Uncontacted, page 13
“And they have a permanent detail at their sacred stone site, correct?”
“That’s right. Another similarity between the two tribes.”
The group reached an agglomeration of boulders that looked like they came down the side of the mountain in a rockslide, obliterating the skinny game trail. Each member of the hiking party found his own way up, through and over the obstacles, until they resumed their formation on the path on the other side.
“Let me ask you something,” Antonio said without looking backwards once they were marching onward and upward again.
“Sure, I’ve got time to kill.”
“I’ve been thinking more about why they killed their own man back there on the beach, about why they would do that. I know they said—or we thought they said, anyway—that he was ‘contaminated’ by having left the island, and so had to be killed, but I haven’t seen this behavior before in tribes. Lots of them leave their village and go into town for weeks at a time on supply runs, it’s perfectly acceptable and sometimes even mandated by their communities.”
“It’s not only that they left, it’s that they believe their purpose is to stay here to guard the stone, the sacred stone, and that if they do wander off, they are ‘outside their purpose,’ is the closest I can translate, and therefore meant to ‘terminate.’”
“Terminate…” Antonio became lost in thought as he put one foot in front of the other, allowing the dappled sunlight on the forest floor to lull him into a trance-like state conducive to deep thought. After a while of this Antonio felt as though he was on the verge of a breakthrough, of connecting all the pieces of the strange puzzle he’d been thrown into, when Stel’s voice broke his concentration.
“Something else is odd,” he said. “This morning, I tried your suggestion of firing up my cellular just to see if I could get a signal, and what do you know, I got one bar, probably from the Indian coast, and so I checked the news I have flagged according to my keywords.”
“You’re an even earlier riser than me. So what did you find out?”
“I already knew that in Brazil the deaths of those born on 2-29 was a high number, but over here in the Andamans and in India, the nearest mainland, the number was very low.”
Antonio almost tripped over a tree root as he processed this. “Wait a minute, you’re saying that there were tribal 2-29 deaths besides the Amazon ones?” He turned around and made eye contact with Stel for a moment before turning around again, his forward pace never flagging, to keep up with the tribal people.
“That’s correct. I saw, in the Indian online news sites, a back pages article about how two, maybe three people—they weren’t sure on the birthdate of one—had suddenly dropped dead in or around the city of New Delhi, with their birthdays reportedly having been confirmed or at least reported as February 29.”
Antonio considered this for a few steps before replying with a shrug. “Makes sense, I mean we have both tribes with same language, same birthdates, and now the deaths on the same day—it was the same day, right?”
“Yes, the same exact time, even, as near as anyone can tell. I mean, accounting for the time zone difference, it looks like they dropped dead at the exact same moment in time. So yes, they also share the unexplained sudden deaths on the same day, although our tribe here had orders of magnitude fewer deaths than their sister tribe, if you will, in the Amazon.”
“That could be because this tribe is so much more isolated. On an island, while the Amazonian tribe has a contagious land tract to connect them to the cities.”
“Quite right I expect,” Stel agreed.
“And then, of course,” Antonio said, adjusting the weight of his pack on his shoulders, “there’s the two halves of the same meteor, with a computer program embedded in it, if that’s what this turns out to be. Speaking of which…”
Antonio shrugged out of the heavy meteorite pack. “It’s your turn to lug this thing for a while.”
Chapter 24
That night they made camp again only to find out it was another treetop situation. But looking around, Antonio had to admit, there was no where else to shelter, the ground was so uneven, sloping and covered with thick vegetation. But the tribe seemed worried most of all about nocturnal predators of some sort, from which they felt more protected by being in the canopy.
This time, Antonio felt just a touch of chill in the air, being that they were high up on the mountain now. A wispy fog blew across the top of the canopy, reducing visibility, confining their world to a Robinson Crusoe like treehouse existence, of passing things from person to person by tying them to a vine and swinging them across.
And then, after dinner and after the treetop party had settled into their hammocks for the night, Antonio saw it. He actually saw it before he heard it, that’s what surprised him the most.
A big cat, a panther, he thought. Black as night. A black panther.
When the fog parted for just a second and the moonlight beamed through the leaves, Antonio spotted the big cat crouched on a Y-fork limb about ten feet over him. He saw the robust paws, could even make out the faint spotted pattern of pure black against lighter black. Then the cat opened its mouth in a silent grimace and Antonio saw the mighty incisors flash white in the moonlight.
He'd seen jaguars in the Amazon, but never a black panther. He was surprised at how large it was, a beefy cat, not a scrawny little thing like some of the leopards he’d seen. This feline was the size of a medium tiger. Something about the eyes bothered him, too. They glowed, but a dull red. At first he thought it was a reflection from the moon, but then it occurred to him that should make the eyes more yellow or silvery, not red….
And then he looked down at the backpack with the stone, and saw it glowing red to the point that it shone through the heavy denier fabric. Glowing the same color as the panther’s eyes.
“Hey, Antonio?” Stel’s voice whispered from his hammock a few feet away.
