The Extinction Files Box Set

by A. G. Riddle

  Desmond, see me for details —Yuri

  As soon as Desmond saw that, he walked to Yuri’s condo. “The McClains. The file is empty.”

  “It won’t tell you anything you don’t already know about Conner,” Yuri said.

  “What will it tell me about them?”

  Yuri broke eye contact. “That they were bad people.”

  Desmond had assumed as much. There were two types of people who adopted troubled children: devils and saints. Desmond had hoped that the McClains were the better of the two.

  “Where are they now?”

  “Six feet under,” Yuri said quietly.

  “How?”

  “Car accident.”

  Desmond already knew the older man so well. He was holding back. Desmond was glad.

  “What did Conner do after?”

  “He left. He was seventeen anyway, knew what the foster system had to offer him.” Yuri walked into the living room and sat. “He left to find his own way in life, just like you.” He sighed. “He just wasn’t as lucky.”

  “He had a harder lot,” Desmond said. “And I bet life on the docks in Adelaide wasn’t half as easy as writing code in San Francisco.”

  “Perhaps. But we both know the years before you left Oklahoma weren’t easy for you either. Orville Hughes wasn’t a model parent.”

  “You can say that again,” Desmond muttered.

  “What you can’t do,” Yuri said, “is blame yourself. There’s a big difference between a reason and an excuse. There’s a reason why Conner’s life was hard. And yours, too. But you never let it be an excuse. Responsibility is the difference. You took responsibility for your own actions. You made your choices. So did he. So have I. You can’t blame yourself for what happened to him.”

  A silent moment passed.

  “He’s still young, Desmond. And he has you.”

  “And apparently you.”

  “The three of us have each other now.”

  “I’m thankful for that.”

  Desmond was also thankful that Yuri had redacted the history of Conner’s life with the McClains. There was enough pain written in the rest of the file. Desmond was ready for his younger brother to put it all behind him.

  That began in rehab. Desmond watched the video feeds, of Conner in the group sessions, his evasive answers, his tortured sleep that grew more restless with each night. His determination when withdrawal symptoms overwhelmed him. It was agonizing to watch. And impossible not to.

  With the help of methadone, Conner finally broke free of his heroin addiction. The change in him was radical: he was like a person waking up from a deep sleep and a long nightmare. His demeanor changed. His mind was sharper. He was alive again. But the pain remained, as did his feelings of isolation, of not fitting in with the world. He had no friends. No family. His only solace had been the drug that had made him forget it all. And now he no longer had that. Desmond wanted desperately to drive to the treatment center, embrace his brother, and tell him the truth. Tell him that everything would soon be all right, that he wasn’t alone.

  Yuri urged him not to.

  “Follow the plan, Desmond.”

  On the videos, he watched as Conner opened up in the group sessions. He connected with the others going through treatment, people as wounded as him. And in them, he found companions. He finally made human connections. It was a floodgate opening, parts of his mind that had lain dormant his entire life. He was a different person, and he was discovering who that person was. As Yuri had predicted, he was living the words written at Delphi—coming to know himself. Inside him was a strong resolve. A will to never touch drugs again, to never fall in the hole that had trapped him his entire adult life.

  Yuri and Desmond encouraged the Red Dunes administrators to introduce Conner to a variety of classes and trades, to test his affinities. Unlike Desmond, Conner didn’t excel at computer programming, or math, or any science field. He did, however, have a knack for strategy—no doubt honed by those countless hours playing video games.

  “That’s the key,” Yuri said over dinner at a sushi restaurant.

  “I don’t follow,” Desmond said.

  “Rook Web Hosting will power the world’s internet and data infrastructure one day.”

  Desmond ate a bite of sushi. It was good, almost as good as his favorite spot in San Francisco.

  “Do you know what the key to Rook’s success is?” Yuri didn’t wait for Desmond to respond. “Resource allocation.”

  Desmond raised his eyebrows.

  “The company needs a leader who’s obsessive about the capabilities of every server, router, switch, and tape backup. Who can look at network demand around the world and allocate resources to regions likely to grow. Who can make the right choices about hardware in the data center and do accurate capacity forecasting.”

  Desmond understood. “Like a strategy game.”

  Yuri nodded.

  “So it all comes back to hit points, magic points, leveling up those data centers, and upgrading the weapons and armor.”

  “In a sense.”

  Desmond put his chopsticks down. “You knew, didn’t you?”

  “I suspected what role Conner would play.”

  And he played that role well. In the following months, Conner joined Rook’s South Australia purchasing team. He ended up saving the company half a million dollars by purchasing cheaper hardware that performed just as well for the same requirements. He did an audit of their existing hardware, sold off pieces they didn’t need, and repurposed what was left. He spent every waking minute obsessing over four key stats: revenue, power consumed, network utilization, and hardware cost. His goal in life was to optimize those numbers, driving the company to the next level. He was made head of operations in Australia, and the following week, he and Desmond met for the first time.

