remain on a shrouded world for our own safety. We believed that our enemy would hunt any remaining Atlanteans to the end of the universe. Our fear was that the Armageddon would extend to all humans, across all human worlds. The next event you know well. Seventy thousand years ago, a supervolcano in present-day Indonesia erupted, spewing ash into the sky and causing a volcanic winter that brought your species to the brink of extinction. The population alarms awoke my partner and me from hibernation. It was our greatest fear. We thought that we could be the last of our species: two scientists who could never go home. And we were watching what could be the extinction of some of the last humans our enemy had not yet found. So my partner made a fateful decision.”
