by A. G. Riddle
When he announced this revisionist history, I asked him flatly why this wasn’t revealed to the Immari earlier; after all, it seems like helpful historical facts. He lectured me condescendingly, something about “heavy is the head that wears the crown” and “knowing we alone stood between humanity and annihilation would have destroyed us. Our ancestors were wise. They spared us the weight of our actions, so that we could focus on finding the truth and acting to save the world.”
It’s hard to argue with a maniac who grows more important by the day.
Kane’s Expeditions:
Kane has sent expeditions to every region of the Asian highlands: Tibet, Nepal, and northern India. He’s convinced the Immaru are there, hiding, sitting on secrets that can deliver us from the coming end of days.
He insists that these Immaru will reside in a cold climate, a highland. He points out that the Nordic peoples of Europe have long dominated the continent because of their connection to the original Immaru bloodline, which flourishes in cold, icy environments. He brushed aside my mention of the advanced Roman and Greek civilizations, in their balmy southern European climate. “Artifacts of genetic gifts bestowed by the Immari as they journeyed to the north, seeking Atlantis and their natural, preferred habitat,” he said. He insists that this “Atlantis Gene” which bestowed all humanity’s gifts, a genetic heritage most concentrated in the Immari, must be connected to cold weather. From there, he’s postulated that the rest of the Atlantean race must be out there somewhere, in the cold, hibernating, waiting to retake the planet.
As such, he’s become obsessed with Antarctica. He’s sent an expedition there as well, but no word has come yet. He plans to follow up personally, in a super-sub he’s building at a shipyard in northern Germany. I’ve tried desperately to find out its location, hoping I could plant a bomb on it. But I’ve heard that the sub is nearing completion and that he will soon sail for the Far East to dispense with the Immaru once and for all, before turning south for Antarctica to find the Atlantean capital. It’s quite a plan.
I had hoped his absence would provide an opening, that I could take control of Immari in his absence, but he’s accounted for that as well. If I’m right, I’ll soon be out of the picture, more or less permanently. So, I’ve made other plans.
I’ve convinced a soldier in the expedition to carry this journal to you, assuming Kane even finds the Immaru, and that the soldier keeps his promise. If he’s caught with it, it’s a death sentence for him (and me).
A Chamber of Curiosities:
There’s one final thing I wish to tell you. I’ve found something. A chamber of some kind, deep inside the ruins at Gibraltar. I believe it holds the key to understanding the structure and possibly the Atlanteans. The technology here is advanced—dangerous in the wrong hands. I have gone to great lengths to keep it from Kane. I’m enclosing a map to the chamber, which I’ve been hiding behind a false wall. Hurry.
Kate unfolded the delicate yellow page with the map, studied it for a few moments, then handed it to David. “It was the same device—the Bell—in China. They used it on me, on hundreds of people. That’s what they’re doing, trying to find a genetic key that will impart immunity to the device. All my research, all the Immari research into genetics has been about this one end: finding the Atlantis Gene. All Martin’s lies, my whole life… they used me.”
David handed the map back and gazed out of the basket at the mountains and forest flowing by below. “Well I’m glad they did.”
Kate focused on him.
David looked her in the eyes. “It could have been someone else. Someone who wasn’t as strong. Or as smart. You can figure this out, and you can still stop them.”
“I don’t see—”
“Let’s just go through what we know. Let’s just lay all the pieces of the puzzle out there and see what fits together. Okay?” When Kate nodded, David continued. “Back at the monastery, I said I knew what the Bell was. It’s an old World War II legend. Conspiracy theorists still talk about it—Die Glocke or the Bell. They say it was an advanced Nazi weapons project, or possibly a breakthrough energy source. The theories get wilder from there. Everything from anti-gravity to time travel. But if it caused the Spanish flu in 1918, and bodies from China got out—”
“It would be another pandemic, this one much worse than Spanish flu.”
“I mean, is that possible?” David said. “Are the Immari statistics even right? How could we not have a vaccine for something that killed two to five percent of the population?”
“We studied Spanish flu in medical school, or the 1918 flu pandemic, as it’s now known. Their stats are right or close. We think Spanish flu killed between fifty to one hundred million—so about four percent of the total global population—”
“That would be like… two hundred eighty million dying today—the entire population of the United States. Surely they have a vaccine. And how could the Immari hide this—or sell it as the flu?”
“At first, doctors didn’t think it was the flu. It was initially misdiagnosed as dengue, cholera, or typhoid—mostly because the symptoms were very… distinctly un-flu-like. Patients had hemorrhages from mucous membranes, especially from the nose, stomach, and intestines, even bleeding from the skin and ears.” Kate thought back to the dark room with the Bell hanging over the cowering crowd, of the bleeding bodies. She had to focus. “Anyway, of all the flu strains in the world, it’s still the least understood—and the most deadly. There is no vaccine. Spanish flu essentially caused the body to self-destruct; it killed through a cytokine storm—the body’s own immune system ravaged it. Most flu strains are devastating for people with weak immune systems—children and the elderly. That’s why we vaccinate: to boost the immune system. Spanish flu was fundamentally different. It killed people with strong immune systems. The stronger the person’s immune system was, the worse the cytokine storm was. It was deadly for people aged 25-34.”
