The Darwin Strain

by Bill Schutt

  Without biology’s Rosetta Stone, there were too few clues from which to read how her fruit flies had become so long-lived, how ancients might have accomplished a similar feat, or what really happened with the pitiful creature behind the Santorini death mask.

  We are like Neanderthals or bonobos playing with napalm, Nora reminded herself. One of her mathematician friends, whom she had tried recruiting to expand the machine’s computing power, had put it another way: “We know very little and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.”

  “But if we can build a genetic Rosetta Stone—if we can one day compare all the genes of all the necessary animals,” Nora insisted, “we’ll have all the knowledge we need.”

  “And good-bye,” her friend replied.

  Before he left, he had summed Nora up with a reprimand—“You are the kind of explorer, I fear, who would crack the world open, if you could, just to see what would happen.”

  She hoped that, given enough time, she could change the old genius’s mind—which was why she “poisoned” his drinking glass with the same variant of the Darwin Strain that had infiltrated her own tissues, and which was presently keeping the NR-3 engine crew alive.

  Now, barring a fatal car accident or any other unforeseen mishap, Nora expected that she and Bertrand Russell had all the time in the world. But she did not know precisely why this was so. No one did.

  “The scope of our ignorance on this, and other matters of nature, is huge,” she wrote in a notebook. “Knowing this is belittling. And yet it is the most precious thing we have.”

  Nora understood, better than most people, that from the day the first atomic bomb was exploded, scientists knew nothing at all about what protons and neutrons in the middle of an atom were really made of. And still, no one knew.

  She could scarcely make a crude guess at how the strain—which she had classified as somewhere between a bacterium and a fungus—“chose” to work its strange symbiosis within human, bonobo, and Kraken bodies. She had ventured perhaps an only marginally less crude guess about how little gardens of the “scarlet moctus proctus” came to be maintained at both Santorini (by Kraken) and in the Himalayas (by Yeren and Cerae). She knew that the old Roman historian Pliny the Elder had written about encounters with the mysterious Cerae culture—last seen near the hot springs of a Himalayan grotto. Pliny’s accounts seemed consistent with a more highly evolved version of Alan and Pierre’s Fira Quarry bonobos, leading her to suspect that the ancestral Cerae had carried the organism with them from a distant shore, and very likely from the vicinity of Santorini.

  And, she noted, the organism must still have been there, near Santorini, when the pyramids were new and the first wooden ships arrived.

  The gold “helmet” recovered by the NR-3 was a work of art so beautiful that it did indeed surpass the golden death mask of “King Tut.” Yet it bore enough ancient mysteries to leave even Tut’s sarcophagus behind—“Forever in the little leagues,” Nora told herself.

  Rows of nearly microscopic, lapis-bordered hieroglyphs placed the death mask definitively within the same dynasty as Tut, but identified a queen named Kyri giving honor to another unknown historical figure, named Semut. This dedication rendered all the more perplexing the question of why Kyri or anyone else would have stuffed the interior of the headpiece with a mixture of human and animal bones.

  The answer meant that the question of “the red miracle” went a little deeper than even Nora Nesbitt had at first anticipated.

  Why were a man and a bull sharing the same coffin?

  They weren’t. The piecing together and reconstruction of only half the skull told it so. Microscope slides and comparative histology told the rest: Another civilization had indeed discovered the “red moctus proctus” at Santorini. It was being used there more than thirty-five centuries before the red plumes erupted onto the scene and damned near triggered a modern war. Viewed through a microscope, the semifossilized cells of bones from the headpiece were structurally identical to one another, and must therefore have belonged to a single, fully functional creature that survived into adulthood.

  A chimera? Nora asked herself. But that’s impossible.

  She knew already that an organism closely related to the microbe coursing through her blood had also infected Mac, Yanni, and at least four or five other people—not counting, of course, Private McQueen, the NR-3 crew, and Bertrand. Now she understood that someone had advanced beyond the healing of wounds and curing of diseases and discovered that the red mats could also be used to blend the genes of such distantly related creatures as a man and a bull—and somehow make it work despite the obvious obstacles.

  And she told herself, All I needed to know is that it can be done; now all I need to learn is how it was done.

  In the next moment it made no sense to her. First the Kraken, and now? It made no sense that the Minotaur could once have been real. It seemed impossible that, back when the pyramids were still gleaming white and clear-cut, someone had thrown open the doors to a genetic frontier far beyond anything imaginable with today’s technology.

