Paradeisia: Origin of Paradise (9 page)

As Aubrey turned back to the window, she was surprised to see how close they had come.  A myriad of details had now become visible.  There was a port with two long piers stretching out from the coastline. A monstrous cargo ship with the words IntraWorld Logistics printed on the bow was docked at one of them.  Containers with large white print that read “WARNING: LIVE CARGO” were being swung by a crane from the vessel toward a dock where rows of semi-trucks waited and tiny workers milled about.

Situated on the plain that stretched out from the coast to the mountainous ridges was what Aubrey recognized as their target: the airport.  There were several runways with a maze of asphalt between them.  These were edged by a shiny glass terminal.

As the plane circled around over the mountainous ridges to align with the runway, it began to shudder, first one wing raising up and then the other.  The bumps and jolts of descent became so bad that a knot formed in Aubrey's stomach.

She was thrilled.

The airport was obscured by a ridge ahead.  They passed over so closely that the sound of the jet engines reverberated back off the rocks and it looked like the tree branches would strike the bottom of the plane.

Finally, the wheels bounced on the runway and Aubrey loosened what she realized was a white-knuckled grip she'd had on her armrests.  The plane pulled around toward the terminal and then stopped about three plane lengths away, the scream of the engines slowly winding down.

When the door opened, a blast of warm, salty tropical air blew into the cabin.  Before long everyone had exited the plane down a flight of steps to sit on a waiting open-air shuttle.  Aubrey breathed in the scent of the sea in the wind that whipped her face as the shuttle sped them toward the terminal.

There was a large opening in the glass wall that the shuttle rolled through.  Soaring 100 feet above was a glass roof supported by a network of triangular trusses.  Reaching up towards the ceiling was a row of thin-trunked, erect palm trees that lined a platform where the shuttle came to a squeaky stop.

Music with an African chorus, brilliant trumpets, and a strong jungle beat echoed from hidden speakers.  A sonorous voice spoke over the music, "Welcome to Paradeisia:" the voice paused for emphasis, "Eden on Earth."

Suddenly, the same sonorous Anglican voice, but very close, very cheerful and no longer echoing, said, “At long last you've finally arrived!  I thought you'd never get here, and by 'never,' I do mean not ever.”

China Academy of Sciences

Yue Zhang, the
Xiàoz
hă
ng
(head) of the China Academy of Sciences, was an impatient man, prone to fits of anger when things were not going according to his timeline.  But he was also sensible, highly intelligent, and equitable.  He had been a near-failing student in school himself, and did not possess a PhD in any field, but his aptitude at management was second-to-none.  It was for this reason that he had led China's most venerable science institution for the last ten years.

Short, with a round face and piercing black eyes under thick eyebrows, he looked down at Doctor Ming-Zhen from an especially large desk and tall chair.  Zhang said, “I am sure you have heard of the calls for your resignation?”

Doctor Ming-Zhen looked down, “I have considered resigning myself, for the sake of the Academy.”

“And what has stopped you?” the superior inquired sharply.

Doctor Ming-Zhen looked up and said calmly, “I did nothing wrong.”

Zhang took a deep breath, casting a glance out the window as if he longed to be somewhere else, and said, “Now you know you have already tried everything.  No amount of photographs, documentation, radioisotope dating, or remains will satisfy them.  They've taken thousands of samples of the fossils and done their own studies.  It's all come to nothing.  You cannot prove it to them.”

“You are correct they will ever accept the original fossils as genuine.  But I can prove that man and dinosaurs existed concurrently.”

Zhang raised a skeptical brow, “And how could you prove that?”

Doctor Ming-Zhen sat back in his chair, “Antarctica.”

Zhang furrowed his thick eyebrows, “Antarctica?  What relevance could that possibly have?”

Doctor Ming-Zhen explained, “Once, many years ago, I assisted a colleague at San Diego State University in documenting fossils from the Hell Creek formation.  It covers parts of North America; Montana, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming.  It is notoriously fertile.”

“Yes?”

“Hell Creek has yielded a treasure trove of all varieties of dinosaur fossils over the years.  Tyrannosaurus, triceratops, and ankylosaurus, for example.  You've heard of all of those, I assume?”

“Yes.”

Doctor Ming-Zhen said, “Well, the fossils my friend from San Diego State University and I cataloged were not dinosaurs at all.”

“No?”

“No.”  The paper that resulted from their efforts was published in the
Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology
, and quickly fell into obscurity.  But Doctor Ming-Zhen never forgot it.

Thousands of representations of all kinds of animals were discovered at Hell Creek, including modern and extinct ones: all manner of amphibians, reptiles, fish, and birds (including many species still alive in modernity).  Hell Creek also contained a wealth of plant specimens, ninety percent of which were
angiosperms
(flowering plants), a type supposedly in its evolutionary beginnings.
In the words of one professor of paleontology, “If you've ever wondered why so many prehistoric animals are dated sixty-five to seventy-five million years ago, in the Cretaceous, it's because most of them were discovered in Hell Creek.”

Also found there were over 1,000 mammalian specimens, and it was precisely these which Doctor Ming-Zhen and his colleague documented.

Spreading his hands, Doctor Ming-Zhen asked, “You tell me, what was such an abundance of mammals doing in a place of history where they were allegedly in their infancy?”

“Weren't they all just little rats?”

“No,” Doctor Ming-Zhen said, “They weren't.”  He cleared his throat, “There were primates.  Tree-dwelling primates.”

Zhang leaned back with a look of surprise.  He said, “You mean monkeys?”  He blinked, “You cannot be serious.”