  Desmond was nervous as he entered the board room at Rook’s Australian headquarters in Sydney. He had considered several approaches to meeting Conner, including doing it in private and coming clean. He’d decided against that one.

  Desmond strode into a room with an impressive view of the city’s downtown. He shook hands with each of the executives. When he came to Conner, their eyes met briefly, and Desmond knew he held Conner’s hand a little too long. But his brother didn’t seem to notice. Maybe he was used to people lingering on his face longer than was comfortable, holding the handshake while they stared.

  Desmond barely listened to the presentation—except when Conner spoke. They were building a new data center in Melbourne. A possible acquisition in Christ Church, New Zealand. When the meeting ended, Desmond stood and promised to preview their requests to the board. As he walked out, he heard Conner call to him. “Mister Hughes.”

  Desmond’s mouth ran dry. He turned.

  Conner approached in a slow jog and held something out. “You forgot your pen.”

  Desmond was speechless for a moment. He reached out and took the pen. Conner turned and began walking away.

  “Thank you, Conner,” Desmond called, a little too loudly.

  Yuri was waiting at Desmond’s condo when he arrived home.

  “And?” the man said simply.

  Desmond shrugged. “We were strangers. But only he knew that. It was super, super awkward.”

  “For you, Desmond. Only for you.”

  “I have to tell him.”

  “Not yet.”

  Desmond shook his head. “Why?”

  “Because he needs time to find himself. He’s rebuilding his life. You know what that’s like. He needs to do this for himself. He needs time and space to discover who he is and become the man he was always supposed to be. If you tell him now, it will distract him from his own life and career. It will confuse him. Wait, Desmond. I urge you.”

  Desmond relented.

  And Yuri was right. From a distance, he watched Conner’s successes and failures at Rook Web Hosting. His mind was incredibly well tuned for analytics, planning, and strategy. And in his own way, he
was a charismatic leader. He was dogged when he set a goal. He didn’t accept excuses—or care what people thought of him. He had thick skin, developed from years of rejection and ridicule.

  Two years after he’d joined Rook, the board voted to make him CEO after the company’s leader retired. Desmond made sure he was the last to vote. It was unanimous. Conner deserved the job.

  Desmond was glad he had waited to contact him. But he couldn’t resist anymore. He invited Conner to his home in San Francisco—under the guise of discussing Rook’s future plans.

  And so, on a warm summer day in June of 2005, Desmond sat in his living room, waiting to introduce himself to his only living relative—the brother he had lost and found and brought back from the dead. He was nervous and overjoyed and counting down every second.

  Five minutes early, the doorbell rang.

  Chapter 32

  Yuri’s plane was in a holding pattern off the coast of Spain when his phone rang.

  “We’ve got something,” Whitmeyer said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “In 1943, Kraus led an expedition to the Cave of Altamira.”

  Yuri had never heard of it.

  Whitmeyer shuffled some papers. “We only know because it was mentioned at Nuremberg in the trial of another Nazi scientist. He claimed to have been with Kraus during the period, but Kraus denied it, and Kraus’s trip was confirmed by a border guard called to testify.”

  “Interesting. What’s in the cave?”

  “Cave paintings. Some of the oldest ever found in Europe. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site now.”

  “That’s it—that’s where she’s going. Figure out a rally point somewhere outside the site. Be discreet. And send everyone we’ve got in the region. This is a fight we have to win.”

  Chapter 33

  Lin stepped inside the hidden room in the Cave of Altamira, holding her electric light out in front of her. From behind her, Peyton saw stacks of metal crates—just like the ones they had found on the Beagle, with round metal discs on the end that provided a view inside.

  Lin stooped and slid one of the discs aside, then moved to several more, peering in each crate for only a second or two. “Bones,” she whispered.

  Peyton saw a glimmer of excitement cross her mother’s face, like a child on Christmas morning. Lin Shaw had been searching for this room for thirty years. It was the culmination of her life’s work. The missing piece.

  One by one, the others slipped through the crevice and deployed their lights around the small room, which Peyton estimated to be no larger than fifteen feet across. The walls were stone, and she could see now that the stone door had been added to this natural alcove to close it off.

  “Should we carry them out?” Adams asked.

  “No,” Lin said quickly. “We need to find the inventory. There should be a list of everything that’s here.”

  Nigel glanced around. “Maybe it’s in one of the cases.”

  Lin took out the first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and set it on one of the crates. “Kraus left five pages of trace paper in the book. We’ve only used two.”

  “After Alice is carried away by the pool of tears,” Avery said, “she washes up on a bank. She and her random group of companions do a Caucus race to get dry.”

  Chief Adams scrunched his eyebrows. “What’s a Caucus race?”

  “One of Carroll’s inventions,” Lin said, her eyes focused on the book. “It means they ran around in circles with no clear winner.”

  “Well, I don’t favor us running around in circles,” Nigel said.

  “Thank you, Doctor Greene. We’ll keep that in mind.”

  Lin turned the book to the beginning of the third chapter. The opening illustration showed a mouse standing on his hind legs, hands held out. Alice and twelve animals, including a Lory Parrot, a duck, a Dodo Bird, a lobster, and a beaver, stood around the mouse in a circle.

