CHAPTER 32
Immari Jakarta Headquarters
Jakarta, Indonesia
Martin’s men had taken Kate deep underground, then led her down a long corridor that opened onto what looked like a large aquarium. The glass window was at least fifteen feet tall and maybe sixty wide.
Kate didn’t understand what she saw. The scene beyond the glass was clearly the bottom of The Bay of Jakarta, but it was the creatures moving about that puzzled her. At first she thought they were some sort of illuminated sea creatures, like jelly fish, drifting down to the bottom then floating back to the surface. But the lights were wrong. She walked closer to the glass. Yes — they were robots. Almost like robotic crabs, with lights that swiveled like eyes and four arms, each with three metallic fingers. They burrowed into the ground, then emerged with items in their mechanical hands. She strained to see, what were the items?
“Our excavation methods have come a long way.”
Kate turned to see Martin. The look on his face gave her pause, worried her. He looked tired, dejected, resigned. “Martin, please tell me what’s going on. Where are the children that were taken from my lab?”
“In a safe place, for now. We don’t have much time, Kate. I need to ask you some questions. It’s very important that you tell me what you treated those children with. We know it wasn’t ARC-247.”
How could he know that? And why did he care what she had treated them with? Kate tried to think. Something was wrong here. What would happen if she told him? Was the soldier, David, right? “I will tell you, but I want the children back first,” she said.
Martin walked over, joining her beside the glass wall. “I’m afraid that’s not possible, but you have my word: I will protect them. You have to trust me, Kate. Many lives are at stake.”
“Tell me what the hell’s going on, and I’ll think about trusting you.”
Martin turned, walking away from her, seeming to ponder. “What if I told you there was a weapon, somewhere in this world, that was more powerful than anything you can imagine? A weapon capable of wiping out the entire human race. And that what you treated those children with is our only chance at survival, our only means to resist this weapon?”
“I’d say that sounds pretty far-fetched.”
“Does it? You know enough about evolution to know that it’s not. The human race isn’t nearly as safe as we think it is.” He motioned toward the aquarium wall, toward a robot floating down. “What do you think is going on out there?”
“Digging for treasure? A sunken merchant ship maybe.”
“Does this look like a treasure hunt to you?” When Kate said nothing, he continued. “What if I told you there was a lost coastal city out there? And that it was only one of many around the world. Around 13,000 years ago, most of Europe was under two miles of ice. New York city was covered by a mile of ice. In the span of a few hundred years, the glaciers melted and sea levels rose almost four hundred feet, wiping out every coastal settlement on the face of the planet. Even today, almost half the human population lives within 100 miles of the coast. Imagine how many people lived on the coast then, when fish were the most reliable source of food and the seas were the easiest method of trade. Think of the settlements and early cities that were lost forever, the history we’ll never recover. The only surviving record we have of this event is the story of The Great Flood. The people who survived the deluge from the glaciers were keen to warn generations that came after them. The story of the Flood is a historical fact, the geological record proves it, and the story appears in The Bible and all the texts we’ve recovered before it and after it. Cuneiform tablets from Akkadia, text from Sumeria, native American civilizations — they all tell of the Flood, but no one knows what happened before it.”
“That’s what this is about? Finding lost coastal cities — Atlantis?”
“Atlantis is not what you think it is. My point is that there is so much below the surface — so much of our own history that we don’t know. Think about what else was lost at the time of the Flood. You know the genetic history. We know that at least two species of humans survived to the time of the Flood — maybe three. Maybe more. We’ve recently found Neanderthal bones at Gibraltar that are 23,000 years old. We could find bones that are even younger. We’ve also found bones that were only about 12,000 years old — dated to around the time of the Flood — less than a hundred miles from where we now stand, off the main island of Java, on Flores Island. We think these hobbit-like humans walked the earth for almost 300,000 years. Then, suddenly, 12,000 years ago, they die out. The Neanderthals evolved 600,000 years ago — they had roamed the earth nearly three times longer than us when they died out. You know the history.”
“I do, and I don’t see what this has to do with kidnapping my children.”
“Why do you think the Neanderthals and Hobbits died out? They had been around a long time before humans walked onto the scene.”
