Extinction (19 page)

“I’ll see what I can do!” Janine
and Emily were now laughing together as Hillstep turned and continued to lead
them to the new chamber.

Once they reached the
decontamination area, they entered the enclosed room where they donned their
work suits. Emily had to stifle a giggle when Lance, who had been waiting at
the chamber, asked whether any of them needed assistance getting into their
suits. Janine had thought,
Maybe out of them!,
but as the project leader
she knew that was a step too far for her to voice out loud.

After their suits were on, they
left the decon room and approached the door to the alien chamber. The suits
provided them with their own air, some protection from abrasions or slight
falls, and communications between suits and other members of the team in other
locations. If they could figure out how to open the chamber door, they didn’t
know what kind of atmosphere they’d be exposed to so they were playing it safe,
as Janine always did.

“Now,” Hillstep began as he
pointed to several areas on the doorway, “you can see that these markings don’t
have any similarities to writings from any known species that we have records
on. Even our translation software showed nothing in its comparisons. But, Emily
pointed something out to me yesterday that I think you might find interesting.
Emily?”

“Uh, yeah, right over here. See
that in the corner, at the bottom there?” Emily was pointing to the lower left.

“You mean that tool mark in the
rock?” Janine was kneeling, looking closer now. “Well now, this little guy is
kind of interesting. It’s meant to look like a stray tool mark but if you look
close enough, it seems to be purposeful. Nice catch, but what else have we got?
I don’t recognize that from anything I’m familiar with.”

Hillstep nodded to Emily to
continue. “Well, who would make a mark or symbol on purpose but try to make it
look like a stray tool strike? Slaves. Just like an artist signing his work,
some slave workers in other cultures have been known to leave their mark on
their master’s work as an act of defiance or as a remembrance to future
generations that a slave made it and not the master.”

“Yes, I believe I have read that
somewhere…” Janine was smiling.

“I believe you
wrote
that
somewhere.” Hillstep was playing along. “In your doctoral thesis when you were,
uh, just a tad younger.”

“Nice save, Doctor. Go on, Emily.”
Janine was now looking around for other clues left behind by the potential
slave workers of the past.

“Okay, so I’m looking at that
mark and I decide to call it purposeful, but it’s only one line. Granted, that
could mean something huge to another species but most species we know of don’t
use such simple symbols for anything important.” Emily then pointed to six more
tool marks in the cave wall. “I found these other marks after a few hours of
searching every inch in this area in front of the door. Doctor Hillstep had to
take over after that.”

Emily turned the reins back to
her mentor. “I don’t think I took over; you still helped me arrange the
markings, dear. You still helped solve, or possibly solve I should say, what we
found.”

“So you know who made this place?”
Janine was excited but at the same time disappointed. Solving a mystery was
always fun but if they knew who built these ruins then that meant it wasn’t a
new species; it was someone they were already aware of. “Don’t keep me in
suspense here!”

“I think I do, sort of, and it’s
as exciting as finding a new species! Bear with me while I walk you through it.
I don’t want to give you our conclusion without you seeing the steps we went
through to get there. It will be easier for you to find problems with our
theory if you see our work leading up to it.”

Janine just nodded in agreement.
Hillstep pulled up some images on a tablet. “Once we had all of the tool marks
put into images we could play around with on our tablets, it was like trying to
figure out a puzzle where you don’t know what the pieces are supposed to look
like. But together we decided that this was the best shape for the marks to
make when put together.”

Hillstep showed Janine the end
result. “And why is that?” she asked as she viewed the tablet.

Emily stepped up and pointed to
areas highlighted on the screen. “Based on those intersections, they look like
purposeful points where other marks would come together to form a shape, a
letter in their alphabet or possibly a whole symbol for a thought or phrase. We
found those spots on each tool mark and determined that they were put there for
a reason. We then told the computer to use those points to fit with each
marking we had. It came up with only one possible geometric shape that could be
made by connecting all of the points on all of the tool marks. The computer
thinks that all of the tool marks make this one symbol.”

Janine looked at it and cocked
her head. “Why does this look familiar to me?”

“Ah ha! I was hoping you would
say that.” Hillstep took the pad from Janine so he could tap in a few more
commands. A new image was pulled up next to the one they had been looking at.
The new image was almost exactly the same but much more refined and pristine because
it had been formed by hand on a computer screen and not secretly carved into
rock a few hundred thousand years ago.

“That mark is from the Unwutine
tribes in the Delaz system. But that’s impossible; they are barely out of their
stone age yet. They don’t even have basic metal-working abilities. Their written
history is maybe a thousand years old.” Janine was amazed but thought there had
to be some mistake, somewhere, somehow.

“Well, what if they were used as
slave labor by some other species and then dumped on that planet to rot? Or
they were visited by aliens who showed them that symbol?” Emily had taken to
sitting on a crate while Janine just stared at the tablet.

“Possible but not likely”, Hillstep
started. “For a couple of reasons. One, these tool marks were made with advanced
metal implements. It looks like these ruins were once a mine and then someone
more advanced came in and turned them into a base of some sort. The tunnels
were definitely created with different tools and materials than the chambers
and hallways we’ve found.

“These marks you found were made
with the advanced tools that came after the mines were built. So we have to
assume that whoever made the marks had access to advanced tools, slaves or not.
The Unwutine don’t have those tools and nothing in their short history
indicates they ever did or that they were visited from other species.”

“Refresh my memory, Doctor, what
does this symbol mean?” Janine was racking her brain but couldn’t remember what
it was.

“This is their symbol for two
things, actually, just depending on the context.” Hillstep pulled up another
image, this one of a very deformed alien that Emily wasn’t familiar with. “When
the Unwutine have a baby deformed with this genetic mutation, they use this
symbol to describe the baby. You’ll forgive me for not trying to speak their
actual word for it but I can’t even come close to pronouncing anything in their
language.”

