The Genesis Plague (2010)

time.’
    ‘Is that possible, Brooke?’ Flaherty asked.
    She considered it, then nodded. ‘The Mesopotamians were obsessed with the celestial cycles. So I’d say, yes.’ But without fully transcribing and testing the number system she had to accept what Stokes was saying. ‘And this was what led you to the cave?’ she asked Stokes.
    ‘Yes.’
    If he’d truly been able to decipher this tablet, she thought, then why would he have commissioned her - an outsider - to assist in the excavation? It didn’t add up.
    Flaherty was losing his patience. ‘This is all very nice, Stokes. But let’s talk about the other things you found in the cave. The real reason behind your excavation. We know about the skeletons. So why did you study all their teeth?’
    ‘Yes, the teeth,’ Stokes said. He reflected for a moment to choose his starting point. He directed his response to Brooke. ‘As you know, the emergence of civilization was long, uneven, violent, and marked by many false starts and setbacks. And every major turning point … every conquest in history, was determined by nature’s most potent equalizer: disease. Pestilence is the planet’s survival mechanism. The means not only for maintaining equilibrium, but for genetically selecting winners and losers.’
    Flaherty said, ‘I thought guys like you didn’t believe in evolution?’
    ‘Creationism may make for good sermons, but it certainly doesn’t make good sense or good science,’ Stokes admitted. ‘Ms Thompson, the story you deciphered on the wall of that cave chronicled one of the most profound events that shaped modern civilization. It told of a thriving, technologically advanced people who’d effectively been wiped out shortly after the arrival of a foreign visitor.’
    ‘Lilith,’ Brooke said.
    ‘That’s one of the names later mythology ascribes to her,’ he conceded. ‘Lilith was responsible for a wholesale extermination at the dawn of the earliest civilization. A theme that would play out many, many more times throughout our history.’
    ‘But only the males died, right?’ Brooke said.
    Stokes raised his eyebrows. ‘Every one of them. Which begged the question: how could pestilence selectively afflict only men? It seemed impossible. But the remains found in that cave substantiate the story. At that time Frank Roselli was overseeing Fort Detrick’s Infectious Disease lab. His top virologists and geneticists studied specimens from the cave - traces of ancient DNA left behind from a most unusual virus. Of course, I’m not a scientist,’ Stokes said, ‘so the nuances are lost on me. However, I do understand the basic mechanics.’ He paused to marshal his thoughts. ‘The majority of conventional viruses are coded in RNA and replicate within the cytoplasm of host cells. But some viruses, like Lilith’s plague, are coded in DNA and penetrate deeper into the host cell’s nuclear core to replicate.’
    Roselli had explained to him how the nucleus of human cells stores the entire genetic code - the genome. The genome has twenty-three chromosome pairs, twenty-two non-sex chromosomes, and one pair of sex chromosomes. The female sex chromosome is noted as ‘XX’ and the male’s is ‘XY.’ At the genetic level all humans are 99.9 per cent identical. Mutations passed on from one generation to the next make up the remaining 0.1 per cent of the genetic code. These ‘single nucleotide polymorphisms’ recode one of the four nucleotides - adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T) - along the gene, changing an ‘A’ to a ‘C’ or a ‘G’ to a ‘T’. And in those slight mutations, ancestry can be traced back along a 100,000-year genetic tree to one man and one woman in Africa - the genetic Adam and genetic Eve. ‘Which means we’re all distant cousins,’ Roselli had explained. Roselli inevitably sided with science by refuting the notion of a truly common variant among any ethnic group. Yet Roselli’s scientists clearly demonstrated that a high frequency of specific genetic variations were common among different ethnic groups.
    Stokes’s interpretation of the genetic data was simple: the Middle East was a hotbed of genetic variation, and Lilith’s plague was capable of pinpointing the specific genetic sequences that accounted for it.
    And Stokes was sure that Lilith’s plague wasn’t mere science - it was a mechanism put into play by God Himself to destroy the wicked early civilizations in the Middle East. He’d