My father is dead. He died last fall of complications from acute lymphatic sarcoidosis after first getting sick just two months earlier. It was strange how fast it all happened, and given what I know, I wonder if there was more to his sudden passing.
For his part, my Dad never questioned it or even complained about receiving a surprise death sentence at fifty-eight. He has always been a private person—stoic and reserved most of the time, though he could still be very funny and warm when the mood struck. I knew he’d spent his most of his career as a geneticist working on hush-hush government contracts, and growing up I’d almost seen him as a kind of nerdy spy—assigned to some top secret mission he could never tell his family about. As I got older, I’d laugh at that. Odds were, I figured, he was just a normal scientist working on something boring that had a federal grant or something, and the only reason he didn’t talk about it was because he didn’t want to get sued by someone, or maybe he just had an appreciation for how not interested we would be.
Except, in the last week of his life, Dad was on a lot of pain medication, and rather than make him sleep, it seemed to wire him up, making him fidgety and talkative. That nervous energy and lack of inhibition, combined with the knowledge that he was winding down on the last chances he had to talk to his son in this life, seemed to have a powerful effect on the man. He began telling me all kinds of stories—some from his childhood, others from his time with Mom before I was born. As the pain got worse and the medicine became more frequent, he began telling other things too. Like the two months he spent working on The Buried Kings project.
He’d been lead on various high-clearance projects for several years at that point, developing a reputation for being a good problemsolver when someone’s experiments hit a snag or their research needed a fresh set of eyes. Most of his work involved the study and alteration of the human genome—understanding the effects of radiation and biological weapons on DNA, for example, as well as treatments or resistances that could be developed against these effects. He said it was usually theoretical or low-level experimentation, as whenever he reached a certain milestone in something, within a few days he was shifted to something else entirely, with the explanation being that his old work was now being taken over by a different department. He knew what that really meant—they were divvying up the work so no one person knew what they were really doing.
He understood the precaution, but it still made him a bit worried he might be contributing to something much different than what he’d thought. Something much more dangerous. Telling himself he was being paranoid, he tried to keep his unfounded fears at bay, and most of the time he was successful. That is until he was woken up one night and told to pack a bag. That he was going to a research bunker in the west to work on a new project.
It was called The Buried Kings.
Henry, you know how your body has little microorganisms in it? Bacteria, fungi, viruses, protozoa, you name it. But the idea of it is one thing. I think it’s easy to think of it as a few germs on your skin or in your body. Something alien and sparsely distributed that can be kept at bay with some soap or hand sanitizer.
But nothing could be further from the truth. Your body, all of our bodies, are small universes for literally thousands upon thousands of different species, and they aren’t aliens trying to invade your body either. They are your body.
Years ago, when they were working on the Human Genome Project, they figured out that our genome only contains about 23,000 protein-coding genes, which was about twenty percent of what we’d expected to find. But if that was true, where were the other eighty percent coming from?
We figured out over time that what we call the human organism is actually a supraorganism, and that the majority of our cells aren’t actually what we’d define as human. There are actually ten times more microbial cells in the human body than human cells, and the genetic contribution of those non-human cells isn’t five times greater than the human ones.
It’s hundreds.
Yet for all that we’ve learned, we still have such a limited understanding of how human genetics actually work and all of the interactions and influences between the myriad of things that make up our body, much less those things that exist in the broader world. Strange and forgotten things that had once been known and maybe understood in a time before science and reason. Back when superstition was the vehicle for explaining the unknown and man’s ignorance was a given rather than a dirty secret.
I’m a man of science, Henry, and I think it does a lot of good in the world, or at least it can. But I also have come to understand that we are not much different than those that came before us, and certainly no better. We have traded ignorance for arrogance, unable to accept that despite progress and effort and the passage of time, there is much we were never meant to know.
They’d found the box during an archeological dig in what’s now western Romania—buried beneath the stone floor of a small temple back in second century Dacia. The box contained numerous writings in various languages, as well as several objects initially deemed by experts to be of some unknown religious significance. It wasn’t until several of the people at the dig site began to grow ill and…change… that the location was quarantined and secured, and it wasn’t until they began translating the writings that they gained some dim understanding of what they were actually dealing with.
The items in the box were just items, chosen more for their structure and resilience to decay than anything. Certain metals and minerals are particularly good hosts, you see, and the thing living on the pendant we had at the bunker was likely several million years old.
They had been experimenting for years when I was brought in. Doing chemical analysis, microscopic and submicro readings and studies. Live subject testing on both animals and people. And for all that, all they knew was that there was something tiny and alive nestled into the crevices of an old pendant fashioned into a crude metal triangle. Something that, given enough exposure, made some people get sick and die and others start to warp in their bodies or their minds.
The changes…they went far beyond anything I knew was possible within the confines of a single organism. It was almost as though it was sparking some kind of single-generation evolution, but with a force and logic that was so alien that it defied our ability to even begin to understand it.
