Lemuria, Burt Clinchandhill [adventure books to read .TXT] 📗

DNA transcribes into a string of RNA, but before it’s translated into proteins.”

“So?” Jennifer shrugged. “What’s that got to do with me?”

Mulder lifted a finger in the air, screwing up his face. “Patience, I asked you. It was long believed that those introns didn’t have a function at all. Non-functional, non-coding, or junk DNA. The only thing that researchers always wondered about was that if introns have no function, why have they been preserved during human evolution.”

“The appendix has no function,” Jennifer said. “And it’s still there.”

“True, and that’s also why it’s on its way out, shrinking. Did you know that one in every one hundred thousand people is born without an appendix? In earlier times, the appendix probably helped in the digestion of large amounts of leafy greens. In animals with the same diet, the appendix is much larger and functional. In 1978, Harvard professor Walter Gilbert suggested for the first time that introns could help speed up evolution. He called it exon shuffling. He proposed recombining exons and in that way, format new genes.

“Introns have always been in our genes to support evolution. They are the blank slates on which future design is being drawn. I based my research on his and soon found I could manipulate introns, not only to create new genes. I also proved I could re-create old genes that were removed through evolution. Shuffle back, so to say.”

“Proof?” Jennifer asked.

“Of course, my dear. You’re living proof that all that was lost over hundreds of thousands of years doesn’t have to be lost forever.”

Jennifer frowned. “What did you do to me? There was no activated sleeping G2 quiescent stem cell?”

“Oh, no, my dear. Of course there was. The hospital did great work on triggering the regenerative potential of the G2. The only thing I did was piggyback on their procedure, to replace a piece of recombined DNA, your own recombined DNA, that is. A two for one, so to say.”

“And if it wouldn’t have worked, or something terrible would have happened, or evolved?”

“We only recombined genes of which we knew the purpose beforehand.”

“That’s also why you needed the isolated tribes.” Jennifer tilted her head. “You needed a template of how DNA looked before it evolved into modern man. And since those isolated tribes are far less evolved as we are....”

“That among other things,” Mulder confirmed. “But you’re not wrong. Once I created new DNA by using introns to reshuffle exons, I needed comparative material. Those less evolved tribe members were the ideal subjects. Did you know that on every continent, homo sapiens evolved differently? Today’s DNA of all humans is 99.9 percent the same, but it’s that 0.1 percent that makes all the difference.”

“But why?” Jennifer asked. “What’s your purpose with that knowledge? Do you want to re-create a prehistoric man or create a future man, Homo Futurus?”

“That’s a nice name.” Mulder laughed. “But why do those two have to be mutually exclusive? Why can’t the future human benefit from our prehistoric forefathers’ traits?”

“So, what’s your plan?” Jennifer asked. “Change humans according to your own liking? More suited to what you think are our future needs? What’s wrong with people as they are?”

“For here and now? Not much, I guess. I believe that humanity, as it is, deserves the Earth it has created. I also believe that this Earth is lost. Mankind is lost. There’s nothing to be salvaged.” Mulder shook his head. “No, instead, Homo Futurus, as you so eloquently called it, will develop into a species capable of living in a completely different environment.”

Jennifer frowned. “And become immune to a polluted Earth, eat and digest plastic and live beneath the sea?”

“You still don’t get it, do you?”

“You said you would explain it to me.”

Murder rose from his chair and walked to the door. “Follow me.” He walked into the hallway.

“Where are we going?” Jennifer asked.

“You’ll see in a minute.”

After snaking through the concrete hallways for two minutes, Mulder stopped at a large double door crisscrossed with black- and yellow-striped tape. ‘DANGER, DO NOT ENTER.’ On the right side of the door was a screen with a red light flickering on top of it. Mulder stepped toward the screen, and from a foot, he put his face in front of it. The red light turned green, a click sounded and the door slowly swung open toward them.

“Be careful.” Mulder took Jennifer by the shoulder, pulling her back from the doors. A massive room, about one hundred square feet with a fifty-foot-high ceiling, appeared. Rows of desks with dozens of computer screens divided the place. Over one hundred men and women worked computers, talked into headsets and anxiously paced the room.

Astounded by the scale of things, Jennifer examined the room.

“This is our base of operations, the control room to The Core, as we like to call it.” Mulder approached a woman behind a desk in front of him. He put his hand on her shoulder, and she typed on her keyboard. The entire wall at the end of the room became a huge video screen with one large image in the center, surrounded by smaller screens with different views.

Jennifer’s jaw dropped at the images on those screens.

“Now you understand?” Mulder asked.

Chapter 30 – Toilet Paper

Galápagos Islands, Ecuador

The Eurocopter EC130 took off from the landing pad behind the Finch Bay Hotel at Puerto Ayora, in the south of Santa Cruz Island on the Galápagos Islands. Santa Cruz was the second largest, and most populated, island in the center of the archipelago. Over the year, more than two hundred fifty thousand tourists visited the island in search of plants and animal species found nowhere else in the world.

Threatened by climate change, pollution, deforestation and the introduction of invasive species, the fragile islands were the first-ever on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1978.

The oval-shaped island was home to unique indigenous specious like the marine iguana, the Galápagos giant tortoise, the magnificent frigatebird, the Galápagos penguin, the Galápagos sea lion, and the fur seal.

“That’s phase one.” Bishop waved