The Extinction Code Read online

  He could tell at a glance that predation was not the cause, for the lemur had been neither bitten nor eaten in any way. Although the eye sockets had already been consumed, all animal’s softer parts the first to decay or be eaten after death, its flesh and fur remained almost untouched, and that was when Michael saw what he had feared the most.

  The lemur’s snout was enveloped in a thick mass of white, gloopy fluid that looked almost like fungus. Michael crouched down alongside the remains, and with one hand he pulled a sample kit from his jacket and carefully scooped a globule of the mess inside and then sealed the kit, careful to wipe the exterior with an alcohol solution before slipping it back into his pocket.

  He was about to leave when something else caught his eye, a bright patch of color amid the dense foliage. He got up and moved across to it, and looked down to see the colorful plumage of a Malagasy warbler, a small bird native to the eastern forests that survived on insects. Michael took another pace closer and then he froze.

  The warbler’s beak was smeared with white fluid.

  Despite the intense heat cloaking the forest, Michael’s blood ran cold in his veins as he looked around and saw more birds lying dead amid the foliage, their beaks and bills choked with the fungal fluid. He took another horrified step back, then turned and hurried away from the grim killing field, holding his breath all the way but already knowing that it was too late. He stumbled to Lucien’s side and thrust the specimen he had collected into the guide’s hand.

  ‘Take this to Reserve Speciale d’Analamazaotra, as fast as you can, and never come back here again.’

  Lucien took the sample, his dark eyes fixed on Michael’s. ‘What did you find?’

  Michael could barely speak of it, but the sight of the lemurs and the birds lying dead together on the forest floor was something that he would not forget as long as he lived, which may not be all that long at all. Two distinct and unrelated species, struck down by the same affliction, dead within hours.

  ‘I found the end,’ he gasped. ‘Go, hurry!’

  Lucien whirled and ran down the hillside, vanished within moments into the forests further down as Michael ran his hands through his hair and looked back over his shoulder into the depths of the gloomy forest as though death were watching him even now from within.

  ***

  XVII

  Narryer Gneiss Terrane,

  Canadian Sheild Formation,

  North–West Territories

  Ethan clambered out of the jeep that had carried them far out into the wilderness of one of the most rugged landscapes on earth. Although the sun was shining high in a perfect blue sky the air was so cold he felt as though he could reach up and crack it with his hands. Spruce forest dominated the undulating hills, which were peppered with streams that flowed into a large lake to their east, endless beaches of rock lining the frigid water.

  ‘They like their wilderness, these guys,’ Lopez noted as she pulled the collar of her jacket closer about her neck and checked a map she held in one gloved hand. ‘He should be around here somewhere.’

  Ethan slammed the jeep door shut and looked around briefly for any sign of bear spoor before he set off toward the river. They were right in the heart of big bear country and although Ethan was armed, he didn’t fancy his 9mm pistol’s chances against an eight hundred pound bear with a bad attitude.

  Schofield had sent them in pursuit of Doctor Gregory Lysander, a scientist who would understand what Channing had been involved in. That Beauchamp was already missing in itself troubling, but Lysander was allegedly in the field somewhere out on the Canadian Shield and so far nobody had reported him as missing.

  ‘Jarvis said that Lysander was looking for something far older than what Channing was working on,’ Ethan said as they walked, their hiking boots crunching on the heavy rocks beneath them. ‘I’m not sure but didn’t they find some of the oldest rocks on earth out here?’

  ‘Beats me,’ Lopez said with a shrug. ‘I’d Google it for you, but we’re about a zillion miles from the nearest cell tower so I guess we’re on our own.’

  They made their way down to the shoreline for a better look both up and downstream in the hopes of spotting Lysander’s camp. As soon as they got there it was obvious that the scientist was camped nowhere near their location.

  ‘Nothing,’ Lopez said, her voice seeming louder in the deep silence of the terrain surrounding them. ‘Damn it Ethan, this guy could be anywhere out here and it might take days to find him.’