“It’s almost like it killed anyone who could be a threat. No wonder the Immari think it’s a weapon,” David said. “But why unleash it? The world wouldn’t stand a chance. In 1918, at the end of World War I, borders were sealed everywhere, the whole world had ground to a halt. Think about how connected we are today; a similar outbreak would wipe us out in days. If what you say is true, the contagion has already left China and is scouring the world as we speak. Why would they do it?”
“Maybe they don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a cho—”
“In their minds,” Kate said. “Just based on the thinking in the journal, I have a couple of theories. I think they’ve been looking for the Atlantis Gene so that they can survive the device. That’s why they were interested in my research, why they kidnapped the kids. They must be out of time.”
“The satellite photo—with the codes on the back. It had a sub in the middle.”
“Kane’s sub,” Kate said.
“I bet so. And there was a structure below it. We know they’ve been looking for the sub since 1947—the obituary in the New York Times decoded to ‘Antarctica, U-boat not found, advise if further search authorized.’ So they finally found the sub, and under it, another Atlantis—a threat.” David shook his head. “But I still don’t get it, the science—why unleash another pandemic?”
“I think the bodies from the Bell are Toba Protocol. It seems that direct contact with the Bell is the most deadly, but there’s only one Bell, or was only one. Maybe they’re going to distribute the bodies around the world. The subsequent outbreak would reduce the world’s population drastically, to only those that could survive the Bell, to anyone with the Atlantis Gene.”
“Yes, but why—aren’t there better ways? Couldn’t they, I don’t know, sequence a bunch of genomes or steal some data and find these people?”
“No, or maybe. You could probably identify people with the Atlantis Gene, but there’s a missing piece: epigenetics and gene activation.”
“Epi—”
“It’s sort of compli
cated, but the bottom line is that it’s not just what genes you have, it’s what genes get activated, as well as how those genes interact with each other. The plague conceivably would cause a second Great Leap Forward by activating the Atlantis Gene in anyone who has it. Or maybe it’s something else entirely, maybe the plague will reduce the population and force us to mutate or evolve, just like the Toba catastrophe did…” Kate rubbed her temples. There was something else, some other piece, just out of reach. The conversation with Qian flashed through her mind: the tapestry, the flood of fire, the dying band of humans cowering under the blanket of ashes… the savior… offering a cup with his blood, and the beasts of the forest emerging as modern humans. “I think we’re missing something.”
“You think—”
“What if the first Great Leap Forward wasn’t a natural occurrence? What if it wasn’t evolution at all? What if humanity was on the brink of extinction and what if the Atlanteans—whoever built the structure in Gibraltar—they came to our rescue? What if the Atlanteans gave that dying band of humans something that would help them survive Toba? A gene, a genetic advantage that made them smart enough to survive. A change in brain wiring. What if they gave us the Atlantis Gene?”
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David looked around as if deciding what to say. Finally he opened his mouth to speak, but Kate held up her hand.
“I know it sounds crazy, okay, but just hear me out, let me talk through this. It’s not like we’re going anywhere for a while.” She motioned to the basket and the balloon above it.
“Fair enough, but I’m warning you, I’m out of my element here. I’m not sure how much help I can be.”
“Just tell me when it starts sounding too crazy.”
“Is that retroactive? Because what you just said—”
“Okay, actually, you just listen for a while, then call me out on any craziness. Here are the facts: around seventy thousand years ago, the Mount Toba supervolcano erupts. There’s a global volcanic winter that lasts six to ten years, and possibly a one-thousand-year-long cooling episode. Ash blankets southern Asia and Africa. The total human population plummets to somewhere around three thousand to ten thousand, maybe even as low as one thousand viable mating pairs.”
“All right, that’s true, I can confirm its non-craziness.”
“Because I told you about the Toba catastrophe in Jakarta.”
David held up his hands. “Hey, just trying to be helpful here.”
Kate remembered her own reaction and her words to David in the van days ago, what felt like a lifetime ago. “Very funny. Anyway, the reduction in population caused a genetic bottleneck around that time. We know that every human on the planet is descended from an extremely small population, between one thousand to ten thousand breeding pairs that existed about seventy thousand years ago. Every human outside of Africa is descended from a small tribe that left around fifty thousand years ago with as few as one hundred people. In fact, every human alive today is directly descended from a man who lived in Africa sixty thousand years ago.”
“Adam?”
“Actually we call him Y-chromosomal Adam, since we’re scientists. There’s an Eve too—Mitochondrial Eve—but she lived much earlier, we think about one hundred ninety thousand to two hundred thousand years ago.”
“Time travelers? Am I still calling out the crazy—”
“Not time travelers, thank you very much. They’re just genetic designations of the people everyone on earth is directly descended from. It’s complicated, but the bottom line is that this Adam had a huge advantage—his offspring were far more advanced than any of their peers.”
“They had the Atlantis Gene.”