  Impossible.

  But there it was—like an echo from the island of Dr. Moreau. The emerging reality seemed stranger than anything H. G. Wells had tried to warn the world about.

  No. None of it made any sense at all . . . without the red hydrothermal microbe, without the Darwin Strain.

  Nora Nesbitt suspected that what happened with the creature named Semut was an experiment gone wrong.

  But we have the technology, she concluded. We can get everything right this time.

  She had plenty of samples worth studying. There was, for a start (just for a start), the freeze-dried “moctus proctus” sample from a Himalayan grotto—the “stolen” finger that had infuriated Patricia Wynters. There was also an ample supply of the symbiotic infection in her own tissues. Life extension was beginning to look far easier than anyone had believed possible. Now, if she could unlock the secret of how to orchestrate the process of evolution, essentially instantly—even to the point of hybridizing species at will—then the agricultural advances alone might become limitless, all but guaranteeing the future security of the human species.

  “Take command of our own evolutionary destiny,” Nora whispered to the arctic twilight, in a moment that seemed triumphant. Standing before the lab’s only window, she failed to notice the northern lights bunching together overhead and rotating on a rarely seen magnetic axis, sweeping down toward her like the spokes of a giant wheel. Instead she looked back across the past decade of her life, bit down hard on her lower lip, and dreamed a future in which no one would ever again know the peculiar horror of watching a child die from something incurable—for it became possible to believe that she could command the destiny of nature itself, and along the way cure every disease, perhaps even create the immortal child.

  She whispered to the impassive stars, “I can slow down and perhaps even reverse the human aging process. I can feel it. I am at the beginning of a fantastic adventure.”

  And yet, in this very same lab, within Nora’s reach lay proof that the Minotaur was real, and had lived in agony.

  Nora Nesbitt was a long way from being finished with the Minotaur.

  And the Minotaur’s bones—seething with mystery and wonder—were not through with her.

  Nor was the Kraken through with her kind.

  ASSN DECLASS: JANUARY 20, 2021

  RE: Virginia Beach Incident

  FEBRUARY 15, 1981

  CAPTAIN, RUSSIAN SUBMARINE TSIOLKOVSKY:

  WE DID NOT RUN AGROUND.

  REPEAT: WE DID NOT RUN AGROUND.

  VESSEL DISABLED AND PULLED ONTO SHALLOW SANDBAR ZONE 32 KILOMETERS OFFSHORE BY MULTIPLE LIVING OBJECTS BINDING TO HULL.

  ALL CONFIRMED BY IMAGING SONAR.

  FEBRUARY 15, 1981

  POTUS RESPONSE:

  THIS FAIRY TALE IS UNACCEPTABLE.

  THE RUSSIAN CREW IS
SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR A NEAR NUCLEAR DISASTER ON AMERICAN SHORES.

  MARCH 1, 1981

  LT. COMMANDER ALAN J. ACKLEY, SEAL TEAM LEADER, (SOVIET SUBMARINE RECOVERY) RE: DAMAGE REPORT:

  MISSILES (2 ARE MULTI-STAGE) NEUTRALIZED BY RUSSIAN CREW. WARHEADS ALSO NEUTRALIZED BY CREW.

  VISUAL EXAMINATION OF HULL CONSISTENT WITH CREW REPORT OF DAMAGE BY MULTIPLE OBJECTS OF 2 TON OR GREATER MASS. SONAR IMAGES BY CREW PRESERVED, ALSO CONSISTENT. SEAL TEAM BETACAM OF HULL STEALTHING MEMBRANE, ALSO CONSISTENT. DR. G. L. VOSS EXAMINED DAMAGED SONAR DAMPING MEMBRANE SAMPLES FROM HULL USING LIGHT AND SEM MICROSCOPY: CONCLUDES DAMAGE NOT FABRICATED BY RUSSIANS AND WAS LIKELY CAUSED BY ONE OR MORE (UP TO “AT LEAST SEVERAL”) LARGE ANIMATE OBJECTS, SPECIES UNKNOWN. CEPHALOPODA.

  CROSS REFERENCE: MACCREADY/THORN/COUSTEAU M016A

  CROSS REFERENCE ARGO M016B

  THIS IS NRBQ INDEX SHEET 1 OF 2

  COUNT YOUR PAGES.

