The Genesis Conspiracy

Chapter 1

Pyrenees Mountains, Spain

August 1, 2059

Archaeologist Juan Garcia removed his oxygen mask and glared up at the largest glacier in the Pyrenees. “We’re nearly there,” he said to his colleague, Marcelino Heras. Both men were buzzing with excitement. And for good reason. Entombed in the ice somewhere up there was a discovery that could rewrite history.

Twenty-four hours ago, a group of Austrian mountain climbers stumbled upon a discolored rock poking up from the ice. When one of them chipped at it with his ice pick, they discovered that it wasn’t a rock at all. It was the back of a human skull.

They contacted the local authorities and a forensics team was sent to investigate. After clearing some of the snow, the police quickly realized this was no lost climber. Their call to the local university was intercepted by a testy receptionist who transferred the cops to the department of archeology and anthropology.

That was when Juan had answered.

And now here they were, but Juan knew that eagerness was one thing, and getting to the body in one piece was another. The problem was rather simple; the glacier atop Mount Aneto was melting, every day becoming more unstable.

In nineteen eighty-four, a survey of the glacier had measured the ice pack at nearly a dozen miles long. Since then, eighty percent of it had been lost. Within a decade, the mountain would be bare. A reality which made the team’s trek to the summit that much more important and that much more difficult.

With this in mind, Juan and Marcelino charged on, forcing one leg in front of the other. Slowly they made progress as they struggled to haul heavy backpacks loaded with equipment up the mountain’s eleven thousand feet.

Two hours later, they finally found what they were looking for. The authorities had been wise enough to leave a triangle of evidence flags to mark the location. Dropping their packs nearby, Juan and Marcelino got to work at once.

The process of digging through ice compacted over several millennia was slow. But soon enough, the glacier began to reveal its secrets.

First to become visible was an upper torso with flesh the color of rich amber. Assigning an accurate date to the body while on-site would be difficult. They would need contextual items such as a Bronze Age ax, a quiver of arrows, or if they were exceptionally lucky a few scraps of clothing. Regardless, the state of the body made one thing perfectly clear: whoever this person once was, they had remained trapped in the ice for many thousands of years.

Marcelino was digging under the body to free the legs when he stopped and let out a quiet little sigh.

“You find something?” Juan asked, glancing up from his analysis of the skull.

“Yes, but I don’t see how it can be.”

Juan stood and came around, his feet crunching over the dense ice sheet.

“Reach your hand inside the hole I dug,” Marcelino instructed him. “Tell me what you feel.”

Juan removed his glove, wiggling his fingers against the cold. He reached in, at first touching snow, then the smooth, marble-like flesh of the body before he felt it. His eyes narrowed with confusion then grew wide with shock.

“Is this what I think it is?” he whispered under his breath.

Marcelino’s head bobbed up and down. “Impossible, I know, and yet there it is.”

Juan removed a small flashlight from his pocket and peered into the gap. Diamonds of light danced over an object that shouldn’t be present on a body this old.

It looked like a zipper.

•••

After the archaeologists finally freed the body, it was flown to the quaint Pyrenees village of Sallent de Gallego, where the university housed one of its satellite research facilities.

There, the body was kept in a nitrogen-rich atmospheric chamber with a relative humidity of ninety-eight percent. The initial temperature was set to minus six Celsius, but was gradually warmed to allow the ice crystals to melt.

Before long, they discovered that the individual in question―affectionately named Johnny Doe―was a middle-aged male. Isotopic analysis of the teeth showed he had lived in North Africa, but it was the carbon-14 dating that really surprised them. Juan had already figured out the body was old, going back as many as five thousand years, but when Marcelino read the date, Juan could hardly believe it.

“Twelve thousand years,” Juan yelped.

He paused, struggling to slow his breathing. Johnny Doe was more than twice as old and far better preserved than any previous find in the history of archaeology. But Juan’s euphoria was tempered by the strange discovery that had accompanied him: the remnants of what could only be described as a zipper running the length of the body.

“Could it somehow have been placed there afterward?” he wondered outloud. He needed to find a solution that made sense or the archaeological community would tear him apart.

“There was a small amount of fabric attached to the zipper line,” Marcelino told him. “It appears to be a synthetic material, rubberized plastic perhaps. If I had to guess I’d say it was a body bag.”

Juan’s gaze, deep and penetrating, flicked over in his direction. They had been in this room for nearly two days straight and Juan’s head was swimming. Since lunch his heart had been galloping in his chest, his flesh rosy and warm to the touch. Signs he’d associated with being overworked and underfed.

Marcelino was in the middle of proposing a fresh hypothesis about their puzzling zipper discovery when a stream of blood rolled out from his left nostril.

Juan watched it pass over his friend’s lip and down his chin. He pointed, waving his finger, unable to quite get the words out. Then came another stream, this one from Marcelino’s other nostril. His friend and colleague wiped it away with the back of his hand, staring down at the crimson smear.

Something was terribly wrong.

Juan turned to leave the chamber when Marcelino collapsed, his head hitting the floor with a wet slap. He rushed for a phone, to call an ambulance for the man who’d become like a brother to him.

Juan stopped before the glass door. The phone was on the other side. His numb fingers fumbled over the keypad. The code was simple, the same four digits he’d entered probably a thousand times before, but for some reason he couldn’t remember them at all. Panic surged into his throat as he tried again, the final digit followed by an angry buzz and the glare of a red light.

Denied.

He glanced up, terror clawing at his every breath. Raising an arm to hammer the glass with a closed fist, Juan caught his own reflection in the glass door. Thick streams of blood ran from his nose, ears and eyes.

Suddenly his dreams of becoming a celebrated academic seemed a million miles away. His eyes flickered back toward the ancient body thawing on the gurney, and a final thought had time to slither through his infected mind as he wondered what horror they had just unleashed?