“For now, we’ll stick to the facts. They had some kind of advantage, whatever it was. By around fifty thousand years ago, the human race is beginning to behave differently. There’s an explosion in complex behavior: language, tool-making, wall art. It’s the greatest advancement in human history—what we call the Great Leap Forward. In looking at the fossils of humans before and after, there’s not a ton of difference. There’s also not much difference in their genomes. About all we know is that it was a subtle genetic change that caused a difference in the way we thought, possibly a change in our brain wiring.”
“The Atlantis Gene.”
“Whatever it was, this change in brain wiring, it was the greatest genetic jackpot in the history of time. The human race goes from the brink of extinction—less than ten thousand people, hunting and gathering in the wilderness—to ruling the planet, with over seven billion people, in the span of just fifty thousand years. That’s the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. It’s an extraordinary comeback, almost hard to believe for a geneticist. I mean, twelve percent of all the humans who have ever lived are still alive today. We only evolved around two hundred thousand years ago. We’re still riding a mushroom cloud of the effects of the Great Leap Forward, and we have no idea how it happened or where it will lead.”
“Yeah, but why us, why did we get so lucky? There were other human species around, right? The Neanderthals, the—I can’t remember what you called them; what about them? If the Atlanteans came to our rescue, why not help the others?”
“I have a theory. We know there were at least four subspecies of humans fifty thousand years ago: us or anatomically modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo floresiensis or Hobbits. There were probably more that we haven’t found, but those are the four subspecies—”
“Subspecies?” David said.
“Yes. Technically they’re subspecies; they were all humans. We define a species as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring, and all four of those human groups could interbreed. In fact, we have genetic evidence that they did. When we sequenced the Neanderthal genome a few years ago, we discovered that everyone outside of Africa has somewhere between one to four percent Neanderthal DNA. It was most pronounced in Europe—the Neanderthal homeland. We found the same thing when we sequenced the Denisovan genome. Some people in Melanesia, and especially Papua New Guinea, share up to six percent of their genome with the Denisovans.”
“Interesting. So we’re all hybrids?”
“Yes, technically.”
“So we absorbed the other subspecies into a combined human race?”
“No. Well, a small percentage maybe, but the archaeological evidence suggests the four groups survived as separate subspecies. I think the other subspecies didn’t receive the Atlantis Gene because they didn’t need it.”
“They—”
“Weren’t on the brink of extinction,” Kate said. “We think Neanderthals existed in Europe as early as six hundred thousand to three hundred fifty thousand years ago. All the other subspecies are also older than we are; they probably had larger populations. And they were out of the blast radius of Toba: the Neanderthals were in Europe, the Denisovans were in present-day Russia, and the Hobbits were in Southeast Asia—farther away from Toba and downwind.”
“So they fared better than we did, and we almost die out. Then we hit the genetic jackpot, and they actually go extinct—at our hands.”
“Yes. And they died out quickly. We know Neanderthals were stronger than us, had bigger brains than us, and had lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years before we showed up. Then, within ten to twenty thousand years, they’re extinct.”
“Maybe that’s part of the Immari grand plan,” David said. “Maybe Toba Protocol is about more than finding the Atlantis Gene. What if the Immari think these advanced humans, these Atlanteans, are hibernating, but if they do come back, they’ll eliminate any competing humans, anyone who might be a threat—just as we did in the last fifty thousand years after we received this Atlantis Gene? You read Kane’s speech: they thought a war with the Atlanteans was imminent.”
Kate considered David’s theory, and her mind drifted to her conversation with Martin. His allegations that any advanced race would wipe out any threatening inferior humans; his theory that the human ra
ce was like a computer algorithm advancing to one eventuality: a homogeneous human race. That was the last piece of the puzzle. “You’re right. Toba is about more than finding the Atlantis Gene. It’s about creating Atlanteans, transforming the human race by advancing it. They’re trying to synchronize humanity with the Atlanteans—to create one race, so that if the Atlanteans do return, they won’t see us as a threat. Martin said Toba Protocol was ‘a contingency.’ They think if the Atlanteans wake up and see seven billion savages, they’ll slaughter us. But if they emerge and find a small group of humans, very similar genetically to themselves, they’ll allow them to survive—they’ll see them as part of their own tribe or race.”
“Yes, but I think that’s only half the plan,” David said. “That’s the scientific basis, the genetic angle, the backup plan. The Immari was and is run by soldiers, and they think they’re at war. They think like soldiers. I said before that I thought they were creating an army, and I still do. I think they were testing the subjects on the Bell for a specific reason.”
“So they could survive it.”
“Survive it, yes, but more specifically: to be able to pass under it. In Gibraltar, they had to excavate around it and remove it. I think there could be a Bell at every Atlantis structure—a sort of sentry device that keeps anyone out; but it malfunctioned on us because we’re actually human-Atlantean hybrids. If the Immari found a way to activate the Atlantis Gene, they could send an army in and kill the Atlanteans. Toba Protocol would be the ultimate contingency—if they were unsuccessful, the Atlanteans wake up and all that’s left are members of their own race.”
