Free Luca by Jacob Whaler Page A

Mercer’s face relaxes into a slight frown. Now is the hard part. Making her believe. “You’re going to find this all exceptionally hard to swallow, so brace yourself.”
    “Ready.”
    Mercer draws in a deep breath. He brings the green jewel to eye level and examines it like a jeweler assaying a diamond. “This artifact was produced by a civilization as technologically advanced as ours, perhaps more.”
    “3.5 billion years ago?”
    “Yes.”
    “On Earth?”
    “Yes.”
    Qaara shakes her head. “It’s not possible.”
    Her curt answer triggers an internal flash of rage, but Mercer pushes it back. It’s too early to risk losing Qaara. “Allow me to explain.” Mercer fingers the green jewel. "After much trial and error, we finally figured out what this is. Any guesses?”
    “An ancient earring?”
    “Not even close. It’s an information storage device, much like our memory cubes.”
    “So, you’ve been able to read it?”
    “In small part, yes.”
    “What did you find?” Qaara leans forward in her chair, eyes focused on the green jewel. “If this really is from some past civilization, it's incredible. Utterly astonishing. It would overthrow all our theories about the origin of—”
    Mercer holds up his hand. “We found massive amounts of data, written in a language we couldn’t decipher.”
    “But why can’t you just—”
    “Allow me to finish.” Mercer feels the anger boiling to the surface at Qaara’s verbal impatience but manages to push it back down again. "It isn’t for lack of trying. The data is so massive, so densely packed, we’ve had three Xunil Clusters churning through it for the last two years. Professor Ye from the Beijing Institution, the world's expert on deep encryption, was directing the work.”
    “But didn’t he have a falling out with Genesis Corporation? And die on Everest last month? Something about a severed climbing rope.”
    Mercer’s eyes narrow. “A tragic accident. But that’s beside the point.”
    “What is the point?”
    He’s tempted to tell her how the otherwise quiet Professor Ye had indeed decrypted most of the data on the little green chip and found it so disturbing that he was about to flout Mercer’s orders and publish his findings on the Mesh, a move that Mercer could not and would not tolerate.
    It’s something Mercer noticed years ago. The utter improbability of the little green jewel has a way of driving people to desperate measures. And Mercer is desperate to keep it secret.
    And now it’s affecting Qaara.
    She’s acting out of character, her quiet and submissive attitude strangely missing, as if her curiosity has taken over and pushed back her fear of Mercer. He isn’t amused, but her intellect, not to mention her genetic inheritance, could be essential to the success of Project LUCA, so he ignores her lack of respect.
    “Six months ago,” Mercers says, “we stumbled onto a section of the dataset on the green jewel that stood apart from the rest. It had so many repeating patterns that we were able to decipher it. To our surprise, it turned out to be a DNA sequence. Molecular machinery for producing an enzyme or a protein.”
    “The LUCA?”
    “You’re getting ahead of me.” Mercer feels the sting of the bright light in his eyes. He moves his jaw, throwing a subtle switch that causes the glacier glasses to turn to dark mirrors again. Running fingers through his hair, he pulls a few stray strands away from his head. He notices he’s sweating. And his hands are trembling.
    “Is everything all right, Mr. Mercer? Can I get you something?”
    Her show of condescending concern is infuriating. The truth is, for all the bravado, he’s nervous. Revealing the information about the Cloud and the green jewel to Qaara has its risks. If she leaks it to the world, all his work and effort, all his plans, will be for nothing.
    He’ll kill her before he allows that to happen. Like the others.
    “I’m fine.” He breathes deeply and finds his