The Atlantis Plague (The Origin Mystery 2)

The night was dark and still for a moment, then a tiny thread of light floated up from the ground, like a phosphorescent 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 classified 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 classified. 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.