CHAPTER 53
February 2, 2100 (Earth/Proxima timeline)
Proxima b, aka Fintidier
The weeks since the team returned from the ruins were filled with more than a little anxiety. Based on the warning from Secretary Arctinier, the medical team ran a complete workup on those who had been part of the excursion to the southern continent, looking for any sign of infection. The workups were performed every two days since to account for any latency period of possible infection. They were all clean and had remained that way. Whatever contagion risk that had so worried the Fintidierians either didn’t affect Earth humans or it didn’t exist anymore, if it ever had.
And it was clear that they were under long-distance surveillance. They had been warned that there would be multiple flyovers of the small, propeller-driven aircraft multiple times each day and that there would be spotters surrounding the camp. Rogers noted their locations, routines, and how they were able to blend in with the surrounding countryside with respect, noting that they were extremely professional and competent—and would have been difficult to keep track of if it weren’t for the Earthers’ more sophisticated technology.
It was clearly going to take more time to rebuild trust.
* * *
“Do they have groundhogs on Fintidier?” Charles asked.
“We saw some little rodents down in the southern hemisphere that might pass for a groundhog,” Alma said. She sat her coffee mug down on the conference table they’d set out in the middle of the basketball court. The rest of the scientists were making their way to seats in the bleachers. One of the security force guys, Lyle Baker from the US FBI, was setting up the projection screen and activating the drone. They were coming together to learn the results of the analysis done on the data they collected during their foray to the ruins.
“Crosby here. Are you guys reading us?”
“We have you, Captain,” Baker said and then he turned to the ambassador. “Charles, you are ready go whenever you like.”
“Thanks, Lyle. We’ll let them all get seated.”
* * *
“The remains we found; they are all human. Since the atmosphere here is remarkably similar to Earth’s, uncannily so in its composition, we measured the interactions of incoming cosmic rays with the atoms in Proxima b’s upper atmosphere and found the rate at which Carbon-14 is produced, normalized it with what we are used to on Earth, and then applied the results to dating the remains we found in the burial mounds. They Carbon-14 date to over fifty-one thousand years ago. And the stories left on the walls of the inside of this temple appear to be telling us of an ancient much more advanced culture than even what we have on Earth today, perhaps having developed here tens of thousands of years ahead of us. This sounds like an Atlantis-type myth,” Alma Jones briefed the rest of the Proxima One Base team.
“The myth that is recorded though, is much darker than ours. This advanced culture here just vanished. There were two different interpretations that Dr. Oliveira-Santos and I came up with after the AI cracked the glyphs. One, they left the planet. Two, they died and their spirits went to heaven. Typical kind of ancient myth debate here.” Alma paused and looked to the linguist. “Maggie?”
“What we have here is A Tale of Two Cities all over again. No matter which interpretation we use here,” Dr. Maggie Oliveira-Santos explained as her face popped up on the main screen at half court. “There appear to be haves and have nots. Whoever this . . . Atlantis culture, as Alma calls them, were, they were somehow different and more advanced than the others. And it appears they must have mixed their genetic line with the lesser-advanced culture for centuries, maybe millennia. For whatever reason, their advanced culture or technologies weren’t shared. Maybe they were like the Romans and the rest of the world were slaves or at least labor peasants in an extreme lower class. The story told by the glyphs isn’t clear on this.”
“This is where it gets interesting,” Alma whispered to Charles sitting beside her at the table sitting in front of the bleachers.
“You mean it wasn’t already?” he shot back at her quietly.
“Then the Atlanteans—again, what Alma calls them as we never found a name—started dying at an extremely fast pace. There must have been some disease then because the glyphs show them falling dead in rows. It was a very significant time for them and there were these glyphs here representing this.” Maggie tossed an image of the wall inside the temple onto the main screen so everyone could view it and then she continued.
“You see here how there are rows of people with these ornate-looking belts and bandoliers? That is how they drew the advanced people. The normal people are always stick figures. Well look at this image here and see how the stick figures are smaller and prostrate to the others. Note how the sun behind them is illuminating them with these rays. Now, what appears to be later in the story, we see this same type of presentation but the sun is much larger and more pronounced and there are rays here coming all the way to the taller advanced people’s figures. Maybe this means they were more godlike or in touch with the heavens. We’re not sure about that. But it is here where we see”—Maggie changed the image—“to this one Alma found. Alma . . . ”
“Oh, okay, yes, you see here that the larger figures with the ornate belts and such, well, some are standing and some are horizontal. Perhaps these rays from the sun are representative of their spirits going to the heavens when they died? Maybe they were sun worshipers?” Alma started to flip to the next screen but was interrupted. Dr. Gilster was standing up, waving at her.
“Hold on a minute,” Rain said. Her face appeared on the screen. The little conference drone silently hovered closer to her. “No offense, Alma, Maggie, but that isn’t what that glyph is telling us at all.”
“No offense taken. Go on, Rain.” Alma sat back down.
