The Tethys Report (The Rise of the Chirons Book 1) Page 11

  He didn’t answer. I could see him pulling on something, however. It was something very heavy as he was struggling to keep the fishing pole in his hands. His muscles bulged as his entire frame strained under the weight of whatever was pulling on the string. There was a noise of string being caught on wood as he pulled back the string, using the side of the boat as leverage.

  “Daddy?”

  Finally, he was able to break free from the struggle. He pulled tighter on the string, reeling it in slowly. At last, he had his hand on something. He seemed satisfied, as if the touch of whatever it was filled him with accomplishment. I looked into the water to see what it was.

  I woke up to the alarm I had set unconsciously. Confusion overtook me for a few seconds. I quickly got dressed, grabbed my gear and went out. The lighting on the research vessel was set to a dim shade, barely illuminating the surroundings. Very few were up. I remember seeing most had been up very late the night before, so it had made sense that not many were awake.

  Kraznow was the only one I saw sitting at the instruments. He gave me a sleepy nod and went back to his work. Outside, on the view panel, there was a large squid looking creature in front of the vessel. I was not aware of the exact type, but it had a long fish in its tentacles and was enjoying its meal. I peered into its eyes, and it looked back at me. It had large dark eyes that seemed very aware of who I was and what my intentions were.

  “Fascinating, isn’t she?”

  “It must be a giant squid. I’m guessing it’s about twenty meters long at least. My god, look at that thing,” I said. It was true. The squid was massive. I had heard that they lived off the waters of Antarctica, deep in the ocean. I didn’t know they would be in this lake. Its massive tentacles were illuminated by some inner light—no doubt from some chemical reaction. I knew that it had not been in contact with other species in the ocean, so it could have been far different from more common species. It was certainly a sight to behold.

  “Dr. Bloom, are you ready to see the creature?” said a voice.

  I looked over to see Laennec walking over to me. He had a smile on his face that expressed his desire to take a look at this thing he wanted to show me. My heart beat a little faster at the prospect of seeing it. Would it be the same as the one I found in the report? My mind raced to think of the implications of the amazing discovery.

  “You bet I am. Let’s take a look,” I said. I had been hungry a minute before but not anymore.

  Kraznow gave a smile at us and went back to his controls as we walked out of the room.

  The medical room Laennec led me to was down a long hallway on the opposite side from the control room. After opening the door, he immediately moved towards the sole table in the room. It was covered with a blue sheet. He pulled back the sheet, and I gasped as soon as I saw the object.

  It was a preserved set of bones from a creature that looked to resemble modern humans, but there were indeed some significant differences. The skeleton itself was preserved in some kind of hard gelatin material. I wasn’t sure if that was Laenneck’s doing or someone else’s.

  “Look at that head. The brain size capacity is about a third more than humans. A lot of the extra space is found in the occipital lobe and the frontal lobe. The occipital lobe, as you know Jake, houses a lot of the vision input as well as processing among other things. Could it be that this species was able to see things or process visual data in the way we humans could never do?”

  I said nothing as I looked at the base of the skull. The differences between human skulls and this one were amazing. For humans, it was the smallest of the four brain areas, but here it seemed roughly of similar size with the rest of the skull. The design was phenomenal. There was an entirely different bulge shape from what humans have.

  “And in the front—take a look at this. This is the forebrain. I have studied this for many hours now, and I think it’s roughly equivalent to the cerebral cortex. Imagine if humans had the size of this thing’s! My god, just look at that. What other abilities would we able to create?”

  “Doctor, what evolutionary processes could have led to such developments?”

  “I have no idea,” Laennec said. “That’s the damned particular thing. I don’t know. We don’t have enough evidence. We found this while digging around this area. We nearly crushed the damned thing. I’m guessing it was an ancient grave site. What’s your take on it.”

  “Well, I’d be really curious to see from where you found it. I’d have to investigate the surroundings,” I said while rubbing the Chert rock on my chest. “I’d say that overall, most fossils survive in marine environments because it usually gets dropped and left undisturbed for a long period of time. It is certainly possible that this thing here lasted for millions of years if nothing disturbed it. It just amazes me of how—similar it is to our species. There’s no way it could have evolved from a recent common ancestor with ours.”

  Laennec was getting very excited now. “My thoughts exactly! Now take a look at the body. First, its pelvis has something amazing about it. I’m convinced that this is a female.”

  “Why so?”

  “Take a look at this,” he said while taking out a flashlight and shining it at the bones of the pelvis. “Notice the scrape marks. I was an obstetrician in my previous life. See here?” he said indicating some light scrape areas on the bone. “That means this person—I guess—gave birth, That’s not the interesting thing. Look how wide the pelvis is. It’s larger than a human pelvis. I’ve already done the measurements—way about the human average, especially for the height. That means that it could account for the larger brain size. See, human females have what we call the obstetrical dilemma—we can’t give birth to babies with large brains because there is no more room. At the same time, we have to walk upright. That’s how I know if something is a great ape or say a human in an ape costume: the bow-legged walk. Humans have the ability to walk straight on two legs. None of the other species like monkeys or chimpanzees can do that. Now, this wonderful specimen looks like it could do both—larger brain while being able to walk.”

