Subhuman by Michael McBride

Author:Michael McBride [McBride, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2017-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

28

FRIDEN

Max Friden groaned and tried to open his eyes, but the screaming pain in his forehead forced him to close them again. He raised his head and pried his watch from his cheek. He’d apparently fallen asleep on it and hadn’t moved since. He smacked his tongue from the roof of his mouth and, somewhat disoriented, looked around his lab. He just needed some caffeine to take the edge off of his splitting headache, which he knew was caused by ingesting copious amounts in the first place, but that was a problem for another day.

“Sweet nectar of the gods,” he said and killed off the remainder of a warm can of Red Bull he found on the corner of his desk. He belched and launched the empty can toward the trashcan with the others.

A glance at his watch confirmed that not only had he slept through breakfast, he’d nearly missed lunch. Again. This kind of thing was becoming habit for him, but he did his best work in the middle of the night. Always had, always would. There was something about being on the brink of exhaustion that seemed to free his mind from the constraints he unconsciously placed on it during the day.

After Richards left, he’d gotten right down to business and researched ancient musical scales, which led him to the Solfeggio scale, first documented in cuneiform by the ancient Sumerians more than seven thousand years ago and utilized in Europe clear through the Renaissance. In the process, he’d stumbled upon all sorts of New Age mumbo jumbo about its so-called sacred tones, including the belief that the note mi—528 Hz—could repair damaged DNA. While he found the notion laughable, considering it was roughly half the acoustic energy of the tone that had caused the membranes of the organisms to rupture, it seemed like a reasonable starting point.

He’d extracted samples of each of the twenty-eight species isolated from the lake, everything from algae to protozoans, and prepared slides with as many living specimens of each as he could. One by one, he’d mounted them on the light microscope and watched through the lens as he exposed the organisms to that infernal sound. If there was a more annoying tone on the planet, he couldn’t imagine it. After a while he’d started to wonder if stabbing knitting needles through his eardrums wouldn’t have been an improvement.

None of the eukaryotes—single-celled organisms like amoebae and algae—showed any appreciable reaction whatsoever, nor did any of the previously identified multicelled prokaryotes found elsewhere in the world. So much of the scientific method involved ruling out reactions in control samples. Without them, it would be impossible to qualify the reactions of the test subjects, which he had saved for last.

The previously unclassified archaea they’d discovered in the lake, those that had matched the fossilized bacteria from the meteorite and had responded so violently to the Metallica song, had reacted not only immediately to the tone, but in the precise manner he’d predicted. Their fimbriae had

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