  ‘You never know,’ Ethan shrugged, ‘he might just walk up to us.’

  ‘Yeah, sure we’d get that lucky.’

  The reply was called out from behind them. ‘Good morning!’

  Ethan turned and saw a man standing beside the jeep they’d arrived in, waving cheerfully as he descended the beach toward them. Ethan smirked at Lopez, who in reply stuck a sharp little tongue out in his direction.

  ‘You’ll freeze like that in this cold,’ he warned her.

  The man, bespectacled and bearded and wearing thick thermal jacket, pants and boots, stuck a hand out in Ethan’s direction.

  ‘You’re from the Institute,’ he said in delight. ‘I heard your jeep from across the valley. Did they approve my funding for the next semester?’

  ‘I’m afraid we’re not from the Institute, Doctor Lysander,’ Ethan replied as he shook Lysander’s hand. ‘We’re from the Defense Intelligence Agency.’

  Lopez managed to show Lysander her ID badge using her gloved hand, unwilling to expose even the smallest patch of her skin to the cold. Lysander’s expression faltered.

  ‘What brings you out here?’ Lysander asked. ‘And how did you know my name and where to find me?’

  ‘The Institute gave us a rough idea and we just followed our nose after that.’

  Lysander frowned. ‘What would the Defense Intelligence Agency want with me?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Lopez said, ‘it’s what you know about other people that interests us. Do you know a man named Aubrey Channing?’

  Lysander seemed surprised. ‘I did, he worked out of Montana, made quite the name for himself before he disappeared some years ago. I think that most people thought that he’d injured himself while working alone in the field and perhaps succumbed to the elements or wild animal attack, it does happen from time to time. I’ve encountered quite a few bears out here since I arrived.’

  ‘We think that Channing was murdered,’ Ethan said. ‘We’re not sure but we have some leads we’re following, most of them surrounding a Professor Martin Beauchamp.’

  ‘Beauchamp?’ Lysander said. ‘He’s working similar fields to me, we met at Harvard only last year. How is he?’

  ‘He’s missing,’ Lopez replied, ‘hence our interest. There’s something linking the two men, Channing and Beauchamp, and we wondered whether you could help enlighten us on what they might have been up to? Beauchamp worked as Channing’s undergraduate during the early part of his career, and helped Channing to find something buried in Montana. Channing found it but then disappeared.’

  Lysander stared at them for a moment. ‘What you’re describing sounds like some kind of conspiracy theory or something.’

  ‘Trust us, we’ve seen far worse,’ Ethan assured him. ‘You say that Beauchamp works in a similar field to you? What is it that you do here?’

  Lysander gestured to the wilds around them.

  ‘You’re standing on the Canadian Shield, what’s known as a physiographic division, essentially a large divide between different kinds of rock. The whole thing together is a maze of Archean Plates, terranes and sedimentary basins formed in what we call the Proterozoic Eon, one of the formative periods of earth’s formation.’

  Ethan and Lopez stared blankly at Lysander in silence for a moment and the scientist chuckled as he went on.

  ‘I’m studying the very earliest stages of the formation of life on our planet, and have made some incredible discoveries only in the last few years. Come, I’ll show you.’

  L
ysander set off at a spritely pace, leaving Ethan and Lopez with no choice but to follow him across the rugged terrain. They walked until Lysander crouched down and pulled a claw hammer from a satchel slung across his shoulder. Moments later, he hacked a piece of rock from a sloping formation near the water’s edge and turned to show it to them.

  ‘There, what do you think of this?’

  Lopez stared vacantly at it. ‘It’s lovely. What is it?’

  ‘It’s a rock,’ Ethan smiled helpfully at her.

  ‘This is part of an Archaean igneous core of an ancient mountain chain, exposed by glacial forces that formed this valley millions of years ago. A form of this rock discovered in 2008 at the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt contained zircons inside it that were successfully dated to over four billion years old.’

