There were many things in the big office, but a huge desk with several screens in the middle of it occupied a prominent space. Althaea told Raquel they’d see her later and took Juan Carlos to a chair near the desk.
“Sit down, Juan Carlos,” she asked him while she sat on the other side, looking at the screens.
While they sat, Juan Carlos looked at her most closely and noticed that she had six fingers on each hand. He felt the hairs bristle on the back of his neck and his pulse beat even faster. How had he not noticed that before?
“Are you scared?”
He was going to deny it, but confessed: “Yes.”
Then he realized something and asked: “Althaea, are you a relative of Tzedek’s?”
“You could say so. I’m...his daughter,” she hesitated, smiling.
Juan Carlos looked at her, intrigued. “How can you be his daughter? You’re almost the same age.”
Althaea held her head. She could see there wasn’t any reason to keep hiding things. It was all too complicated. And the more complications, the more possibilities for problems.
“Juan Carlos, the fact that you’ve arrived here and are talking to me indicates that you’re an extraordinary person. Let’s not have false modesty. You’re not a prodigy, but almost. I know you.”
Juan Carlos looked at her strangely. “How?”
“Besides the interviews you had, we know what you do, we researched all your work, we read everything you’ve ever written online, we talked with everyone you know. Tzedek knows you from before your birth.”
“That’s impossible, if I’m older than him,” Juan Carlos laughed.
Althaea didn’t open her mouth, but Juan Carlos felt the following words in his head:
“Not everything is as it seems. I think you’re ready to know more about us.”
“What...?” thought Juan Carlos. Was he going crazy?
“Yes, it’s true, you can hear me without us talking.”
“Telepathy,” thought Juan Carlos, with disbelief, but at the same time brushing it aside, even before the overwhelming evidence.
“But that’s impossible!” he said aloud.
“Of course it’s impossible for humans,” Althaea affirmed. “It’s me reading and answering in your mind. You can’t do it.”
“For humans,” he repeated, looking at her again attentively. His temples throbbed, his pulse raced as if he’d just run up ten flights of stairs. “Is this a joke? Hidden camera? Please don’t tell me later that this is a joke and I’m an idiot. I’ve always been a skeptic. I think it would ruin me if I believed what you’re telling me and later I found out that it was all a trick...though I don’t see how it could be a trick.”
“No it isn’t, and you’ve taken it very well, although you don’t believe it and you doubt yourself.”
Juan Carlos got even more nervous.
“You said humans? What are you...invaders from another world? Is that why you killed everybody? Am I in danger? Are you going to replace us with younger versions of ourselves, clones?” Juan Carlos asked with alarm, thinking about Raquel.
Althaea rolled her eyes.
“You’re not in any danger, on the contrary. Calm down. Nowhere in the world or with anyone else will you be safer than with us.”
“Althaea...are you saying, or rather thinking or transmitting to my mind or whatever the hell you’re doing, that you aren’t human?”
“Isn’t that fairly obvious?”
“But...are you serious? Where are you from? Why...well, that is fairly obvious, you want the planet for yourselves?”
She looked at him with a sardonic smile and Juan Carlos suddenly felt old, impacted by her beauty. For a moment he felt disgusted with himself. Besides being a beauty, she is a young girl, she’s what, twenty-four years old? Hell, I’m a degenerate.
Althaea looked at him in a way that made him turn red.
“I don’t know my exact age. We’ve used so many different calendars since I was born. Neither the day nor the year stayed the same and before that we measured time differently from you...but today I would be tens of thousands of years old in your years. So in reality you would be worse than a kid for me, without taking into account that you’re a different species. And I like you and I don’t feel like a degenerate. But I’m a young girl among my people.”
Juan Carlos turned as red as a beet. “That was a private thought.”
Then he absorbed what Althaea had explained.
“What did you say? That can’t be. You can’t be that old, that would be immortal.”
“We aren’t immortal. Certainly, if a train ran over me or a bomb exploded on me, I’d die like any other creature. Our immortality consists of not getting old, we heal fast from any injury, and we don’t get sick. Our technology, what we have left, is like magic for you. For example, right now you could touch my face easily but if you tried to shoot me, the bullet would bounce off of my ‘force field’ without touching me, as if I had a bulletproof vest.”
Juan Carlos leaned back in his seat, his mind blank.
“’We are’ you said.”
“Of course.”
“How many are there of you? And Tzedek is your father?”
“Today, too few. Tzedek was quite happy to have found you.”
“And why are you here, did you use up the resources on your planet or what?”
Althaea laughed.
“If you knew the irony of what you’re saying.”
Juan Carlos cocked his head and couldn’t help letting out a tired wheeze.
“Pay attention. We evolved on this world, about five million years ago. We are natives of this planet, the Earth. Our species developed an advanced civilization, technology, and prospered for millions of years. Our level of technological, social, and intellectual development allowed us to control everything that could be controlled, including the environment and mortality. We lived in Paradise. We aren’t a very aggressive species and we work in a collaborative manner. We channeled our aggressive impulses with rituals. The world population remained stable at about ten million. Just a few died in ritual combat, when they got tired of living, or in serious accidents that tragically occurred once in a while. When it was necessary, we’d create new individuals, by way of what you are starting to know as genetic engineering, to keep the population stable.”
