“Sorry about that,” said Frost, joining Nina and Kari.
“No problem,” Nina told him. “I mean, if you’re going to save the entire world, you might as well start with just one plane, right?”
“Indeed.” Frost smiled. “Come, follow me. I’ll show you how.”
“They’ve given us emergency landing permission,” Starkman told Chase over the noise of the engines. “Ten minutes.”
“Any problems?” asked Chase.
“Norwegian ATC keeps wanting to know why they don’t have our flight plan. The pilot’s stalling them, but I think they’re getting suspicious.”
“So long as they don’t get suspicious enough to send fighters after us, it won’t matter.” Chase turned to the other men in the cabin. “All right! Ten minutes, lads! Better get ready to jump!”
Frost led the two women into the containment area, passing through another airlock and proceeding deeper into the underground facility.
“In here,” he said. The door at the end of the corridor was solid steel with no view of the room beyond, unlike the transparent aluminum entrances to the other labs. The logo of a trident was painted on the metal. He pushed his thumb against a biometric reader beside it. The heavy door slid open. “Please, you first.”
Nina wasn’t sure what she was looking at as she entered. A few pieces of scientific equipment she vaguely recognized, but most of the gleaming hardware was a mystery. The banks of supercomputers at the rear of the large lab were among those that were easy to identify, towering blue cabinets hooked up to liquid cooling systems. In one corner of the lab was an isolation chamber; it had windows, but they were blacked out.
“This,” began Frost with an air of theatricality, “is where my life’s ambition has finally been fulfilled. Everything else in my business empire merely supports what has been done in this room. For thirty years I have been using the resources of the Frost Foundation to search the entire world, to identify the genetic lineage of every group of people on the planet.”
“Looking for the Atlantean gene?” Nina asked.
“Precisely. Only about one percent of the world’s population carries what I would consider to be a ‘pure’ form of the genome-we are members of that one percent.”
“One percent of the world… that’s, what, sixty-five million people?”
“Equivalent to the population of the United Kingdom, yes. But they are spread out all across the planet, in every ethnic group. Then there are those who have an impure form of the genetic markers-either from dilution over time due to interbreeding with those who do not possess it, or from natural mutation. These people make up around fifteen percent of the population.”
“Nine hundred and seventy-five million,” Nina said immediately.
Frost smiled. “You’re definitely one of us. One of the traits of the Atlantean genome is an innate skill with logical systems like mathematics.”
“Considering what you’ve found out,” added Kari, “we now think it’s almost certain that the descendants of the ancient Atlanteans were entirely responsible for the development of the numerical and linguistic systems all around the world.”
“Even after the sinking of Atlantis itself, the Atlantean survivors were still the driving force in human civilization,” said Frost. “They were the leaders, the inventors, the discoverers. They devised the systems that allowed humanity to thrive and expand-language, agriculture, medicine. But ironically…” his expression darkened, “in doing so, they sowed the seeds of their own subjugation. Before they brought civilization to the world, the survival of the human race was entirely in the hands of natural selection. Those who were weak perished. But by reducing the threat from external forces of nature, the Atlanteans made it possible for the weak to thrive.”
“I don’t know if I’d put it quite like that…” Nina began.
“I would,” Frost insisted. “And the process has accelerated out of control over the last fifty years. Within four years, the world’s population is predicted to reach seven billion. Seven billion people. That is an unsustainable figure. And eighty-four percent of them do not possess the Atlantean genome. That means more than four-fifths of the entire population of the world is useless.”
Nina was startled by the bluntness of his words. “What do you mean, useless?”
“I mean exactly that. All those billions provide nothing of value to humanity. They don’t innovate, or create, or even think. They just exist, breeding and consuming.”
“How can you say that?” Nina protested. “That’s-that’s just…”
“Nina,” said Frost, leaning closer, “just look at your own country. You can’t have failed to see it. America is dominated by the indolent, the stupid, the wilfully ignorant masses who do nothing but consume. Democracy does nothing but perpetuate the system, because it allows the masses to take the path of least resistance and continue to avoid work, avoid thought, and achieve nothing. And those who should be leading them out of that state have become corrupted by greed, wanting to do nothing more than exploit them-for money!” He sounded almost disgusted by the word. “That is not the role of a leader! The Atlanteans knew that for society to advance, the people had to be led, not left to indulge their gluttony.”
“But the Atlanteans fell into the same trap,” Nina reminded him. “Remember Critias? ‘They appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.’ And the gods destroyed them for it.”
“A mistake that will not be repeated.”
“It’ll always be repeated! Atlantean or not, everybody’s still human. ‘The human nature got the upper hand,’ as Plato put it.”
“We will learn from the past.”
“How?” Nina demanded. “You’re going to do-what? Change the world with a DNA sample from an eleven-thousand-year-old corpse?”
“That is exactly what we’re going to do!” said Frost. He gestured at the supercomputers. “Until now, these machines have been working on simulations, coming up with a million, a billion variations of the same thing. But without a sample of pure, untainted Atlantean DNA to use as a base, there was no way to know which was the right one. Even our DNA has been changed by time to some degree, and we are the closest there is in the modern world to pure-blooded Atlanteans. But now…” He looked at the black-windowed chamber. “Now, I know exactly what those changes are. And I have been able to take them into account.”
“Into account for what?” asked Nina.
“For a way to restore the world to how it used to be-how it should always have been. A world where the Atlanteans retake their place as the rightful rulers of humanity, to lead them to new heights without being held back by the useless, unproductive masses.” He walked across the lab, Kari following. Nina went with them almost against her will, unable to take in what Frost was saying. Had he gone mad? He sounded nearly as crazy as Qobras!
“This,” said Frost, indicating a glass-sided cabinet with thick rubber seals, “is what the discovery of the true Atlantean DNA has finally let me create. It was one of the variants the computers had simulated-but until now there was no way to know if it was the right one.”
Nina peered into the cabinet. Inside was a line of glass and steel cylinders filled with a colorless liquid.
She was certain it wasn’t water.