The Atlantis Plague Part 7

"Think about it. A supposedly deranged woman, working alone, creating a virus to infect the world and accomplish her own delusional goals? It's a lot less scary than the alternatives: an organized conspiracy, or the worst possibility-a natural occurrence, something that could happen anywhere, anytime. All the alternatives are ongoing threats. The world doesn't need an ongoing threat. They need a crazy lone gunman, presumed dead. Or better yet, captured and punished. The world is a desperate place; catching and killing a villain puts a win on the board and gives everyone a little more hope that we might get through this."

"What about the truth?" Kate said as she handed him the tube with her blood.

Martin dropped the tube into the top of the thermos. "You think anyone would believe it? That the Immari dug up an ancient structure, hundreds of thousands of years old, below Gibraltar, and that the device guarding it unleashed a global pandemic? It's the truth, but it's farfetched, even for fiction. Most people have a very limited imagination."

Kate rubbed the bridge of her nose. She had spent her adult life doing autism research, trying to make a difference. Now she was public enemy number one. Fantastic.

"That's why you hid me in the spa building."

"Yes. I didn't tell you because I didn't want to worry you. There was nothing you could do about it. I've been negotiating for your safe pa.s.sage and safekeeping. I just finalized a deal two days ago."

"A deal?"

"The British have agreed to take you," Martin said. "We'll meet up with their team in a few hours."

At that moment, Kate couldn't help but glance at the sleeping boys in the pew.

"The boys will go with you," Martin added quickly.

Hearing that Martin had a plan, that they would be safe soon, seemed to drain half the fear and tension from her. Her aching muscles hurt a little less and the weight of knowing that the whole world blamed her for the plague faded, if ever so slightly. She ran a hand through her hair. "Why Britain?"

"My top choice would be Australia, but we're too far away. The UK is closer, and probably just as safe. Continental Europe will likely fall to the Immari. The British will hold out to the very end. They have before. You'll be safe there."

"What did you trade them?"

Martin stood and held the bottle of hair dye up. "Come on, time for your makeover."

"You've promised them a cure. That's what you traded for my safety."

"Somebody has to get the cure first, Kate. Now come on. We don't have a lot of time."

CHAPTER 20.

Immari Corporate Research Campus

Outside Nuremberg, Germany

Dr. Nigel Chase stared through the wide gla.s.s picture window into the clean room. The mysterious silver case sat upright on the table, glimmering, reflecting the room's bright lights. The team from Antarctica had delivered the strange case an hour ago, and Nigel had learned nothing about it so far.

It was time to run some experiments, time to start guessing. He carefully nudged the joystick. The robotic arm inside the clean room jerked wildly, almost knocking the case off the steel table. He would never get the hang of this. It was like that silly contraption at the grocery store where you fed it a quarter and tried to fish out a stuffed animal. That never worked either. He wiped the sweat from his brow and thought for a moment. Maybe he didn't need to turn the case. He would just use the arm to move the equipment.

"You want me to try?" Harvey, his lab a.s.sistant, asked.

Nigel loved his sister Fiona dearly, almost as much as he regretted taking on her son Harvey as his lab a.s.sistant. But she wanted Harvey out of the house, and he needed a b.l.o.o.d.y job for that.

"No, Harvey. Thank you, though. Run get me a c.o.ke Light, would you?"

Fifteen minutes later, Nigel had repositioned the equipment, and Harvey still hadn't returned with his c.o.ke Light.

Nigel programmed the computer to begin a round of radiation bombardment, then sat back in the chair and stared through the window, waiting for the results.

"They were out of c.o.ke Light. I checked every machine in the building." Harvey held out a can. "I got you a regular c.o.ke."

For a second Nigel considered telling Harvey that another light drink would have been the logical course of action, but the boy had made a good effort, and that went a long way. "Thanks, Harvey."

"Any luck?"

"No," Nigel said as he cracked the can and sipped the caramel liquid that splashed onto his hand.

The computer beeped, and a dialog filled the screen.

Incoming data.

Nigel set the drink down quickly and leaned in to study the screen. If the readings were correct, the box was emitting neutrinos-a subatomic particle that resulted from radioactive decay and nuclear reactions in the sun and nuclear reactors. How could they be here?

Then the readings flashed red and the neutrino readings slowly ticked down to zero.

"What happened?" Harvey asked.

Nigel was lost in thought. Was the case reacting to the radiation? Was it some kind of signal, like guiding lights flashing in the night? Or an SOS, a proverbial tap-tap-tap with subatomic particles?

Nigel was a nuclear engineer-he focused primarily on nuclear power systems, though he had worked with nuclear warheads a bit in the eighties and on the nuclear power systems on submarines in the nineties. Particle physics was way outside his wheelhouse. A part of him wanted to call in another expert, someone with a background in particle physics, but something made him hesitate.

"Harvey, let's alter the radiation regimen. Let's see what the case does."

An hour later, Nigel finished his third c.o.ke and began pacing the floor. The latest group of particles the box had emitted could be tachyons. Tachyons were theoretical, mostly because they could move faster than light, which isn't possible according to Einstein's theory of special relativity. The particles could also conceivably make time travel possible.