“How is it that nothing remained of that? Why didn’t we ever find anything?”
“Oh, every now and then someone has come across some remains from our civilization. Not that much was left. If a stone monument breaks apart from erosion after ten thousand years to the point of being unrecognizable, imagine after a couple of million years...besides, we had thousands of years to get rid of any suspicious remains before you all developed the technology necessary to recognize them. Even so, we’ve had to ‘buy’ the silence of more than one person who investigated in the wrong place. Or make them look crazy. You wouldn’t believe the truths that there are behind some conspiracy theories. Our main place of residence was to the west of Europe until about five thousand years ago.”
Juan Carlos went from surprise to surprise. He tried to organize the thousand questions he wanted to ask.
“So... how did we enter into the scene? We humans, I mean.”
“We have a certain parentage with you, in the same way a gorilla is related to chimpanzees. For some millions of years, there were several branches of intelligent hominids cohabiting in this world, but they were maintained with a primitive intelligence, except us, of course. About a hundred fifty thousand years ago, we got a big surprise. A space object fell on an African plateau, far from our populations, unfortunately. We knew that there were other planets with life and even with technological civilizations. Our technology allowed us to detect them but we weren’t interested in space exploration or the conquest of other worlds. I’m sorry—I don’t want to carry on a conference here...”
“No, please tell me...” asked Juan Carlos, closing his mouth.
“W
e didn’t have satellites like the humans have now, because we weren’t too interested in conquering space, as you call it. We didn’t have the pressure of destroying the planet and needing a place to escape to. So we didn’t give enough importance to that object that we assumed was a meteorite.”
“And it wasn’t one?”
“No, it wasn’t. It was a small automated space ship whose only objective was to assemble a portal once it had landed. Once assembled, it was activated and the real invasion began. Some creatures looking like giant bipeds, six feet tall, came with an army of machines and equipment. They deployed their instruments, many towards space around the Earth, and they quickly studied us. I don’t know how these creatures thought, we never were able to communicate with them. When they started operating here, they tried unsuccessfully to attack us several times in various ways. In the end, they did something we weren’t expecting. They took a species of hominids, ones that were closest to what they needed and through genetic engineering transformed the friendly and collaborative primates that we knew, similar to the bonobos of today, into a species of violent, selfish, destructive, and unscrupulous beasts: Homo sapiens.”
“Wait, wait. We were created? We were created? How did we survive if we were as violent as you say we were?” questioned Juan Carlos, a little indignant.
“They introduced genes with the necessity to reproduce without gauging the consequences, and a more advanced intelligence but selfish and oriented towards finding new ways to kill in order to conquer the environment. Very few natural species look to kill even members of their own species for any excuse like you do, have you noticed that? That done, they let them out in different regions and they left them to act. You humans were created by creatures of another world to destroy us.”
Juan Carlos was speechless. When he reacted, he said:
“I’m sorry, but this must be a joke, all my life saying that intelligent design was stupid, that there was no evidence for it, and now you tell me that we were designed.”
“Designed to destroy, unfortunately. When we finally found the portal after hundreds of years of looking for it, we analyzed it and destroyed it, but humans were already reproducing all over the world. Although at first there were just a few, they began to reproduce exponentially, and the moment arrived when there were more of you than us. We had secluded ourselves in our most important continent, Atlantis—your famous Atlantis.”
Juan Carlos made a face that said ‘Don’t kid me.’
“Yes, it existed. The humans found it and invaded our lands over and over again, despite our efforts to stop it. It was only three thousand years ago that a group of humans infiltrated our main source of energy and ruined it. We don’t know how they did it, but what they did was start a chain reaction in the main reactor that destroyed the whole continent, sinking it into the sea. Almost everyone died. Better said, almost the whole Atlantean world.”
Althaea was serious now, thoughtful.
“And you were there?” Juan Carlos asked.
“Tzedek was. I was far away, in what is now Africa, investigating. That’s why I’m alive today. Almost all of the Atlanteans perished and there were only a few hundred of us left. While you humans, with your instincts genetically coded, kept reproducing unchecked, we lost almost all the important people of our species, most of our technology, or at least, how to continue making it, and much of our knowledge. And worst of all, our species was genetically modified many ages ago so that the women are sterile, an impeccable way to keep the population under control, but it played against us when we lost the technology that allowed us to create new members of the species.”
“But that’s horrible—they practiced eugenics, and yet couldn’t have children even when they wanted to?”
“That’s right. We were able to rescue very few and what we could save we stored up and maintained in secret. Since then, we’ve approached humanity several times, trying to modify the species to get rid of the defects that the annunankis, or whatever they were called, had put in them. Unfortunately, that was almost impossible without destroying them completely. First we tried it with the Egyptians before the hecatomb, later with the Greeks, with whom we had a close relationship. The Mycenaeans even learned our language. We tried to guide and advance humanity, to control their destructive impulses, but we made mistakes.”