CDC

Doctor Compton sat at a large conference table in a room that was packed full of people, some seated, but most standing.  The person at the head of the table was Karen Harigold.

Karen spoke, “So explain what's going on, Phil.”

Doctor Compton began, “Well, I don't know how much everyone here knows about viruses, I'm assuming you're all fairly well-versed.  But just in case, let me explain.  A virus is a core of DNA or RNA that's usually coated in protein.  Very simple.  So simple, it's not even classified as life.

“Now because they are so simple, viruses are parasitic.  They must have a host to reproduce, in other words, viruses must infect living cells to reproduce.  It is inside these cells that they replicate their DNA and produce new, infectious viruses.

“Now an interesting facet of this process is that more than one virus can replicate inside a single cell at the same time.  When the virus replicates, transcription errors can produce mutations that can sometimes be beneficial to it, but it can also pick up genes from its host or from other viruses in the cell.  So, what virus ends up being is an amalgamation of the genes that were useful, both from random mutations and from its hosts or even from other viruses it might have met inside its host.

“Viruses also pass pieces of their DNA
into
their hosts, which then can be passed on to successive generations.  The fastest-replicating viruses are RNA viruses.  Influenza is an RNA virus.  Because it replicates, and therefore mutates, so quickly, it has transferred to different species very quickly.

“Now, to get to the point, you all know a mysterious virus killed a woman in Towson, Maryland, and we received samples for analysis.  In fact, we now have the whole cadaver.”

Karen interrupted him, “And everyone needs to understand that, so far, the people in Maryland have refused to take this thing seriously.  Unless the President adds this virus to a list for which we can quarantine, we are entirely at the mercy of the states for containment.  Maryland has not reacted with the urgency they should, and that is why I've gone to the White House—to get quarantine authority in advance.  Clear?”

Everyone nodded.

She said, “Go ahead, Phil.”

“Now this virus that we're dealing with here, it's an RNA virus, so the first thing we know is that it has the capacity to mutate very quickly.  This means that the way she received it might not be the way it is transferred next time, if there is a next time—God forbid.  As it mutates, it might attack other types of tissue.

“We tested the samples and couldn't find a match for any known virus.  So we sent samples to some respected labs overseas.

“One of those labs happens to have compared the virus to a database of all known genes.  And I mean all known genes from living and non-living creatures.  If anyone found a snippet of DNA anywhere, in a bacterium, in a bone, in an insect...anything at all, this database has it.”

“Yes, it's called 'A.R.K.'.  Any lab can freely access it online,” Karen said, impatient.

“Yes, that's right.  Well, the lab that ran the test just called me.”  Doctor Compton paused because he knew what he was about to say was going to raise questions.  And doubts.

“Well what were their results, Phil?” Karen said.

“This virus is very old.”

“Okay???”

“I mean very
, very old.”

“How old, Phil.”

“Ancient.”

“So is influenza...” she said.  “Hippocrates wrote about it.  What's the big deal?

“No, I mean before that...  Many of the genes from this virus are only common with...”

Everyone was staring at him in expectation.  He couldn't believe that all his study, all his hard work, all the companies he had worked for, his appointment to the CDC...everything had culminated in this: he had to say something preposterous.  He finally let it out:

“Sauropods.  This virus has genes matching sauropod DNA.”

A guy chewing gum and wearing a baseball cap said, “Sauropods?  You mean stomp stomp 'Welcome to Jurassic Park' sauropods?”

“Sauropods, yes; dinosaurs.”

Karen immediately interjected, “But a virus can only be transmitted between
living
things.”

“That is correct—well, HIV could survive for weeks in a corpse, and, given the ideal conditions, some viruses could even survive for months outside a body...  But, yes.”

“So whatever gave the virus to the woman must have been alive today.”

“Correct.”

Karen leaned forward, “What I'm trying to get at is, she couldn't have walked by a rock that a dinosaur happened to have touched eons ago and picked up a virus from that.”

“That is correct.    A virus doesn't sit around for thousands...or millions of years waiting to infect someone.  It needs a host.  She probably had to have touched or been in close proximity to the original carrier of the virus.”

Karen looked at him with one brow raised.  “Phil, really?  Are you saying she touched a dinosaur?”

“What I mean is she would have had to touch something that was alive today and was carrying the virus.  Not a dinosaur.”

Karen sat back.  “Regardless, this sounds impossible.”

Doctor Compton nodded.  “It certainly seems like it would be.”  Suddenly, Doctor Compton's phone rang.  He looked at the screen and recognized the number.  He apologized, “I have to take this; it's St. Joseph's.”

He answered, feeling everyone watching him expectantly while he listened to the person on the other end.  After he hung up, he said, “They say the pathologist's assistant at the hospital has the virus.  It appears our worst fears are true: the virus has transmitted.”

There was a hushed silence in the room for a moment.  Karen stood up, “Okay, I need everyone to listen, and listen good.  Starting now, we're in national health crisis mode.  This is command central: every piece of information, every directive passes through this gate.  First, I want quarantines.  No one comes or goes from St. Joseph's until I say so.  Send a team down there; call the police, whatever you need to do.  And I want anyone who so much as looked at the original victim within the last week quarantined.  This is an unprecedented situation, we are going to take unprecedented steps. 

“Now I know you guys are used to doing research, but I want containment.  I don't care if we never know how this thing got here as long as nobody else gets it.  Flex your muscle first and ask if you had the authority later.  There will be hell to pay if this becomes a nightmare on my watch.  Am I clear?”

Everyone nodded, except for the ball-cap guy, who said, “But we don't know anything about it.  We can't really label it a national health crisis until we have done research.”