by Andrew Lane
‘What the hell – enough people around here know me, know what I do and know where I live. They even did a feature on me in the Big Issue.’ He shrugged, and winced as a spasm of pain shot through his shoulders. ‘My real name is Eduardo Ortiz.’
‘Brazilian?’ Calum guessed.
Gecko nodded. ‘Came over to England ten years ago with my mother. She is a cleaner. Works on the stock exchange, believe it or not.’ He shook his head. ‘She is always looking down at floors, carpets and skirting boards. Never looks up at the sky. I keep telling her there is a whole new world up there, but she doesn’t even know what I’m talking about.’
‘I’m Calum. Calum Challenger.’
Gecko gazed around the apartment. ‘You live here by yourself?’
‘Yeah.’
When Calum didn’t elaborate, Gecko went on. ‘What is it with all the straps hanging from the ceiling, then? Are you in training for something?’ He looked over at Calum, and seemed to suddenly spot the way that Calum was standing awkwardly, with one hand braced on the back of a chair and the other casually entwined in one of the straps. His gaze travelled up and down Calum’s body, taking in the overdeveloped arms and shoulders and the comparatively underdeveloped muscles of the legs. ‘You have a problem?’
Now it was Calum’s turn to shrug, and the pain was inside rather than outside. ‘Car crash, a couple of years back. I was paralysed. My parents were killed. I spent a long time wishing I’d been killed along with them.’
‘Never wish for death,’ Gecko said, shaking his head firmly. ‘It spends all its time slinking around, watching us from the shadows. Never invite it into the light.’
‘It’s OK. I got over it.’
‘So I see.’ Gecko ran his hands along his arms, down his chest and stomach, and then along his legs. ‘Not much damage done, I think.’
‘You were lucky,’ Calum pointed out.
‘I twisted when I fell, to minimize injury, and I kept my muscles relaxed.’ He smiled slightly. ‘Of course, none of that would have done me any good if I had landed on concrete. I was lucky you put your sofa there.’
‘Actually,’ Calum admitted, ‘I put it there because the skylight was there. More light to read by.’
Gecko’s attention was caught by the ten-screen computer display in Calum’s workspace area. ‘Sweet system,’ he said with awe in his voice as he crossed over to take a closer look. ‘That is a high-end gaming set-up. I have seen stuff like this before – only with fewer screens.’
‘I don’t use it for gaming,’ Calum replied. ‘Not often, anyway. Some of the stuff I do needs really good graphics and processing power.’
‘Video editing?’ Gecko guessed. ‘Or are you hosting a web service?’
‘A little bit of both.’ Calum shifted position, aware of the muscle he had pulled when Professor Livingstone and her daughter were there. ‘You want something to drink?’
‘Do you have Coke?’
Calum smiled, despite himself. ‘Have I got Coke? Prepare for a surprise, Gecko.’
As usual, Tara Flynn was hunched over her tablet. This time, however, she wasn’t in her college room. She was in the campus library.
She wasn’t there for information or for the peace and quiet. She was there because her own room had been invaded. And she hated it.
She’d been at college for almost a year now, studying a combined degree in History of Art and Graphic Design. She was only fourteen, but the college had taken her in early, partly because of her impressive exam results and partly because she had hacked their admissions database and changed her age. It wasn’t that she felt any great calling towards making art; more that she wanted to be a computer-games designer – preferably working full time on some massive multi-player online role-playing game – and she knew she already had all the computing skills necessary for the job. What she lacked was the ability to quickly create a character graphic, or build a world that actually looked realistic, down to the waving of the grass. The course kept her interest, and it was fun, but she didn’t seem to be engaging with the other students. They avoided her, for some reason, and she couldn’t find a way to break into their little cliques. Her room was where she retreated to, a sanctuary. And now someone had got inside – virtually, not in reality, but it still felt like an invasion.