  “That is fascinating, Doctor. It must mean that this was an intelligent species.”

  “Very intelligent,” replied Laennec. “It certainly has anatomical differences from us.”

  “What about the hands,” I said, thinking about the grainy photo I had seen earlier.

  “Oh yes, that’s another thing!” he replied. “It has only two fingers.”

  I nodded at this, thinking back to the original photo I had seen from Kraftberger’s report. There was nothing special about this. Many kinds of creatures had two fingers, three four, five even more than that.

  “What are the implications of that?” I asked Laennec.

  “Well, I’ve talked to the others. There’s nothing important I can think of in terms of anatomy or physiology, but just think what it can lead to. Two fingers mean that its number system will have a base of two by two, or four, unlike humans who have base ten. Four is two to the second power.”

  “Fascinating,” I said thinking about these deep implications. This species that resembled humans in many ways may have had a completely different outlook on life than humans did.

  “Yes, and I talked to the others. They marveled at how much sooner humans could have invented the computer had we only had two fingers. It would have been a very interesting thought experiment. Maybe we would have developed the computer much sooner than we actually had! The possibilities are endless. Ten isn’t special at all. We don’t find ten often in nature. We find two all the time.”

  “Good point Doctor. There are so many things in nature that depend on the number two,” I said trying to take it all in. This whole conversation was nearly overwhelming. Nothing like this had ever been discovered.

  “You’ll get a Nobel Prize in something if you even present findings on one of these topics,” I said. “The whole scientific community would go nuts.”

  “If they believe me, and if there is ever another Nobel
Prize committee in the near future—two big ifs,” he replied somewhat more gloomily.

  “There’s one more thing,” he said quietly while looking deep in thought.

  I waited while noticing his face which seemed as if it were working out a problem.

  “What is it, Doctor?” I said.

  He drew in a breath but held it. Finally, he let the air out. “I think that this person we’ve found was perhaps the second to last member of this species.”

  “What? Why would you know anything that specific? They must have lived millions of years ago.”

  Instead of saying anything, he showed me a small but well-intact object that looked like a commemorative plaque of some sort. On the front of the smooth black surface was an image of a humanoid figure in the act of what looked like grieving over another being.

  “So you think this body here was the mother.”

  “Right. And that means that the child was the last—of their kind.”

  “At least at this site. We don’t know if there could be other sites,” I said.

  “That’s true. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “But we have no way of knowing that. It sounds like an interesting story but—“

  “Wait, look at the bottom of that—whatever it is. It’s a message of some sort.”

  I looked underneath the image, wondering if I should even be touching this thing. It had obviously been cleaned off—probably by the doctor, but there were indeed some markings on the bottom.

  “What do you make of them Doctor?” I asked.

  “They looked like geometric shapes with odd angles cut off. It somewhat reminded me of the cuneiform that was used in millennia ago by the Sumerians and adopted by others.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve already deciphered the message?”

  Doctor Laennec grinned. “Not quite. But look at this one symbol,” he said pointing at the area under the image. There was a triangle shaped form that had two lines running straight through the center.

  “I call this one ‘Delta X’ because of the shape of this symbol here. Whatever it is, it looks like the Greek symbol delta with an ‘x’ through it.”

  “Fascinating,” I said.

  “I hope I meet him someday,” he said.

  At that moment, Jen walked into the room.

  “All set to go?” she asked.

  I had nearly forgotten about the search for Dr. Aspect. “Yes, I’m ready any time.”

  “You sound reluctant,” she said. “Oh, you’re looking at the specimen we found.”

  “It’s simply fascinating,” I said.

  “We don’t’ even have a name for it yet,” said Laennec. “We are debating many names, but mainly we’re waiting to hear from Dr. Aspect since he discovered her.”

  “It seems we have many reasons to find him,” I said. “I want to know everything I can about the specimen. Once word gets out, think of how many Ph.D. dissertations will be written. It will change everything we know about our species when we compare it to not just another primate—but a primate with the capacity for language and more complex thought than humans.”

  “I agree, but sadly I don’t know how many can even apply to get their Ph.D. anymore. Universities are slowly being shuttered—supposedly to make room for the cost. I know what it really is though.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, suddenly sobered from my previous excitement.

  “The world’s getting dumber—except for a few people at the top. They have all the power now—and the knowledge. They control the vast network on which it’s stored. What’s to stop them from keeping it from the rest of us?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that question, depressing as it was.

  Chapter 7

  The docking chamber for the research vessel was in the middle of the station, a different section than when we came in. I soon realized that this was a different vessel too. It had a long chamber in its center with many instruments operating on the sides. Around six monitors of assorted sizes hugged the walls, showing cameras, topography maps, local life forms detected along with other things I wasn’t familiar with.

  “Like the chair?” Jen asked.

  “Yeah, it’s way more comfortable than the military’s.”

  “Aren’t they all?” she asked. “Hey, don’t put your feet up. This one is my rig, so keep it clean.”