"Harvey, let's try a new regimen."

Nigel began programming the computer while Harvey manipulated the joystick and the robotic arm. The young man was surprisingly good at it. Maybe video games, and youth in general, are good for something, Nigel thought.

Nigel finished programming the radiation protocol into the computer and watched as the device spun up inside the clean room. Nigel had a theory: Perhaps the case manipulated Chameleon particles-a postulated scalar particle candidate that had a ma.s.s that depended on its environment. Chameleon particles would have a small ma.s.s in s.p.a.ce and large ma.s.s in terrestrial environments, making them detectable. If it was true, Nigel could be on the verge of discovering the basis of dark energy and dark matter and even the force behind cosmic inflation.

But Chameleon particles were only half his theory. The other half was that the case was a communications device-that it was simply guiding them, telling them what types of particles it needed to do whatever it was going to do. The case was asking for specific subatomic particles. But why did it need them? Were they "ingredients" to build something, or a combination to unlock it? Nigel believed they had found the key, the radiation regimen the case needed. Maybe it was a sort of Atlantean IQ test, a challenge. It made sense. Math was the language of the universe and subatomic particles were the proverbial writing stone, a kind of cosmic papyrus. What was the box trying to say?

The computer screen lit up. Ma.s.sive output-neutrinos, quarks, gravitons, and particles that didn't even register.

Nigel looked through the window. The case was changing. The shiny silver exterior turned dull, then tiny pits popped up. It was as if the polished surface was turning to sand. Then the grains of sand shook in place briefly before sliding to the center, where a vortex formed.

The dark vortex was eating the case from the inside out. Then the case collapsed completely and the room filled with light.

The building exploded in a flash of white light that instantly consumed the six office towers around it before spreading out for miles around, pushing down trees and scorching the earth. Then the light instantly receded, collapsing back to the point where it began.

The night was dark and still for a moment, then a tiny thread of light floated up from the ground, like a phosph.o.r.escent string, swaying in the wind as it rose. Tendrils sprouted from the thread of light and linked with other threads until they became a mesh, and the mesh weaved so tightly it became a solid wall of light, arched at the top and about twice as tall as a normal door. The gateway of light shimmered silently, waiting.

CHAPTER 21.

The Church of St. Mary of Incarnation

Marbella, Spain

Kate perched on the edge of the cast-iron tub in the bathroom, waiting for the hair dye to soak in.

Martin had insisted on overseeing the operation, as if Kate might try to skip out on the dye job. Knowing the whole world was after her was a strange, yet compelling, motivation to alter her appearance. However... the logical, ultra-rational part of her mind screamed out: If the whole world is looking for you, dyeing your hair won't save you. Then again, it wasn't like she had anything else to do, and it couldn't hurt her either. She twisted a strand of her now-brown hair between her fingers, wondering if the transformation was complete yet.

Martin sat across from her on the tile floor, legs straight out, his back against the solid wood door of the bathroom. He typed away on the computer, occasionally pausing to contemplate something. Kate wondered what he was doing, but she let that go for the time being.

Other questions circled in her mind. She wasn't sure where to start, but one thing Martin had said still bothered her: the plague had infected over a billion within twenty-four hours. That was hard for her to believe-especially given that Martin and his collaborators had been secretly preparing for the outbreak for decades.

She cleared her throat. "A billion infected within twenty-four hours?"

"Mm-hm," Martin murmured without looking up from the laptop.

"That's impossible. No pathogen moves that fast."

He glanced up at her. "It's true. But I haven't lied to you, Kate. You're right: no known pathogen moves that fast. This plague is something different. Listen, I'll tell you everything, but I want to wait until you're safe."

"My safety isn't my biggest concern. I want to know what's really going on, and I want to do something. Tell me what you're hiding. I'll find out eventually. Let me at least hear it from you."

Martin paused for a long moment, then closed the laptop and exhaled. "All right. The first thing you should know is that the Atlantis Plague is more complicated than we thought. We're just now understanding the mechanism of action. The biggest mystery has been the Bell."

The mention of the Bell sent a shiver of fear through Kate. The Immari had discovered the Bell in Gibraltar in 1918. The mysterious device was attached to the Atlantis structure Kate's father had helped the Immari excavate. The moment the Bell was uncovered, it had unleashed the Spanish flu on the world-the most deadly pandemic in modern history. The Immari had eventually dug around the Bell and removed it so that they could study it. Dorian Sloane, the head of Immari Security, had used bodies of recent Bell victims to seed the world with the Atlantis Plague, recreating the outbreak in an attempt to identify anyone with genetic resistance to the Bell. His end goal was to create an army to attack the Atlanteans who had created the Bell.

"I thought you knew how the Bell worked, the genes it affected," Kate said.

"We thought so too. We made two critical mistakes. The first was that our sample size was too small. The second was that we were studying bodies with direct contact with the Bell, never re-transmission. The Bell itself doesn't emit an infectious agent: there's no virus or bacteria. It emits radiation. Our working theory has been that the Bell radiation causes a mutation in an endogenous retrovirus, essentially reactivating an ancient virus that then transforms the host by manipulating a set of genes and epigenetic tags. We believe this ancient virus is the key to everything."