“Yeah?” He didn’t know if using a louder voice would spook the cat or incite it, but he decided to stay quiet so as not to wake everyone up. So far, anyway, the panther made no threatening moves.
“I see a big cat, over there.”
“Me too,” Antonio began, but then he cut himself short when he saw the direction in which Stel pointed. Not to his panther, but to yet another one, a few feet above and to the left of Stel. And then, as he turned his gaze around the treetops, he saw many pairs of dully glowing red eyes, dozens of sets of them.
“Why aren’t the guards doing anything?” Stel wanted to know.
Antonio looked around and spotted the silhouette of one guard far to their left, on the edge of the treetop camp, perched in the crook of a branch with his bow at the ready. Casting a glance downward, he spotted the second guard in a similar position much closer to the ground.
“They don’t look too concerned.” Antonio saw that one of the tribal men one hammock over was still awake, and watching their conversation. Wordlessly, Antonio caught his attention by waving and then pointed to the closest panther above their heads, its eyes still glowing red.
In response, the indigenous man nodded slowly, then pointed to the glowing red bag in Antonio’s hammock. He then uttered a single word before rolling over in his hammock and going to sleep. Antonio had to rack his brain to recall its meaning; he’d heard it before, during the interrogations in England, but what was the context? And then it hit him, as the fog parted for a moment and the moon shone down on the pride of black cats watching over them.
Protector.
#
Antonio surprised himself by sleeping well throughout the night, awakening only with the clattering of cookware in the pre-dawn light. He propped himself up on an elbow in his hammock and looked around the trees, but all of the panthers had gone.
He sat up and saw that Stel was already up, sipping some of the potent tea the tribe made. “Morning sunshine,” he called over from his hammock.
Antonio nodded in return. Neither of them mentioned the panthers. Today was the day they would reach the site of the sacred stone. They still faced another long hike most of the day in order to do it, but it would happen today. What if the stone isn’t there for some reason? That thought, and the instant death sentence that accompanied the reality it described, wouldn’t stop running through his head. The tribe was a simple people, after all, prone to all sorts of superstitions, folklore and thinking that was in general not always based in logic. But he had no choice at this point, he was going along for the ride whether he liked it or not, and so he would just have to hope that the stone was there, as it should be.
And if it was there, then what? Antonio pondered this angle, too, as he brushed branches out of the way and negotiated the steep game trail, which now grew even narrower, ever upward. He voiced these thoughts to Stel, who now walked in front of him, free of the stone pack while it was Antonio’s turn to bear that burden.
“Those annoying tech guys said it looked like some sort of computer program simulation,” Stel recapped as they marched along.
“The tribe sees it as a god,” Antonio said. And then, as a mosquito landed on his cheek, he had an epiphany, a series of thoughts that he was stunned to see accompanied by an intense increase in glow from the rock half carried in the pack on Stel’s back in front of him, so that he could see a dim glow even through the bag in full daylight. Green in color. Antonio could feel the mosquito pulling the blood from his face and yet the thoughts were so strong he ignored it, not willing to task his brain with controlling any motion other than walking, so as not to disrupt his synaptic flow.
But then Antonio tripped over a tree root covered in fallen leaves. He lay sprawled on the ground, not yet attempting to get up. The tribe continued walking ahead of them, unaware of what happened, while the hunters behind them had taken it upon themselves to ferret out some small game from a hollow tree trunk.
“You okay?” Stel asked, turning around. Then he saw the strange look on Antonio’s face. “What’s going on?“
Antonio slowly rose to his feet. “I know this will sound crazy, Stel, but just hear me out, okay?”
“Fine, mate, what’s on your mind? Walk while you tell me, though, so we don’t attract too much attention.” Antonio dusted himself off and started moving again.
“I just thought about this: the meteorite came from space. There’s no doubt about that. Lab confirmed. Radio-carbon dating and other tests. So, what if the technology is from not just an advanced civilization somewhere in space—“
Now Stel stopped walking and turned around to face Antonio “Who, hold up. Space? Who said anything about space?”
“That’s where meteorites come from, Stel.”
“I know that, but—“
“They said the computer had to be embedded in that meteorite shortly after it was made, at least a million years ago. This won’t stay a secret for long, Stel. You know the computer team photographed and took video of it, so it’s going to leak that we have some type of alien technology.”
“So you’re just looking to find more things for us to worry about, is that it? Because I thought we had enough already, what with the primitive tribe marching us through a remote island rain forest to some sacred site for a possible human sacrifice, that was enough for me…but okay, sure, let’s add that to the list, why not?”
“What if the tech is not from space, Stel, but is actually from our human race in the future—what if the people who made this computer program are our ancestors, and they ran a simulation—a computer model-- a long time ago to see what would happen to their species down the line?”
“How would our ancestors have sufficient computing power to do something like that?”
Antonio thought about this for a moment. “Okay, then what if a technologically advanced civilization with unfathomable computing power decided to run models of their own ancestors?”
Stel turned around, still unaware of the glowing green ball he carried on his back. Around them, the forest had gone eerily quiet; no drone of insects, no tittering of birds, no sounds of branches moving caused by small mammals leaping from them. Stel looked puzzled, but intrigued. “You mean, like how certain tech moguls have postulated how we all might really be existing in some computer simulation?”