“No one can”, Janine added.

“Quite true.” Hillstep smiled. “So
we have no idea why that mutation occurs but when it does, the baby is branded
with that symbol and then killed. We have no idea why but it seems as though
they fear the mutated babies.”

Emily looked disgusted. “Why
don’t we save those babies if we see them doing it?”

Janine looked at her niece. “Because,
dear, they don’t know we exist. We observe from secret and don’t reveal
ourselves. We don’t want to interfere with their development. It wouldn’t be
right. Just like we don’t stop a mother lion from eating her cubs if that’s
what her instinct tells her she needs to do.”

Hillstep looked at Emily. “It’s a
hard pill to swallow and to tell you the truth, I know I wouldn’t be able to if
I were there on the research team. But, to continue with what we do know, the
research we’ve done on the corpses show that the babies wouldn’t have survived
more than a few days after birth. They’re not contagious in any way; it’s not a
disease process. It’s an extremely odd piece of DNA that we haven’t been able
to map yet or understand, but it does a tremendous amount of damage when it
gets turned on during incubation. It happens to about one in every twenty
thousand infants.”

“What’s the second meaning they
have for the symbol?” Emily wanted to get away from the talk of killing babies.

“Ah yes, the second use of the
term is for their labor force. Whether it’s their version of an ox or horse
plowing a field, or a group of men tasked with moving a fallen tree or large
stone. They use this term to describe heavy laborers of some sort. You might
even say ‘slave work.’”

Emily looked at the alien word
and pressed the text-to-speech button on the tablet. The word the computer
spoke sounded almost like
Hurlkaferncherta.
“Oh my, that is a difficult
word to say. Please forgive me if this is a stupid question, but is there any
possibility that this symbol is just coincidentally similar to the one from
that tribe?”

“I forgive you.” Janine teased
Emily. “We have found evidence that more than twelve hundred sentient species
have existed in our galaxy at some point. We currently can verify that just
over four hundred of those species are still around today. To this day, we have
never seen the letter
A
in any other species’ written dialect, not to
mention any other letter from any human alphabet. With the exception of species
from different planets that we can genetically link to each other as having a
common ancestry, no matter how distant, no two species of different planetary
origins has ever had coincidentally similar shapes in their alphabets or
markings.”

“So, no then.” Emily got
affirmative nods from both doctors. “Okay, so if we know it’s statistically
improbable that these two species aren’t genetically linked somehow, then we
need to find the link. And how do we know that the tribe is indigenous to that
planet? That they evolved there?”

Hillstep put his hand to his
masked chin. “We have something called the ‘flushed goldfish’ theory. It’s when
a spacefaring species visits a planet and leaves behind an animal of some sort,
whether on purpose or not we, of course, don’t know. But in time, that animal
either becomes part of the biosphere or doesn’t and we find it thriving,
evolved, or dead. Regardless of the state we find it in, we can check its DNA
and see that it didn’t spring up from the same primordial ooze as everything
else around it. The Unwutine tribe has been researched enough that we know they
evolved on the same planet we found them on.”

“Okay, so how do we know they
weren’t visited by another species that gave them that symbol or they saw the
symbol and used it for some reason?”

Janine liked answering her
niece’s questions. Going back to the basics helped to get her mind working in
ways she wasn’t used to. “First off, when we say we know they weren’t visited
by someone else, what we really mean is that we’re pretty damn sure. A good
scientist realizes that even the things they know are true, those things can be
disproven later. Keeping that in mind, we
know
they weren’t visited
because if they were visited during a stage of their evolution in which they
had developed some form of documentation, as transference of a symbol would
suggest, then they also would’ve documented that encounter as well. A visiting species
would’ve been seen as a major event by a primitive species and they would’ve
done at least a cave drawing or something. We have yet to find any evidence of
that. And in order for them to take a symbol or word from a visiting species,
they would have to have had extensive contact with the visitors, not just seen
a UFO in the night sky. That extensive of a visit would’ve been detectable by
our researchers.”

“Worms and goldfish…” Emily
muttered.

“You lost me on that one, dear.”
Janine put her hands up in the air in the universal “huh” gesture.

“Worms. Specifically, flatworms.”
Emily was pacing in a small circle and moving her right arm in the air as
though she were conducting thoughts through her brain. “We just did an
experiment in school where we tested the age-old theory of genetic memory in
flatworms. Results aside, what if the Unwutine tribe has genetic memories from
a failed attempt at cross-species breeding? You said they have a genetic
deformation that we don’t understand yet, a weird piece of DNA. We’re pretty
good at mapping DNA. I think it odd that we would find a piece of DNA in a
species that we classify as ‘weird’ and we can’t figure it out. What if it
doesn’t belong there or even belong to them to begin with? Maybe that weird DNA
is from somewhere else and is also responsible for passing down some genetic
memories that have helped shaped their written language development.”

“That theory deserves some
attention. I’m pretty impressed, honey.” Janine pulled up more information on
the Unwutine tribe. “But you also said goldfish. Why?”

“Just going back to the flushed
goldfish theory.” Emily was pumped up with the praise she had received from
Janine. “What if the species that created these ruins were flying out in the
galaxy one day and decided to stop on a planet. Maybe to refuel, maybe to take
samples, maybe to make repairs, maybe to take a family photo and have a picnic—who
cares why, but the point is the stop wasn’t for the purpose of staying any
length of time. And because the stop was just a layover, future explorers would
never find any evidence of that relatively short visit.

“So while they’re on the planet,
their slaves or workforce species escape. Who knows how many, but some get out.
Or they were left on purpose. Regardless of how or why, they are now on the
planet and does what every species does: attempts to survive.”