“The Gods...” murmured Juan Carlos.
“Many considered us like that. A few hundred years ago, humans began to grow wildly once again and we had to make several efforts to reduce their population. We achieved it in the Middle Ages with the plague, again at the beginning of the twentieth century with the flu, but later you yourselves got involved in wars and with the industrial revolution, and technological development began to kill not just yourselves but the whole planet. Our idea was to reverse the genetic changes that had been made, to return them to be the peaceful and controlled primates they had been, but there was a problem. There are very few of us and a traitor among us, Marsan, decided to take things into his own hands and get his revenge once and for all. We don’t usually succumb to revenge, but as I told you before, we aren’t perfect. What we thought was going to be a way to control them was converted into an extermination where only the ones we’d selected would make it.”
“Like us,” Juan Carlos shuddered, pale.
“Yes, like you. Humans chosen for their extreme intelligence, but also for their characters—peaceful, not aggressive, rebellious, skeptical and sexually moderate, and some other genetic characteristics. That is, individuals we could call Atlanteans with pride, instead of the wild primates that the invaders created.”
“And what about Raquel? Is this a young version of Raquel, or a clone, or what?”
Althaea got serious.
“Raquel isn’t a clone. It’s the real Raquel, your Raquel, but when she died, we applied a variation of the techniques that keep us alive, a prototype, fruit of her own research work. That technology repaired her organs, and rejuvenated her, which made it possible to revive her. Unfortunately, in the process, she lost parts of her memory. Not the parts that Tzedek were interested in, luckily for him, so she kept working for us. But she doesn’t remember having had a family.”
Juan Carlos thought for a moment.
“You want me to believe that you didn’t want to kill the humans, just modify them? Why would you do that, if it was so much easier and faster to just kill them?”
Althaea sighed.
“Although it turned out that way, we aren’t genocidal. Why do some humans protect some dangerous species like tigers, instead of just exterminating them? Even some of you humans are aware that it isn’t good to exterminate species.”
Juan Carlos bit his lips.
“And what do you want from us?”
“For you to accept living with us. We have a world to fix and protect. Today there are only a dozen of us Atlanteans left. And the aliens could come back.”
“You just want us as a workforce. Like horses, or pets for humans—short-lived beings that can be used.”
“I understand how it must look like that, but no, there’s nothing further from the truth. If we wanted slaves, we would have chased you down, and put you on boats where you couldn’t escape, and forced you to do what we wanted through extortion or violence. We know those methods work, they were used by humans for millennia.”
“The truth is, we want to start from scratch. And it’s more...you, in particular, Juan Carlos, I like you. Mentally and physically. It’s strange, very strange. But I’d like you to stay with us, of your own free will.”
Juan Carlos’ mouth dropped open, and he turned red.
“Don’t you have any shame?”
“At my age? I don’t know what that is any more. And considering how little time you humans live, it’s better to not waste time,” she said, then getting serious, she commented: “My father is coming in.”
Juan Carlos turned even more red. That was happening to him a lot that day.
REBEL
LION
Alpha, November 27, 2027. 7:55 p.m. (1:55, Rho time)
A surveillance system had surprised a subject sabotaging one of the city’s power converter stations. An internal alarm alerted them to the intent and they were able to catch him right away. After almost an hour of interrogation with chemicals, they found out that the man, named Alberto, had been chosen by Marsan and the sabotage had been planned by him. They went to the control center to see the files and, in checking their file, found to their surprise that his selection was not because of the characteristics the Atlanteans were looking for. This man was an ex-convict, convicted of rape twice, for assault another three times, and a list of complaints as long as your arm. And the worst thing is that Marsan didn’t even bother to hide it, everything was there.
“This is tremendous,” Nikaia lamented. “We did everything to take the best of this species and Marsan also betrayed us in this.”
“Who knows how many individuals of this class are incorporated in the city,” Halius speculated. “We’ll have to check all the records.”
He was interrupted by the noise of a tumult coming from outside.
A group of about ten people had entered the building and were arguing loudly with the guards who were trying to get them out.
“We want to see Alberto!” yelled one when he saw that Halius had come out. “Where is Marsan? We haven’t seen him for days.”
“Yes, we want to see Alberto!” shouted another one.
“Gentlemen...” Halius started to say from the doorway, when one of the men took a weapon that had been hidden in his waistband, pointed it at his chest and fired.
Nikaia and the guards yelled, while Halius fell backwards and the subject shot again and again. The second time there was a light that ran through Halius’ body, the third time the light got brighter and Halius cried out in pain. Nikaia started to close the door while the guards drew their arms and tried to detain the man, but the other subjects were also taking out weapons and starting to shoot.
One of the men threw himself against the door and pushed it just when it was about to close. Nikaia shouted and for a moment held her position, but suddenly the door started to open again.
Earth Keepers Page 17