  “Your rig, eh?” I said with a smile.

  We were alone on the ship—alone since the I last saw her several years ago.

  “Where’s Kathy?” I asked. “Wasn’t she coming with us?”

  “She’s busy with other things,” Jen said. “OK. Let me be honest. I wanted to hear the story from you straight. I knew if Kathy came along, we wouldn’t have any privacy to talk about it.”

  “Look, Jen, that wasn’t me, us who did it back there, OK? Afghanistan wasn’t my fault. They picked me because I served after my undergraduate studies as an officer. They used me—us as a scapegoat.”

  She gave me a hard look before saying: “I know. Of course if I thought you were the one responsible for killing all those people in Afghanistan, I would have never let you into my ship back at the tunnel. But my god Jake, what is the world coming to? There were thousands of people killed. For what? What the hell happened in Afghanistan? I heard people were dying even after I left. Is that true?”

  “Someone wanted us to get us kicked out of there, so they killed tens of thousands of people—probably by poisoning the water. Some of our people got killed too, so you know it wasn’t us—unless you’re very cynical. The locals were, of course, infuriated, and they blamed us. They then kicked us all out of there, killing a lot of our people along the way.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t you—of course I mean the government, the military?” Her eyes were wide with apprehension. She was both probing me for the truth and solving some of her own internal moral conflicts.

  I looked at her with honest perplexity. “I’ll only say this: I don’t think so. But with the way the government is these days, I honestly don’t know.” My sad eyes must have convinced her. She looked at me with resignation too. “It could have even been this damned new AI the government is using.”

  “What do you mean AI? You guys are being run by artificial intelligence now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. It was the truth. I really didn’t know how much of my group’s orders came from a real human being these days. Of course, I had only been reactivated recently, and this meant that I had been out of the loop for over a year. But I did notice several differences from when I had been active a little more than a year earlier. For one, there was far less information than before.

  “Things are so terrible nowadays. I just don’t see it getting any better. The president’s employed emergency powers to secure the borders and actually shoot anyone who tries to make it across. This is the third time now. All those poor people coming from those cauldrons of chaos. My god, it’s too hot to live down there—Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica—none of them have stable living conditions. Europe’s a mess with millions of refugees trying to get in—none of them can make a living back in their homes. Their governments can’t do anything for them. What’s going to happen to all of them?” Jen said looking at me with her eyes wide. “I’m so scared for them.”

  “For whom?” I said.

  “My friends, my family, the people who live down the street of my house—everyone. Hong Kong is where most of my family live now. It’s getting smashed by the ocean. Who knows how long it’s going to stay above the water—what little left there is still. You know I can’t even visit that place anymore. That doesn’t stop me from worrying. What’s going to happen?”

  I looked at her with pained eyes. “I’ve thought about this a lot myself. Every time it goes back to the same thing. Maybe someday the West and the East will stop fighting. After all, what are they really doing? Just grinding each other down when they could cooperate and help each other so much more.”

  “Yeah,
and where is the evidence in that?” There were tears in her eyes. “We’ve nearly got a war now between the Western alliance and the Eastern Powers. Russia and China have never been more powerful, and the USA being run by some kind of partial artificial intelligence government? They’ve done nothing to help things. What’s the president going to do?”

  “The South China Sea? The new discovery of minerals that everyone wants because they’re desperate for resources?”

  “Yes, all the governments want in. The whole world’s a game of musical chairs now, and they all know the music’s going to run out “

  I thought then of the woman we had met in Florida—the one who was barely making ends meet, and who lived on the edges. Janine was her name. She would have to abandon her old life and become an odd laborer, living in a slum-like living apartment somewhere in a Megapolis—a sprawling urban hell, controlled totally by a select few corporations. No one knew how much the corporations were run by AI, but everyone knew it was at least partially controlled by them. A person had to give up so much to live in them. Once they walked beyond the domed protective surrounding, you couldn’t leave. Information of course was choked. That’s mainly what kept me from even visiting. Living in such places wasn’t my choice. Bangkok was nearly as bad, but it still had everyone living in the same area. It may have been a large stinky city, but at least it wasn’t controlled and polluted by a lot of rich assholes. Things were still relatively balanced. Unfortunately, it was one of the last—and once the King died, it would revert to the same pattern as the rest.

  A signal bleeped on the control screen.

  “There’s a signal from EROS.”

  “The AI machine that’s been sent for Dr. Aspect, right?”

  “Yes. Oh my god, this is insane. EROS found him. He’s still alive. He should have been out of oxygen a long time ago, but Kranehouse was right. He’s still alive. This is wonderful! We should go there right away.”

  I looked around at the area around our vessel. “Should we go there by ourselves?” Hordes of jellyfish floated around in hunt of prey—one I was watching was able to envelop its prey. A frightened fish that looked like an ancient armored fish I had studied back as an undergraduate. Here it was now. Supposedly the armor protected it from its prey, but it was being absorbed by the huge jellyfish—its tentacles wrapped around it, and in short order the fish stopped wriggling.