I spent my first week reviewing the past research with some mixture of wonder and horror, and the next two redoing and building on the testing that had been done before. It amounted to nothing. The microbe could not be altered or even sampled, and any more extreme attempts to dislodge it from the artifact would risk losing the organism itself, if it could even be hurt or killed. No one was willing to say that last part, at least not then, but the unsteady hum of tension when I asked the question told me all I needed to know. They had a tiger by the tail, and it was going to take more that the scientific method to learn how to tame it.
So we went back to the texts, filled with ritual and allegory, superstition and strange imagery. The primary topic repeated across the writings from the box was about “The Buried Kings”—some kind of being or beings that were worshipped by small cults in parts of both the Greek and Roman Empires, including a sizeable following in the Kingdom of Dacia itself. Much of it had been deemed useless by my predecessors, but I disagreed. Reading between the lines of some of the rituals and accounts of the Kings’ power, I could see analogues to some of the effects we were seeing here: People sickening and growing mad, changing into beasts and demons and gods. And then, of course, there was the ritual of awakening.
They called it the Tasting of the Key.
Replicating the ritual itself was very easy. Based on what was described and what we knew, the mechanics of it were simple enough. The issue was what it required. A human sacrifice.
Not in the way you’re probably thinking, of course. No stone table or curved knife. Just an enlisted soldier, listed as KIA and brought into the project under the guise of protecting his country. They had done it before, of course, but it had been before my time. And even if I didn’t have to specifically request it, I knew it was my theory that led to them locking him into a room with that thing.
Still, when they handed me the microphone, I didn’t hesitate. I knew better. I didn’t have to act as cold as they were, but I couldn’t look unwilling to do my part, or my role in the project could quickly become much more practical. So I hit the button. Told the young man to approach the locket. To pick it up. To lick the back of it, holding his tongue to it for a full twenty count before putting it around his neck with the licked side of the pendant touching the skin on his chest.
He was a good soldier, and he did as he was told, strange as it probably seemed to him. And I had just enough time to feel relief that my little reenactment of the ritual had failed, as there was no sign of him growing sick or being affected whatsoever.
Then the man began to scream as he broke apart.
His body rippled and twisted as it shifted this way and that, jutting out in a dozen places like taffy pulled by invisible hands. Blood and other liquids sprayed out at first, but those wounds were quickly closed by the rolling tides of his flesh and bone as he was torn apart and reformed over and over, somehow growing larger as he spread across the room like a pink fungus spiked with broken shards of white. I kept expecting him to die, but he didn’t. He just wailed and then babbled from one or two or sometimes ten mouths as he shifted and grew. I began to wonder if he would fill the entire room, but no. The thing had stopped growing, and now it was moving in reverse. Shrinking back down, pulling itself back together into a shape that made more sense but was no less horrible.
It was a man. Not the private who had been sacrificed, but someone or something much different. Taller, with dark hair beginning to come in and eyes that seemed to faintly glow in the shadow of a jutting brow. Eyes that found me behind the one-way glass and pinned me to the spot.
”Ubi?” I heard the voice through the speaker, but I heard it in my head as well, this time in English. “Where?”
“A bunker. Under the ground. In America.”
The man glowered at me, his nostrils flaring as he spoke again in a harsher tone. ”Quod?” In my mind, “When?”
Shuddering, I said the answer as I thought it. “2014.”
The thing that looked like a human smiled now, his lips pulling back to show sharp, white teeth. ”Physiologia.” This word was accompanied by a flood of images and ideas. I couldn’t hold on to most of them, but one stood out above the rest.
Home.
I was terrified, not sure whether to try to respond further or stay silent. I looked around at the others in the room with me and realized they were all completely still, just staring like statues as I had this strange, stunted exchange with the creature that had eaten the solider in the other room. I looked back to the man-thing. He was still smiling, and gave me a small nod before he was suddenly…just gone.
For the next month, I was the guinea pig. We all were. New people were brought in to interview us, test us, observe us. Even with all the safety protocols, there was no guarantee that we weren’t infected or somehow compromised, but fortunately there were enough important people in the bunker that they couldn’t easily just seal us in or bury us out in the desert. And given that the pendant and writings had disappeared along with the creature, there was no more project to conduct.
I still think they might would have killed me, just to be safe, if it wasn’t for how unbelievable it had all been. No one would ever really listen, and I had sense enough to not try in the first place. Not even to you or your mother, at least not until now.
But horrible and scary as it all was, I’ve never lost sight of how important it was too. I don’t know if we woke up something old or just saw a glimpse into a world that’s around us all the time. A dramatic reminder that most of all of…this…isn’t about us, much as we’d like to pretend otherwise. Either way, I wanted to share it with you before it was too late.
And maybe you’ll think it’s the drugs talking, or a fanciful story I made up to impress my son. That’s not what it is, but it doesn’t matter so long as you take this last lesson to heart.
Always be curious and proud of what you can do. But don’t let your curiosity turn you reckless or your pride make you arrogant. There are things we’ll never know. Should never know.
And some things?
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