“Exactly. That we could all merely be software agents in someone’s computer model. But don’t take my word for it, Stel. Take off your backpack for a second and have a look.”
Stel stopped walking, shot Antonio a concerned glance, and removed the pack. His eyes bugged out when he saw the intense green glow coming from within. He put a hand on the outside of the pack. “It’s not hot. Jesus, Antonio, when did it start doing that?”
“As soon as I had that thought, about the computer simulation of our ancestors.”
Stel’s mouth dropped open and he remained speechless, shaking his head back and forth. “What on Earth…”
It was Antonio’s turn to shake his head. “Not on Earth, Stel. What in the universe?”
“How can it read your thoughts like that? How does it manifest things in real life? I don’t understand!”
“I don’t either, yet, but here’s another example of manifesting things in real life, Antonio: Thinking about the 2-29 deaths, the ones who died right away—they all had the leap day birthday, right? So do you remember the Y2K scare? The fear that computers would crash in the year 2000 because of a leap day rollover glitch?”
“Yes, turned out to be a whole lot of nothing.”
“It turned out to be nothing because systems were prepared for it ahead of time. My point is, what if that’s what this is? The two tribes were entrusted with the original program—they were closest to the source of the simulation app, meaning they were the first humans created with the program—that’s why they’re such primitive, uncontacted tribes—but, when some of them –centuries later—left the tribal areas for the cities, on that certain day, the program terminated them as some kind of exception error.”
Stel looked down at the still-glowing pack. “Exception error?”
Up ahead, they heard the natives calling back to them. “We better get moving.”
Chapter 25
As they neared the top of the mountain, Antonio knew they had to be getting close to their destination. The jungle did, too, it seemed. Around them, the presence of predators increased steadily as they neared the apex. There was an absence of the black panthers from the previous night, but there were other big cats—leopards, even a large tiger that stalked just out of sight along the game trail, brief glimpses of its orange and black hide the only evidence of its presence.
It was not a cat, but an ape that attacked them first. A stout mountain gorilla, one that ran onto the path from the side, crashing into the tribesmen up ahead of Antonio and Stel. The hunters battled it down with spears and arrows, and after a short but brutal fight, the primate skulked off into the bush, dragging a broken spear sticking out of its left leg.
No sooner had they recovered from that and resumed their upward progress on the now barely visible trail, than a massive python dropped on Stel and Antonio from the trees. It began coiling itself around Stel’s entire upper body, its impressive musculature rippling with the effort. The hunters behind them proceed to eviscerate the animal with their bone knives, eating some of the meat raw before casting the rest aside.
“The panthers were protecting us last night, and they were strange,” Antonio observed, “while these animals seem normal but they are attacking us.”
“Maybe it’s normal?” Stel threw out. “It’s not like either of us have ever been here before. In fact, I’d say this is by far the most remote location on Earth that I’ve ever been to. We haven’t even spotted an aircraft in I don’t know how many days.”
“Most remote place I’ve ever been, too. But I’m an ecologist, Stel, remember? And I can tell you that it is anything but normal for these keystone predators to be acting in this way.” He batted a biting insect the size of his outstretched hand away from his throat.
“I wonder,” Stel said, “has the tribes’ sacred rock always been where it is, up here, or is this where they took it to keep it safe?”
“You mean, did they find it here or find it somewhere else and take it here?”
“Right.”
“Good question, let’s try to ask them.” They reached a small stream whose damp bank paralleled the game trail. Antonio called out to the hunters behind him, but before he could get a definitive answer, they reached a small hole in a wall of wet rock into which the stream disappeared. Antonio shivered involuntarily as he flashed on the tribal man he had banished into a similar stream in the Amazon cave.
The entire group gathered outside the hole in the rock. One of the tribal men looked at Stel and Antonio and then pointed into the opening, accompanied by a grunted word.
“What’d he say?” Antonio asked.
Stel took a deep breath. “We go.” Then he shrugged off the pack and handed it to Antonio. “And here, your turn to lug our favorite souvenir.”
Antonio stared at the meteorite, which currently was not glowing at all. Then he picked it up and put on the backpack.
“What about light, won’t it be dark in there?” Antonio voiced his concern as he peered into the opening in the mountain’s peak. He shrugged off his backpack and hunted around inside it for a flashlight, but the tribesmen acted unconcerned. They ducked the cave lip as they waded in the middle of the stream into the mountain’s rocky insides. One of the hunters waited outside until Antonio and Stel entered the opening. Only then, with a last look around outside through the notch of a drawn bow, did the tribal hunter enter the cave.
The entire party now inside, they ventured a short distance in the wet stream bed itself, where they still had some natural light. Antonio was concerned because he didn’t have his flashlight, but inside, the walls of the cave glowed with the same kind of strange phosphorescence he’d seen in Brazil, giving off sufficient light to see by. He found it hard to believe the uncharacteristic illumination could be a coincidence.