She had to decide what to do. She’d started out trying to destabilize those big financial and defence companies who seemed not to care that their activities were grinding entire countries into poverty, but now it seemed as if she was going to end up working for one of them. That, or face jail. She didn’t know enough about the legalities of her situation, but what she did know was that these big companies had a lot more money behind them than her family did, and they could hire a lot more lawyers with a lot more experience and a lot fewer moral qualms. They could crush her, if they wanted. The only reason she’d got away with her hacking activities for so long was because she was beneath their notice, like a mosquito quietly sucking blood from an exposed leg. But she’d bitten too deep, and now they had her in their sights.
She felt desperate. She felt as if she didn’t have anywhere to turn, anyone to talk to. She supposed she could get in contact with her hacker friends, but they were just presences on the other end of an electromagnetic wave. They might be in the next room to her in the halls of residence or they might be on the other side of the world. She would probably never know.
Her tablet was on the table in front of her. It suddenly flashed into life as another message came through.
Books are so very old fashioned, don’t you think? How did people ever manage to find what they were looking for without the use of a decent search engine?
A pause, and then:
Have you come to a decision yet? Time is ticking away, and we have solicitors to instruct.
She typed in a response: You’re blackmailing me!
The reply came so quickly that her hand was still lifting away from the tablet’s touch-sensitive screen. Of course we are. You seem surprised.
Tara took a deep breath. What is it you want me to do? she typed.
The answer took a few seconds this time. There is a website at www.thelostworlds.com. We want you to investigate it for us. We want you to find out everything you can about it. We want to know who set it up, who administers it, who updates it and who is viewing it on a regular basis. We also want a copy of all the images and text on the site.
Tara frowned. That sounded suspiciously easy. Can’t you do that yourselves? she typed.
Of course we can, but it might be traced back to us. Far better if we use a dupe who has no connection to us.
She had to admit it made sense. And when I get that information for you, I’m clear? You won’t ask me for anything else?
The letters that arrived on the screen were just pixels, assembled into patterns. They had no emotional context, no overtones, but somehow she knew that they were lies. Of course not, they said. After this, if you leave us alone, then we will leave you alone.
Tara sat there for another twenty minutes, waiting to see if the disembodied communicator was going to send her anything else, but there was nothing. Eventually she tapped her finger on the website address that she had been sent: www.thelostworlds.com.
The site seemed on the surface to be someone’s attempt to pull together lots of information about creatures that might exist out in the world somewhere but were either thought to be extinct or had never been identified by scientists. There were links on the home page to information on things she’d heard of, like the Loch Ness Monster (which might be some kind of aquatic dinosaur – a plesiosaur, apparently), and the Sasquatch (which she knew was a big hairy ape-like creature in the forests of America, but which was more likely to be a hoax, she found). But there were also links to things she’d never heard of – everything from bacteria in frozen underground lakes that had been sealed away from the rest of the world for hundreds of thousands of years to something called the chupacabra, or ‘goat sucker’, w
hich was supposed to be (according to eyewitness reports from Mexico and Puerto Rico, at least) some kind of hairless dog or large rat that sucked blood from livestock. The overall term for these things, Tara discovered, was cryptids, and whoever was behind this website was fascinated by them. Not just that though – he (and she was positive that it was a man) was very even-handed. If there was evidence about the cryptids, then he would report it fairly. The various photographs and mangled corpses that turned up as chupacabras, for instance, were almost always eventually identified as coyotes with severe mange.
It all looked innocent. It looked like the hobby of someone with an obsession and a lot of time on their hands. But if Nemor Incorporated thought there was something odd about it then she had to investigate.
After all, she thought bitterly, she worked for them now.
‘Well, what’s so fascinating about these . . .’ Gecko hesitated for a moment, trying to find the right words. ‘These espécies ameacadas de extincao?’