  Ethan blinked. ‘So, from around when the earth itself formed then?’

  ‘Precisely,’ Lysander confirmed. ‘We’re talking about rocks that have escaped the normal process of tectonic absorption and recycling that is a feature of our planet’s active geology. The zircon crystals within those rocks can survive such activity anyway though so even if the encasing rock was younger, the age of the crystals remains measurable.’

  ‘Okay,’ Lopez said cautiously, ‘so what does this have to do with dinosaurs?’

  ‘Nothing, and everything,’ Lysander explained. ‘The dinosaurs would not emerge as a species until billions of years after this rock was formed, and in fact no recognizably complex forms of life would have existed at this time.’

  ‘Sooo,’ Lopez ushered Lysander on.

  ‘This is the really exciting bit,’ Lysander enthused as he pointed at the rock in his hand.

  ‘I’m on the edge of my seat,’ Lopez whispered.

  If Lysander noticed the jibe, he didn’t react to it as he went on.

  ‘Similar zircons recovered from the Jack Hills in Western Australia and aged at nearly four and a half billion years possessed an isotopic composition that suggested there was already water on the earth when they were formed.’

  If Lopez was blown away by this information, Ethan could see no evidence of it.

  ‘But the earth was just a molten ball of fire back then, right?’ she said.

  ‘Apparently not,’ Lysander continued. ‘In a paper published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, it was suggested by a team that continents and liquid water have existed on this planet for some four point three billion years, and were subject to weathering from the elements and an acrid climate.’

  ‘So there was water early on in earth’s history,’ Ethan said. ‘I don’t get the connection yet.’

  ‘That was what Beauchamp was working on,’ Lysander explained. ‘He was attempting to connect the discoveries of water on the early earth with the parallel discoveries being made in cosmology and physics. Essentially, what they had found was further evidence of panspermia, of the existence of life not from this earth but from elsewhere.’

  ‘We know about that,’ Ethan said, ‘the idea that life can exist inside comets and other celestial bodies and travel between the stars, seeding life on new planets.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Lysander agreed, ‘but these new discoveries suggest that something more than just the chemicals of life arrived on our planet with comets and other bolide impactors. There is a growing collaboration between physicists, biologists and chemists that seeks to identify something known as “directed panspermia”.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Lopez asked.

  Lysander appeared uncomfortable as he sought words to express his explanation.

  ‘Essentially, the idea that life did not begin naturally on our planet or anywhere in the universe, but was deliberately directed here: seeded, if you will.’

  Lopez frowned. ‘By whom?’

  Lysander shrugged. ‘Well, that’s the big question isn’t it?’

  ‘And do you think that Beauchamp, or Channing, might have found the evidence that proves it’s possible?’

  Lysander sighed again.

  ‘I don’t think it’s possible,’ he replied. ‘I know it is, because the evidence has already been discovered.’

  ***

  XVIII

  ‘You’re kidding me?’ Lopez uttered. ‘They’ve actually found alien DNA?’

  Lysander’s smile faded and he let the rock fall from his hands to clatter against the countless millions of others beneath their feet.

  ‘For some decades now, it has been proposed that the most likely place for us to find the signature of a higher intelligence is in our very own DNA,’ he explained. ‘The reason for this is that unlike physical structures that could be erected by higher civilizations as a marker and evidence of their presence, a signature in genetic material could survive intact for millions, perhaps even billions of years, whereas physical structures would decay and erode far more quickly. Therefore, a concerted effort in some academic fields has been ongoing for many years to identify any evidence of such tampering or intervening in the natural code.’

  ‘That gives me the creeps,’ Lopez said.

  ‘It’s supposed to,’ Lysander agreed. ‘The idea that life was purposefully seeded on earth in the form of RNA or DNA, which led to the development of cells and ultimately life, means that all life on earth is ultimately ancestral to some other species that did not originate on this planet.’

