“No, they did not possess a material, mechanistic technology, according to Gates. Not in the way we do. He said they would have possessed an organic technology if you can wrap your brain around that one. A living technology maybe supported by a certain level of instrumentation . . . but not gadgets like we have. Not exactly. They would have been light years beyond us to the point that their minds might have been strong enough to manipulate matter and energy and maybe even time as they saw fit.
“But as to your question, they drifted here. They went into a dormant state, according to Gates, and drifted on what he called the solar winds. I suppose it’s the same way they drifted into this solar system. Gates mentioned them possibly manipulating fourth-dimensional space. You might remember that bit if you ever had any quantum physics . . . you jump into the fourth dimension at Point A and jump out at Point B. A to B could be ten feet away or ten million miles, it wouldn’t matter. You could transverse incalculable distances easily as a man stepping off his porch. Maybe that’s how they crossed interstellar voids. But if Lind’s memory of them was correct — and I tend to think it was — then, yes, they went into a sort of dormancy and drifted here.”
“Shit, Elaine, that would have taken eons,” Cutchen pointed out.
“So what? It wouldn’t have mattered to things like them. A thousand years or a hundred-thousand would be all the same to something that was essentially immortal and endless. Lind was in contact with that memory, Cutchy, a memory a billion years old and probably even two or three. And he experienced it . . . the dormancy, the drifting. Even the cold and lack of atmosphere were no deterrent to them. Nothing would be.”
“I’m still having trouble with this,” Cutchen admitted. “I mean, listen to what you’re saying here. Something like this . . . to put forth a plan, a grand design for this planet that wouldn’t see fruition for hundreds and hundreds of millions of years. It’s just too incredible. That amount of time . . . “
“You’re looking at this as any being with a finite lifespan would. But time means nothing to them, nothing at all,” Sharkey said, realizing she was using the same arguments on him that Hayes had used on her.
Cutchen sighed. The bigness, the longevity of such an operation, the huge scale it must have been carried out on . . . all of this was flooring him. Not to mention that everything she said completely dwarfed man’s history, his importance, his very culture. It made the human race no more significant in the greater scheme of things than protozoans on a laboratory slide. It was very . . . sobering. “All right. So these Old Ones drifted here, started life with some master plan behind it all . . . then what? Just hoped for the best?”
“Hardly. Our evolutionary development would have been carefully monitored through the ages,” Sharkey told him, glancing back to her screen from time to time. “Remember, they colonized this world and they had no intention of leaving and still haven’t. They would not have left anything to mere chance. Gates wrote that there are great gaps in our own fossil record, times when our evolution jumped eons ahead for no apparent reason. 500,000 years ago, for example, the brains of our ancestors suddenly doubled in size if not tripled. It happened more than once, Gates said. These were the times, Cutchy, when those ancestors of ours were carefully manipulated by the Old Ones. Through selective breeding, genetic engineering, molecular biology, methods we can’t even guess at.”
“And . . . and they’ve been waiting for us . . . their children . . . all this time?”
Sharkey nodded. “Yes, waiting and watching through unimaginable gulfs of time while the continents shifted and the glaciers arrived, while the Paleozoic Era became the Mesozoic and finally the Cenzoic. While our ancestors evolved along lines already laid out for them. And at times, I would think, entire populations would have been taken to their cities and altered, then placed back again with selective mutations installed. They’ve waited and watched and now, if Gates is right, we’re ready for harvesting. Our intellects are sufficiently advanced to be of use to them. Down there in that warm lake, Cutchy, is the last relict population of a race as old as the stars.”
“And now we’ve come,” he said. “Just as they knew we would.”
“Exactly. Men have always been drawn down here to the Pole, haven’t they? And if what Gates is saying is correct, then it’s been more than a sense of exploration. As a race we would be drawn to those places where our memory was strongest.”
Cutchen was sweating now and couldn’t help himself. The idea of it all was terrifying. Like the human race had never, ever been in command of its own destiny. It was shocking. “It’s like we’re . . . what? A seed planted in a fucking garden? Cultivated, cross-bred, enhanced . . . until they got the proper strain, the proper hybrid they desired.” He just shook his head. “But what do they want, Elaine? What do they have in mind? To conquer us? What?”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure and neither is Gates. But one thing’s for sure, it’s our minds that they want, our intellects they need. They are of a single mind, a single consciousness, a hive mentality. That is exactly what they intend for us to be. For us to be them but in human form.” She scrolled through a few pages on her laptop. “According to Gates, they’ve bred certain characteristics into us. There are probably latent gifts we all carry in our minds, our carefully engineered minds, that they will now exploit. They’ll reawaken faculties that we’ve long forgotten about, but have been buried in us all along . . . “
“Like what?”
“Abilities they planted in us long ago. Abilities that would make us like them. Mechanisms seeded in our brains, special adaptations that have been passed on through our genes . . . wild talents that occasionally make themselves known like telepathy, telekinesis, prophecy . . . talents that, when the time was right, would make us like them — a single, ominous hive mind. That coupled with an overriding instinct, a blind compulsion to serve them. An all important seed they would have planted in our primitive brains and is still there today.”
Cutchen said, “So everything we are, our entire history and even our destiny . . . these Old Ones were the architects of it? We’re . . . synthetic?”
“Yes and no. Our culture, our civilization is our own, I think. Though much of it might be based upon archetypes imprinted upon our brains eons ago. Even our conception of a god, a superior being, a creator . . . it’s no doubt based upon some aboriginal image of them placed into our subconscious minds. They would have seen themselves as our gods, our masters . . . then and now . . . and we, in essence, were designed to be their tools, an extension of their organic technology, to be used for what plans we could never even guess at. But it might be in us, that knowledge, lying dormant in our brains until they decide to wake it up. And when that happens . . . when that happens, there will be no more human race, Cutchy.”
Cutchen’s face was beaded with sweat, his eyes were wide and tormented. “We have to stop this, Elaine. We have to stop this madness.”
“If we can. If we can,” she said, her voice filled with a bitter hopelessness, a dire inevitability. “Lord knows what they planted in us, what buried imperatives and controls that they might be, right now, getting ready to unlock on a global scale to bring us to our ultimate destiny.”
“Which is?”
But Sharkey could just shake her head. “I don’t know and I don’t think I want to find out.”
“We’re fucked, Elaine. If Gates is right, we’re fucked.” Cutchen kept trying to moisten his weathered lips, but he was all out of spit. “I really hope Gates is a lunatic. I’m really hoping for that.”