The kid with the paralysed legs – Calum Challenger – had been telling him about his hobby – finding creatures that were supposed to have been extinct for thousands of years or which had never been known about in the first place. Well, ‘hobby’ probably wasn’t the right word. ‘Obsession’ was closer to the mark. Gecko knew the signs of obsession. He’d run across rooftops until his lungs burned, jumped across gaps that he shouldn’t have been able to cross and generally pushed things too far, all in the cause of his own obsession – free-running. But that was about beauty and freedom of movement. Trying to find dead stuff – that was just lame.
Calum shrugged. He was sitting on the sofa, now that it had been cleared of glass, and both he and Gecko had drinks. ‘I guess it has to do with my parents,’ he said softly. ‘My father was a palaeontologist.’
‘A what?’
‘He studied fossils. His particular field was the early evolution of the human race.’ Calum smiled. ‘He used to talk to me for hours about what he was doing, and what he hoped to prove. At the beginning I only understood a fraction of what he was saying, but as time went on I picked up more and more. It was his life – his passion.’
‘What about your mother?’ Gecko asked.
‘She was a geneticist. She was trying to find ways of curing disease by modifying the human genome.’
‘I’d say you were lucky they ever met,’ Gecko pointed out. ‘It is like he is at one end of the football field and she is at the other. My father was a janitor and my mother is a cleaner. Same world.’
‘You would think,’ Calum replied. ‘But they met at a scientific conference. My mother had got interested in whether our remote ancestors had genes which might have protected them from diseases like cancer. She asked my father about the chances of finding DNA samples from some of the predecessors of Homo sapiens, like Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus sediba or Homo erectus. She even wondered whether Homo neanderthalis might have some genetic material that could prove useful.’ He smiled, obviously remembering some story his parents had told him. ‘They talked all night. By morning they’d realized two things – they could work together on this project, and they were in love.’
Gecko shook his head. He was getting lost. ‘This genetic thing,’ he said. ‘I do not understand it.’
‘It’s pretty simple,’ Calum said. ‘Genes are the plans for what we are – what any living thing is, right? They’re like little sections of blueprint that tell chemicals and cells how to work together to make something – like an eye, or a hand, or a tentacle. The great thing about genes is that they pretty much don’t care if you mix and match them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Let me give you an example. A few years back scientists managed to move certain genes in a fly’s DNA around so that instead of growing antennae, it grew an extra set of legs out of its head. They just replaced the “antenna-making” gene with a duplicate copy of the “leg-making” gene.’
‘Yes, I think I saw that film,’ Gecko said drily. ‘It didn’t end well for mankind.’
Calum shrugged. ‘That was just an example, to prove that genes could be moved around. There’s no actual need for a fly with legs growing out of its head.’
A thought struck Gecko. ‘Does that make it a spider instead?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, I remember at school, we were told that the difference between insects and spiders was that insects had six legs and spiders had eight legs. But if this modified fly had eight legs – six of them where they should be and the seventh and eighth ones sticking out of its head, doesn’t that make it a spider instead?’
‘No,’ Calum said firmly. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’
‘Why not?’
Calum’s mouth was setting into a shape that Gecko was beginning to recognize as indicating he was annoyed. ‘Just accept it. It was still a fly.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Other scientists moved genes from one animal to another. They took a gene from a jellyfish that caused it to glow, and inserted it into a mouse. The result was a glowing mouse.’
‘Easier to catch,’ Gecko pointed out. ‘They can’t hide in dark corners.
Calum’s mouth twisted into that shape again. ‘That wasn’t exactly the point.’
Gecko raised his hands in surrender. ‘OK. I understand. Scientists can move these genes around, within the same animal or between animals. So what?’
‘So, what if we could find a gene that protects its owner from some terrible disease and incorporate it into human DNA?’ Calum asked, leaning forward.
‘Would we still be human?’
Calum flicked his head, as if to brush the question away. ‘Of course we would. We’d be human, but better.’
‘Tá bom,’ Gecko conceded, although the thought of fiddling around with the blueprint of the human body made him uneasy. ‘But how does this connect up with your search for these animals?’