  Ethan turned to Lopez. ‘The Black Knight.’

  Lopez nodded. ‘Could be something to do with it.’

  ‘What’s the Black Knight?’ Lysander asked.

  ‘Never mind,’ Ethan said. ‘How did they find out about this supposed alien DNA, and why the hell isn’t it being talked about on every news channel on earth?’

  Lysander chuckled bitterly. ‘Human foibles and failures. There is considerable concern among governments around the world about just how some people would react to this kind of news. Some argue that it would be an irrecoverable blow to religious faith that would see some form of societal collapse in the wake of such devastating news. Others, that the faithful of the world would simply assume it as further evidence of divine intervention in human evolution. I personally would like to see this news around the globe too, but for now it’s considered far too sensitive and is thus passed over by most of the media.’

  ‘I don’t believe they’d block something like that,’ Lopez said.

  ‘No?’ Lysander challenged. ‘In a recent study of Israeli and Palestinian Muslim Arabs, more than seventy per cent of the Jewish men and over eighty per cent of the Arab men whose DNA was studied had inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors, who lived in the region within the last few thousand years. In short, Israel’s people are not a distinctive race after all and have no right to claim to be. Israel promptly blocked the report wherever they found it, and it was distinctly under–reported around the world for fear of upsetting Jewish beliefs, their faith and their perceived right to a country with an undivided Jerusalem as its capital. Faith trumps fact once again, with media compliance.’

  ‘But this alien DNA is sensational, right?’ Lopez argued. ‘I’d have thought that they’d be all over this no matter who it upsets?’

  ‘Do not underestimate the power of politics over science and the media,’ Lysander cautioned her. ‘This isn’t the first time scientists have been censored over what they can release publicly. The International Committee on Climate Change has repeatedly used its governmental connections to suppress any evidence suggesting that climate change is anything other than man–made. Manufacturers of everything from toothpaste to major drugs repeatedly do the same to conceal the long–term effects of the products they produce, and tobacco firms long fought to suppress evidence of their efforts to create cigarettes capable of crossing the blood–brain barrier, increasing addictiveness. In the case of alien DNA, however, the suppression appears genuinely motivated by a desire to prevent a paradigm shift in human nature and understanding: mankind has never been able to answer questions of this magnitude unti
l now, and the reaction of the general public is notoriously difficult to predict. Ask any presidential candidate.’

  ‘How did they find this alien DNA?’ Ethan asked. ‘Are you sure this isn’t just some Internet Meme or something?’

  ‘It was part of the Human Genome Project,’ Lysander explained. ‘Scientists worked for thirteen years to unravel the code, and in doing so they discovered that some of the non–coding sections of our genetic sequences, once referred to as “junk DNA”, were in fact extra–terrestrial in origin. The research published in the open access journal Genome Biology focused on the use of horizontal gene transfer, or HGT, the transfer of genes between organisms living in the same environment. Scientists from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom proved that HGT has contributed to the evolution of many, perhaps all, animals and that the process is ongoing.’ He smiled as though in wonder at it all. ‘We’re full of extra–terrestrial material, and nobody knows where it came from.’

  ‘Could it be a mistake?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘Regretfully, no,’ Lysander replied. ‘Maxim Makukov of the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute supported the Cambridge researchers’ conclusions, which were essentially that our DNA consists of two versions: a large structured code and a simple, shorter one. The larger part of the code is non–terrestrial, inherited from some other place or species, while the shorter section of the code is the result of biological and chemical evolution over the history of our planet. The research, along with other material on directed panspermia, has featured in the prestigious journal Icarus, among others.’

  ‘Can this code be read?’ Lopez asked.

  Lysander seemed uncertain.

  ‘The human genome contains many millions of lines of code but in principle yes, any message contained therein should be decipherable in the same way that binary code can be converted into words, images and mathematics. Precisely such a code was found in the human genome in 2013, in the form of mathematical and semiotic patterns within that code.’