  . . . . . . .

  REDACTED. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL. FILE M016A HAS NOT BEEN FOUND.

  REDACTED. COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL. FILE M016B HAS NOT BEEN FOUND.

  THIS IS NRBQ INDEX SHEET 2 OF 2, EYES ONLY.

  SOUND JUDGMENT SHALL BE EXERCISED AT ALL TIMES.

  COUNT YOUR PAGES.

  REPORT ANY MISSING PAGES TO NRBQ AT ONCE.

  COUNT YOUR PAGES.

  Author’s Note

  Reality Check

  A single gram of soil has billions of cells, thousands of species and far more genetic information than the human genome. Microbes, in a sense, rule the world: In their multitudes, they help regulate our biosphere and have profound effects on plants and animals.

  —Dan Buckley, World Economic Forum, 2017

  Life on Earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, and outdoes itself. And you’ll see symbiosis everywhere. . . . Beneath our superficial differences we are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings.

  —Lynn Margulis

  Early on, this series of novels was conceived as a trilogy (with likely spin-offs) about an accidental cryptozoologist and his animal empath colleague. Yanni Thorne’s abilities are based on some very real people known to us—including a family member, and animal psychologist Temple Grandin—who live (and manage to flourish) somewhere along what is often called the autism-Asperger’s spectrum, or as some scientists, engineers, or on-the-spectrum explorers and animal behaviorists prefer to be called, Aspies. (“After all, the official words, [including] ‘high-functioning autism disorder,’ would never look good on our job applications.”) Arising from such realities, some of the intense emotions described during encounters with today’s known cephalopod species are based on the experiences of real people, not all of them Aspies (although it occasionally took an Aspie to show the way).

  As with any other human group, there is much variation among people “on the spectrum.” We know a string theorist who could be moved often to tears by the beauty of a mountain range or the universe hidden within the diameter of a proton. Temple Grandin shocked him by saying she could not understand, emotionally, the beauty he saw in nature. There is so much variation that even the “rule” of total social ineptitude is not universally true. The true rule: if you’ve met one Aspie, you can only say that you’ve met one Aspie.

  Temple Grandin speculated that it was not the most social member of a tribe who changed history by first befriending “man’s best friend” or who thought far enough outside the box to shape the first stone spear. It was probably social outcasts like Yanni, said Grandin—“Probably an Aspie, who chipped away at rocks [or scrutinized the patterns of a wolf’s behavior], while the other people socialized around the campfire. Without autism traits we might still be living in caves.” Some, considered “alien-ish” by most people, have described “alien” the other way around. Both Grandin and the late Isaac Asimov said they often felt like anthropologists from a faraway time or place, dropped down here on earth and perplexed by alien human behavior.

  If you have come away from any of these novels questioning what exactly defines an intelligent life-form, if you sometimes get the creepy feeling that humans might not always have been (and might not always be) the smartest creatures on this planet, then we’ve accomplished some small measure of what we have set out to do.

  Each of these novels is a fable, of sorts. Although set in the 1940s, they are really about the world today, and the future. Our characters lived then, as we all live now: in someone else’s yesterdays and tomorrows. Jacques Yves Cousteau understood this when he visited the isle of Santorini and viewed remnants of its lost worlds for the first time. A young Greek archaeologist who marveled at the doors to a new wilderness being thrown open by rocket scientist Werner von Braun told Cousteau that he believed humans were verging on the final conquest of nature, adding, “When God met man in Eden, he commanded, ‘Subdue the Earth.’” Cousteau, one of this fable’s real-life inhabitants, replied, as he often replied on such occasions: “Subdue the earth? But in order to do that, you must realize that the earth has a life of its own. And we must respect this view of life.”

  Cousteau’s theme resonates throughout this tale.

  If this novel is the first example you have come across, from the series, we planned for such possibilities. They are not meant to be read in any particular sequence. Each has been designed as a stand-alone story, with occasional crossover moments, or “Easter eggs” planted here and there.

  Now, while much of what you have just read was a blend of scientific speculation and abstract fantasy, it may be fun to learn that you were simultaneously encountering much real science and history.