“Proxima Centauri is known to be a highly active flare star. We just haven’t seen it flare in a while. The flares act a lot like solar flares due to energy stored in the star’s extreme magnetic field. The field lines within the star get very strong and warped out of shape due to the other magnetic field lines. When there is enough of a tug on one of the lines, it breaks and reconnects to a nearby line. When this happens, there is an enormous amount of energy released. In fact, the star’s brightness will increase all across the spectrum from radio up to x-rays. Solar winds are accelerated to significant portions of the speed of light. Those x-rays and accelerated ions are then slammed into the planets within the solar system. This why we weren’t sure at first that Proxima b could actually house life because if the planet didn’t have a strong magnetic field, which we now know it does, these flares would irradiate and kill anything over time. However, the strong magnetic field of the planet helps shield them from this.”
“What are you suggesting, Rain?” Maggie asked before the screen could change.
“I’m suggesting that whoever these advanced people were, their bodies were being killed by the solar flares. The pictures don’t give you a time epoch. They could have been dying of cancer from the exposure. Maybe skin cancer or something.” Rain sat back down.
“Holy . . . Rain . . . you’ve just explained why this next part occurred!” Alma stood up. “You see, we hadn’t finished the story. It was at this point, when the Atlanteans started dying off, that the peasant culture started an ethnic cleansing.” Alma tossed an icon about and then threw something at the screen. “This set of glyphs here shows a family tree of sorts. Any of the lower culture that had heritage back upward through their bloodlines with any of the Atlanteans were purged. There was a major upheaval and a war here. This entire continent was divided racially, or I guess ancestrally, and hundreds of millions fought and died. The non-Atlantean line won and marched the rest into what must have been deathcamps that would have made what the Nazis did pale in comparison.”
“They thought it was a contagious disease killing them?” Charles asked.
“They must have. So, out of fear and ignorance they started removing the cancer from their planet,” Alma replied. “This makes perfect sense now. Before, we just assumed it was some disease. Now with this, we know that at first, well, it was a disease but it wasn’t contagious. Over time, had they not overreacted, then the solar flares would have killed off those susceptible and the stronger ones would have survived. Selective adaptation would have occurred given time to do so.”
“But they didn’t let it. They forced it and went overboard with it,” Maggie agreed. “And they cleansed their planet of whatever races were due to the intermingling of these people with their own.”
“Wait, has anyone done an assessment of the number of races within the Fintidierians?” Charles asked.
“We haven’t really?” Yoko Pearl stood and gave the drone time to zoom in on her. “Early on before we left Earth, we did go through as much of their video as we could to look for diversity in the genetic pool. We concluded that we didn’t have a good enough sampling across their culture to know for certain. We based this on looking at our movies of that era of technology. The genetic makeup of the planet was very poorly represented at the time. At least that was our conclusion.”
“I’ll agree with that,” Dr. Raheem Ramashandra added. “I’m aware of this effort and we concluded in parallel from a study of our own archived data that an accurate model of the genetic makeup of the era couldn’t be accomplished.”
“Alright then.” Charles held up a hand to quiet everyone down. “Everyone, I think we are close to an answer here. And it is time I brief you all on something that the president of the United States briefed me on just before we left. Commander Rogers, are we certain we are clear of Fintidierians here?”
“Yes sir, there is no presence of them as of yet. We are expecting a food-and-supplies vessel at fifteen thirty, but we’re clear,” Commander Mike Rogers replied.
“And we’re certain they are not eavesdropping on us somehow?”
“Vic?” Rogers turned the screen over to his intel specialist.
“Mr. Ambassador, there is no technology that these people have that we cannot detect. There were listening devices in various locations that might have been placed in malice or just as internal communications during construction that were left behind. But they have all been deactivated. We are clear to speak here,” Tarasenko assured him.
“Alright then, this is never revealed to the Fintidierians and is considered to be classified to Earthlings only. I need all of you to raise your right hand and swear to this. If you can’t do that, I’ll have to ask you to leave the room and the channel for a bit.” Charles waited and nobody left the room or cleared the channel. Then he opened up a file and had an oath displayed on the screen and sent to all of the Earthlings. “Raise your right hands, read the oath out loud, please. The AIs will record it for the record.” Charles waited until his AI showed that all of them had read the oath and digitally signed it.
“Very well, before we left, I was briefed by a Dr. Jason Faheem, an expert in pandemic and population studies. What he told me was that there are actually three locations on planet Earth to date that have for generations shown a tremendous gender discrepancy in their population census data.” Charles paused and then ticked them off on his fingers. “Those are: one, Saudi Arabia; two, Oman; and three, a small area in Asia known as Bhutan. Dr. Faheem went on to show us that at times the female percentage of the population has dipped as low as thirty-four percent in each of these places. He even showed that the birth data portrays a significant difference in the number of female babies born versus male babies born each and every year for the past century. Whatever is causing this, nobody has an answer for it. Fortunately, for us anyway, Earth is extremely racially diverse and has many people moving into these areas to make up for the problem. However, we don’t know if it could spread or not as we don’t know yet what is causing this.”
“Jesus . . . ” Charles heard Alma whisper next to him.
“So, as you can imagine, the governments of Earth are extremely interested in what the cause of the problem here on Proxima b is. Not only are we here to save them, but potentially ourselves as well.”