Calum nodded. ‘Take the horseshoe crab. It’s one of the oldest creatures known. By “oldest” I mean that it’s been around in the same form, without noticeably evolving, for millions of years. Unlike any other creature, its blood is blue, not red, because it’s based on copper-containing haemocyanin rather than iron-based haemoglobin.’ He paused, and took a breath. He was staring ahead now, not looking at Gecko. ‘The horseshoe crab’s equivalent of the white blood cells found in human blood are incredibly efficient at neutralizing bacteria. They have to be, because the seas where the horseshoe crab lives are like bacterial soup. Humanity is facing a crisis in controlling bacteria – most of our antibiotics are losing efficiency as the bacteria get used to them. If we can find a way of synthesizing this factor from horseshoe-crab blood – if we could even splice it into our own DNA, or splice it into a cow’s DNA so the antibiotic is expressed in the cow’s milk – we might never get ill or die from an infection again.’
Gecko nodded slowly. ‘My brother died from an infection,’ he said slowly. The memories were still raw. ‘He scratched his leg on a rusty nail when he was climbing over a fence. He developed tetanus. It –’ he caught his breath, feeling his throat constrict in unexpected grief – ‘it was not a good way to die.’
‘There are a lot of bad ways to die,’ Calum pointed out. ‘If we can reduce them . . . find ways to avoid them . . . then that’s got to be a good thing.’
‘And you reckon some of these undiscovered animals might have genes that could help save people’s lives?’ Gecko nodded. ‘That is a noble way to spend your life.’
Calum looked away. ‘Maybe not completely noble,’ he said softly.
‘What do you mean?’ Gecko noticed the way Calum’s hand clamped on his leg, and suddenly understood. ‘It’s the nerves, isn’t it? You think there might be a gene out there, in some undiscovered creature, that could help regenerate your nerves.’
Calum shrugged awkwardly. ‘Your namesake, the yellow-headed gecko, can grow a new tail if the old one gets bitten off. Salamanders can regenerate entire legs if t
hey lose them. Maybe, somewhere out there, is a way for me to . . . to walk again.’
There was silence for a few moments, both boys preoccupied with their own thoughts.
‘You need any help?’ Gecko asked eventually. ‘For the sake of my brother, I want to do something.’
‘Can you organize an expedition to the Caucasus Mountains to look for a possible missing link between apes and humans?’ Calum asked.
‘No,’ Gecko said. ‘I think I can quite honestly say that I cannot do that.’ A thought struck him. ‘Hey, do we have any of these supposedly undiscovered animals in Brazil? I never heard of any.’
Calum thought for a moment. ‘There’s something called the mapinguary,’ he said. ‘People say it’s a giant sloth-like creature that has a really strong unpleasant smell. And there’s the minhocão, which is supposed to be a giant black worm, some twenty-five metres long, with scaly skin and two tentacles coming out of its head.’
‘That’s just a story for children!’ Gecko protested. ‘The minhocão is supposed to be able to uproot trees and destroy houses, but nobody has ever seen one!’
‘The last eyewitness reports are about a hundred and thirty years old,’ Calum conceded, ‘but they were taken seriously at the time. The trouble is that there are no photographs and no sketches, and it’s difficult to see how an animal that large could survive in numbers big enough to keep a population going without anybody noticing.’ He paused, and shrugged. ‘Still, there’s always hope.’
Gecko was about to ask Calum how he managed to fund all this work when a soft alarm started pinging over at Calum’s computer station.
‘What’s that?’ Gecko asked. ‘Someone else on the roof?’
Calum shook his head. ‘Not that kind of alarm. Someone’s trying to hack into my website.’
‘You have a website?’ Gecko asked. ‘What kind of website?’
‘A website all about the undiscovered creatures we talked about.’ Calum pulled himself off the sofa and started to swing across to the computer desk and the multiple screens.
‘Why would someone want to hack into a site about animals that don’t even exist?’ Gecko asked, standing up and following Calum. ‘Banks, I can understand. Nobody likes banks. Defence companies, yeah. But extinct animals? Isto é loucura!’