  Lin pulled out the page of trace paper.

  She overlaid it with the cave map, and the lines intersected.

  “Another hidden room?” Avery asked.

  “Doubtful,” Lin murmured.

  “Why?” Peyton asked.

  “Because he wouldn’t have done that.”

  Peyton got the sense that there was a deeper relationship between her mother and Dr. Paul Kraus.

  Lin flipped through the book, speed-reading it. She skipped over the other sheets of trace paper, leaving them in place. The others stood silently, waiting, awkwardness growing. Lin ignored them. It was simply the way she was made. Peyton knew her mother that well: the woman assumed—perhaps correctly—that hers was the strongest mind present and that she alone had the ability to unravel Kraus’s clues. Engaging in a discussion would only waste time and divert her focus.

  Lin took the fourth piece of trace paper and held it to the map. It connected with a location deep in the cave, off a narrow passage.

  “Another location,” Avery said.

  “So it would seem,” Lin said, but Peyton could tell she didn’t believe the words, that the response was simply a way to avoid further conversation.

  Lin placed the fifth and final piece of trace paper on the map. It intersected with a location even deeper in the cave.

  “Maybe there are more clues at these locations,” Nigel said.

  “Unlikely,” Lin replied quietly, still deep in thought.

  She stacked all five of the trace pages together and stared at them.

  Peyton could sense the group getting anxious, perhaps annoyed at being in the dark.

  “What are you thinking, Mom?”

  Lin turned to her and made eye contact, as if realizing the others were there for the first time.

  “Carroll’s story has several meanings for Kraus. It was the allegory the Citium used in the 1950s when it embarked on the Looking Glass project. Kraus was one of the leaders of the organization at the time. He believed the nuclear bomb and the nuclear age itself were a sort of rabbit hole the human race had fallen down, that we were entering a strange, unpredictable era in which extinction was a real possibility.”

  She motioned to the book. “The novel begins with Alice being bored and following a White Rabbit into the rabbit hole.”

  “The atomic bomb is the White Rabbit?” Avery said.

  “No. To us, it symbolized technology in general. As do the other clever characters in the story. The blue Caterpillar smoking a hookah, who questions Alice about her identity crisis, is another representation of technology—one that is impartial, but forces us to discover who we are. The Caterpillar tells her that one side of the mushroom makes her larger and the other side makes her small.”

  “And the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all,” Avery whispered to Adams, who smiled and shook his head.

  “What it means,” Lin said with force, “is that technology both shrinks and expands our world. The telegraph and railroads were rapidly bringing people together when Carroll published the story, and the steam engine was enabling the construction of vast cities and supporting industrial agriculture that helped our population explode. When the book was written, in 1865, there were roughly 1.3 billion people in the world. Since then, the population has grown by 6.2 billion. The largest increase in history, perhaps, for any large species.”

  Lin assembled the trace paper pages. “But the story was about more than that to us. We believed even literary scholars didn’t truly understand Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. They thought it was simply a new type of fantasy novel, an accomplishment in the literary nonsense genre. It’s about Alice descending into a world that is very much like hers, but she is constantly changing—growing too large and small, as though she doesn’t truly understand her own capabilities or how the things in the world will affect her. She is lost and wants to get home. She is eventually put on trial for growing too large—for taking the very air the other animals breathe.”

  “Like a mass extinction,” Nigel said slowly. “The Quaternary extinction.
Or the mass extinction currently happening on Earth.”

  “Exactly. Carroll was a polymath who was keenly aware of the changes happening on Earth.”

  “So what does it all mean?” Avery asked.

  “To know that, you would have to understand Kraus.”

  “The way you do,” Peyton said. There was something more going on here, a piece she had missed. She was sure of it.

  “Yes.” Lin held the stacked pieces of trace paper up to a lantern, her back to the group. “Kraus believed that his work was the way out of the proverbial rabbit hole humanity had fallen into. He believed the key was science, and in particular genetics: understanding how the human genome had changed over time. He believed that in our genomes, we would find bread crumbs that lead to an ultimate truth. To him, the genomes of our ancestors were like layers, and when we found the key layers, he believed they would form a picture—an answer that would be our only hope of escaping the rabbit hole.”

  She turned, revealing the five translucent pages in front of the lantern. The lines connected, some darker and lighter, just like the cave paintings, forming the image of a doe.

  “This is what we’re looking for. The inventory will be hidden there.”

  Chapter 34

  Dr. Sang-Min Park had never been so scared in his entire life. Sweat rolled down his face. The heartbeat monitor was the only sound in the van, a countdown to their fiery death.

  He never would have imagined himself here, of all places. He had worked hard his whole life, nearly died from exhaustion during his residency. Recovered during his fellowship and dedicated his life to medical research. He had landed his dream job at Rapture Therapeutics, a company on the cutting edge of neurological medicine. He was making the world a better place. Doing important work. Or so he thought.