“We killed them.”
“That’s right. The human race is the biggest mass murderer of all time. Think about it, we’re hard-coded to survive. Even our ancient ancestors were driven by this impulse, driven enough to recognize the Neanderthals and Hobbits as dangerous enemies. They may have slaughtered dozens of human sub-species. And that legacy shamefully lives on. We attack whatever is different, anything we don’t understand, anything that might change our world, our environment, reduce our chances of survival. Racism, class warfare, sexism, east vs west, north and south, capitalism and communism, democracy and dictatorships, Islam and Christianity, Israel and Palestine, they’re all different faces of the same war: the war for a homogeneous human race, an end to our differences. It’s a war we started a long time ago, one we’ve been fighting ever since. A war that operates in every human mind below the subconscious level, like a computer program, constantly running in the background, guiding us to some eventuality.”
Kate didn’t know what to say, couldn’t see how it could involve her trial and her children. “You expect me to believe those two children are involved in this ancient cosmic struggle for the human race?”
“Yes. Think about the war between the Neanderthals and Humans. The battles between the Hobbits and Humans. Why did we win? The Neanderthals had bigger brains than us and they were certainly larger and stronger. But our brains were wired differently. Our minds were wired to build advanced tools, solve problems, and anticipate the future. Our mental software gave us an advantage, but we still don’t know how we got it. We were animals, just like them, 50,000 years ago. But some Great Leap Forward gave us an advantage we still don’t understand. The only thing we know for sure is that it was a change in brain wiring, possibly a change in how we used language and communicated. A sudden change. What if another change is under way? Those children’s brains are wired differently. You know how evolution works. It’s never a straight line. It operates on trial and error. Those children’s brains could simply be the next version of the operating system for the human mind — like the new version of Windows or Mac OS — a newer, faster version… with advantages over the previous release — us. What if those children or others like them are the first members of a new branch emerging in the human genetic tree? A new subspecies. What if, somewhere on this planet, a group already has the new software release? How do you think they would treat us, the old humans? Maybe the same way we treated the last humans that weren’t as smart as us — the Neanderthals and Hobbits.”
“That’s absurd, those children are no threat to us.” Kate studied Martin. He looked different, the look in his eyes, she couldn’t place it. And what he was saying, all the talk of genetics and evolutionary history — telling her things she already knew… but why?
“It may not seem that way, but how can we really know?” Martin continued. “From what we know of the past, every advanced human race has wiped out every race they viewed as a threat. We were the predator last time, but we’ll be the prey next time.”
“Then we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“We’ve already crossed it, we just don’t know it. That’s the nature of the Frame Problem — in a complex environment, we simply can’t know the consequences of our actions, however good they seem at the time. Ford thought he was creating a device for mass transportation. He also gave the world the means to destroy the environment.”
Kate shook her head. “Listen to yourself, Martin. You sound crazy, delusional.”
Martin smiled. “I said the same thing when your father gave me the same speech.”
Kate considered Martin’s claim. It was a lie, it had to be. At the very least it was a distraction, a play for her trust, an effort to remind her that he had taken her in. She stared him down. “You’re telling me you took those children to prevent evolution?”
“Not, exactly… I can’t explain everything, Kate. I really wish I could. All I can tell you is that those children hold the key to preventing a war that will wipe out the human race. A war that has been coming since the day our ancestors sailed out of Africa 60-70,000 years ago. You have to trust me. I need to know what you did.”
“What is the Toba Protocol?”
Martin looked confused. Or was he frightened? “Where… did you hear that?”
“The soldier who picked me up from the police station. Are you involved in it — Toba?”
“Toba… is a contingency plan.”
“Are you involved?”
“Yes, but Toba may not be needed — if you talk to me, Kate.”
Four armed men entered from a side door Kate hadn’t seen before.
Martin turned on them. “I wasn’t finished talking to her!”
Two guards took her by the arms, forcing her out of the room and down the long corridor she had traveled down to meet Martin.
In the distance she heard Martin arguing with the other two men.
“Director Sloane said to tell you your time is up — she won’t talk, and she knows too much anyway. He’s waiting at the helipad.”