Kate held her hand up. She needed to process. Martin's theory, if true, was incredible. It indicated a completely new kind of pathogen and even a new pathogenesis-radioactive, then viral. Was it possible?

Retroviruses are simply viruses that can insert DNA into a host's genome, changing the host at a genetic level. They're a sort of "computer software update." When a person contracts a retrovirus, they are essentially receiving a DNA injection that changes the genome in some of their cells. Depending on the nature of the DNA inserted, getting a virus could be good, bad, or benign, and since every person's genome is different, the result is almost always uncertain.

Retroviruses exist for one purpose: to replicate, to produce more of their own DNA. And they are good at it. In fact, viruses make up the majority of all the genetic material on the planet. If one added together all the DNA from humans, every other animal, and every single plant-every non-viral life form on the planet-that sum total of DNA would still be less than all the viral DNA on Earth.

Viruses didn't evolve to harm their hosts-in fact they depend on a living host to replicate, and that's exactly what they do: find a suitable host and live there, replicating benignly, until the host dies of natural causes. These reservoir hosts, as scientists refer to them, essentially carry a virus without any symptoms. For example, ticks carry Rocky Mountain spotted fever; field mice, hantavirus; mosquitoes, malaria, West Nile virus, Yellow fever and Dengue fever; black rats, bubonic plague; pigs and chickens, flu.

Humans are actually reservoir hosts for countless bacteria and viruses that haven't even been cla.s.sified yet. About twenty percent of the genetic information in the nose doesn't match any known or cataloged organism. In the gut, forty to fifty percent of all the DNA is from bacteria and viruses that have never been cla.s.sified. Even in the blood, up to two percent is a sort of "biological dark matter." In many ways, this biological dark matter, this sea of unknown viruses and bacteria, is the ultimate frontier.

Almost all viruses are harmless until they jump to another host-a life form different from their natural hosts. The virus then combines with a completely new genome and causes a new and unexpected reaction-an illness.

That was the ultimate danger with viruses, but Martin wasn't talking about these infectious viruses that entered a human body from the outside; he was describing the activation of a past infection, a dormant set of viral DNA that originated inside the human body, buried inside the genome. It was like contracting an infectious virus from oneself-a sort of DNA Trojan horse that activated and began to wreak havoc on the body.

These human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs), as they are known, are essentially "viral fossils"-the remnants of past infections that changed the host genome, were integrated with the DNA of the host's sperm, and were transmitted to future generations. Scientists had recently discovered that up to eight percent of the entire human genome was composed of endogenous retroviruses. These fossil records of past viral infections also appear in our closest genetic relatives, living and dead: chimpanzees, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. They had been infected with many of the same viruses we had.

Kate turned the idea over in her mind. Endogenous retroviruses had been considered inert and essentially part of a large group of "junk DNA" in everyone's genome. These retroviruses were not infectious, but they did influence gene expression and were pa.s.sed on to future generations. Scientists had recently begun to consider the possibility that endogenous retroviruses could play a role in autoimmune diseases such as lupus, multiple sclerosis, Sjgren's syndrome, even cancer. If the virus behind the Atlantis Plague was an endogenous retrovirus, it would mean...

"You're saying the entire human race is already infected. That we were infected the day we were born-that the virus behind the Atlantis Plague is already part of our DNA." She paused. "The Bell and the bodies from it only activated a dormant virus."

"Exactly. We believe the viral components of the Atlantis Plague were added to the human genome tens of thousands of years ago."

"You think this is intentional-that someone or something planted the endogenous virus-the Atlantis Plague-knowing it would be activated some day?" Kate asked.

"Yes. I believe the Atlantis Plague has been planned for a very long time. I think the Bell is simply an activation mechanism for a final transformation of the human race."

"Why didn't the transformation happen in 1918, with the first outbreak from the Bell? Spanish flu?"

"Because the human genome wasn't ready then. As I said at the hospital, the human race is changing at an increasing rate, especially our brain wiring-that's the real difference. The Atlantis Plague has one target: brain wiring. Depending on the host, the wiring either gets scrambled or arranged for some task. We believe that the human race has reached some sort of genetic tipping point-the human genome is finally ready for the planned final transformation. You've seen the survivors-they are the result. Some rapidly evolve, some devolve. What we don't know is which one is the desired outcome. Are the Atlanteans trying to cause another Great Leap Forward-a final leap forward-or is it a great leap backward, a regression to a point before the introduction of the Atlantis Gene?"

"Have you isolated the virus behind the plague?"

"No, and that's exactly what's holding us up. We actually think there could be two endogenous retroviruses at work, like a viral war going on in the body. These two viruses are fighting to control the Atlantis Gene, possibly to change it permanently. In ninety percent of the infected, this viral war overwhelms the immune system and causes death."

"Like the Spanish flu did in 1919."

"Precisely. And that's what we had antic.i.p.ated-a traditional biological outbreak, transmitted in common ways: bodily fluids, airborne, et cetera. That's what we prepared for."

"Prepared how?"