  One result of this: no reliance here on the improbable deus ex machina. Though the year has been changed, a bombing run against a ship at Santorini really did trigger the central volcano to erupt, and really did allow the ship to escape. Operation High-jump was real, as was Admiral Rickover’s design for the NR-3 (a variation of which was actually built). Pliny the Elder really did record, in his Naturalis Historia (parts 3, 11), a “polypus” encounter, exactly as described in The Darwin Strain. The sinking of the Pearl by a large cephalopod is also recorded by history exactly as written here, as are legends and alleged sightings of, and battles with, “the Kraken,” dating from World War II back to remote antiquity.

  One of the great guilty pleasures in penning these tales has been to blur the line between reality and fable. In each of these novels, if a character happens to glance up at the crescent moon, you can be sure that the night sky is accurately described for that date, time, and locale on the surface of the earth.

  So, now that you have traveled this far, let’s look a little more closely, you and I, at the real history and the real science behind the fiction:

  The Argo high-resolution sonar imaging system, introduced with the Prologue, is based on a very real system developed from the late 1940s onward. By 1981, when shuttle astronauts Robert Crippen and John Young met with British space scientists and oceanographers, the technology had already advanced to a level at which faint images (miles beneath the Russian submarines being observed) were identifiable as “crash sites” of sunken vessels (including the Scorpion, the Thresher, and the Titanic).

  Significantly, as concerns our fictional heroes, this same technology revealed how extensions of the Nile and other great rivers actually carved out deep channels across the bed of the Mediterranean (during what are now known to have been a series of Mediterranean dry-outs, the latest episode ending in the great flood of 5.3 million years ago).

  Large-scale geometric line patterns on seafloors have also been indicated by sonar imagery. At first glance, some of them do resemble “unnatural” or “man-made” structures. Our opinion (and the current scientific consensus view) is that all are, to near absolute certainty, natural geologic formations. However, consensus scientific opinions are sometimes proved wrong by new information and if we should be proved wrong, it will only make planet Earth’s natur
al history a lot more mysterious and perhaps a bit more beautiful as well.

  Jacques Cousteau was the first person to map the undersea typography of the Santorini Lagoon and to explore the crater in a mini-sub. His brilliance, and his actions during time-critical life-threatening situations, are as true to life as can be told, based on the firsthand eyewitness accounts of Cousteau’s first American science officer, Thomas Dettweiler (of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the U.S. Navy, retired).

  On the discovery that became Mac’s cover story for the expedition to Santorini: While no prehistoric grave of the sort has been found in Santorini’s Fira Quarry (although the quarry itself is quite real, just as described), the number of branching humanlike lineages and the oldest known stone tools are becoming rather complex and being pushed progressively deeper into our past even as you read. The oldest clearly authenticated stone tools (as first published in the May 20, 2015, issue of Nature) date from 3.3 million years ago, with subsequent and potentially older finds now vying for the title of “oldest known.” Back near the end of the twentieth century, the human family tree was believed to be rather thinly branched, sprouting (about 20 million years ago) from dryopithecine apes, through an apish fossil named “Lucy,” and toward us. Late-twentieth-century sketches of the family tree appeared even thinner than Charlie Brown’s classic, sad Christmas twig. However, newer fossils—more and more of them—revealed we humans to be merely a surviving limb from a once very exotic, widely branching family bush.

  Even as this novel was nearing completion, new examples showed up. In one particularly fascinating coincidence, a “mystery primate,” dating back to the time frame during which an extension of the Nile flowed along the deep Mediterranean desert, left its footprints on Santorini’s neighbor to the south, Crete. The now-fossilized footprints (as first reported in Nature, September 2, 2017), were laid down 5.7 million years ago, along what might then have been a muddy alpine lakeshore. A team from Uppsala University, Sweden, discovered more than fifty of the prints concentrated in an area of scarcely more than four square yards—meaning that there were probably several such creatures, traveling as part of a troop, or lair. They walked on the soles of their feet, as might be expected of an animal that stood somewhere between chimpanzees and a more humanlike primate, or “hominin.” (Note: Bonobos are more comfortable walking upright than chimpanzees.) The footprints are puzzling because, the team said, “Crete is some distance from all other sites where hominins of a similar age have been found: in Chad, Ethiopia, and Kenya. If the animal that made the prints was not a hominin, it must have been a previously unknown non-hominin primate that evolved a human-like footprint independently.”