The Atlantis Gene

Locked in a room inside the Antarctic research lab, Warner tries to bargain for the children with her unseen captors. She refuses to disclose her treatment protocols until she can see them. In response, a video screen shows the image of the two boys entering the structure with the backpacks which, the disembodied voice tells her, hold two nuclear warheads. If she tells them her secret, they claim they will deactivate the warheads. When she hesitates, Sloane enters the room, demanding answers. Warner recognizes him as the father of her child.

Keegan explains how he and Dieter Kane could still be alive after so many years. Pierce’s “deal with the devil” (371), which kept him working with the Immari, was to place Helena’s dead body in one of the Atlantean “suspension chambers” to preserve the life of her unborn child. Kane placed his dying son, Dieter, in another. Then, suspecting Pierce was working against them, Kane ordered Pierce into a tube, followed by Craig. When they were both revived in 1978, Craig began to rebuild Immari which had been nearly decimated by World War II. He focuses on building the Immari security division, renaming it Clocktower. As a front for Immari Security, Clocktower has infiltrated most of the world’s intelligence organizations. Now, rather than kill Vale, Keegan wants to win him over with “the truth.” Vale pulls out his hidden gun and fires.

Confronted by Sloane—who again alludes to Warner’s past transgression against him—Warner finally confesses that she used cells from the umbilical cord of her unborn child to concoct an “experimental stem-cell treatment” (374); however, none of the cells remain.

Vale pulls the trigger, but the gun clicks. Keegan removed the firing pin. He reveals Sloane’s elaborate machinations: Sloane planned the 9/11 attacks to provoke a war with Afghanistan which would allow him to search the mountains for his father. The war also drew Vale into the Clocktower inner circle. Dieter Kane was pulled from his hibernation tube in full health, although the tube could not restore Helena’s life. They were, however, able to save her unborn baby: Kate Warner.

The exposition continues as Sloane places the blame for everything squarely on the shoulders of Warner’s father, Patrick Pierce. Sloane is only continuing his father’s work, trying to clean up the mess Pierce made. Suddenly a guard enters informing Sloane they are under attack.

Keegan tries to ascribe motivation to Sloane’s behavior. He argues that going to sleep in 1918 with a family and then waking up 60 years later, alone and in a strange new world, embittered Dieter and set him on a lifelong quest for vengeance. Keegan’s plan is to give Vale the means and access to kill Sloane so that Keegan can ascend the Immari throne. As Vale considers the offer—trying to buy time and find a way out—a hologram suddenly appears. Thinking it may be a message, Keegan believes Pierce saw these holograms when he discovered the room but did not know what they meant.

Left alone for the moment, Warner hears explosions. Grey enters and leads her to a large open room; it is a warehouse space or a hangar. He hides her behind some crates and dispatches the workers to another location. Once cleared, Grey tells Warner to don one of the white protective “space suits.” He explains that her research was aimed at isolating the Atlantis Gene, which was “given” to Homo Sapiens by the Atlanteans 60,000 years ago. The gene allowed humans to survive when the other subspecies could not. He further theorizes that the gene is activated by the body’s fight-or-flight response. When Warner’s research finds consistent gene activation in the minds of children with autism, Grey tries to keep those subjects hidden from Sloane, albeit unsuccessfully.

He reveals Sloane and Keegan’s plan to use the pandemic unleashed by the Bell to pare down humanity to only its fittest survivors. They will then create an army to infiltrate the Atlantean structure and kill the occupants which they believe are a threat to humanity. Grey confesses missteps, however: He overestimated his ability to control the situation. Grey represents a small faction within the Immari that wants to welcome the Atlanteans as potential mentors rather than destroying them as threats. He tasks Warner with entering the “tombs” and stopping the children from detonating their warheads. Once suited up, she goes outside where Grey lowers her into a hole where she can access the portal leading into the structure. She descends into darkness when suddenly the basket falls free; the cable has been cut.

Inside the Gibraltar structure, the hologram shows a massive “ship” rising from the sea. Keegan estimates the entire ship to be about 600 square miles; the Gibraltar and Antarctic structures are only pieces of the whole. He further estimates the setting of the hologram to be 12,000 years ago, when southern Spain and northern Africa were connected by a giant land bridge. The scene shifts to a small village on the coast. Several prehistoric humans drag a Neanderthal toward a fire. Several small vehicles launch from the ship, inject the Neanderthal with something, and then carry him back to the ship aboard their “chariots.” Keegan speculates that the Atlanteans were interfering in some kind of ritual sacrifice.

The final scene shows a massive tsunami—activated by an undersea explosion—crashing into the ship, breaking it into pieces, and dragging the pieces out to sea. Inside the ship, the lone surviving Atlantean powers down the ship’s computers before disappearing into a room beyond the one in which Vale and Keegan now stand. The door into the next room has a strange spear lodged in it; it is the “Spear of Destiny” which was plunged into Jesus’s side as he hung from the cross. Hitler, Keegan explains, was obsessed with religious artifacts, and he found the spear shortly after invading Austria. Vale pulls the spear out of the door, it opens, and he lunges into the next room as Keegan pulls out his gun and fires.

Sloane’s security team repels the attack, which has come from the oil rig crew trying to free the two children. Just then, a soldier informs him that the basket has been deployed into the tunnel; Sloane orders the cable cut.

Vale is locked inside the adjoining room, safe from Keegan’s gunfire. He explores the room and, after experimenting briefly with a control panel, finds a door leading to another corridor. He goes through another door and is immediately stopped by the sound of a voice. As he hears the figure approaching, he turns to face it but is struck with an electric prod that renders him unconscious.

The plummeting basket finally hits bottom, landing on a bed of ice shards. Warner is stunned but not injured; she is also trapped beneath the inverted basket. She tries to dig her way out, but her protective suit rips on the basket’s steel mesh as she tries to crawl under it. The protective warmth of the suit seeps out quickly, and Warner is in danger of freezing to death. Her limbs grow numb, her helmet visor fogs over, and her mind becomes confused and disoriented. She forces herself to keep digging and eventually scrambles out from under the basket. She runs for the entrance portal, but her clouded visor renders her blind. She stumbles across the ice, only guessing at the right direction. She hears metal grating on metal. Warner falls, gets back up again, and continues moving despite the cold and the numbness. At some point, the sound of ice beneath her boots has stopped. She collapses to the ground.

With Grey held by security for helping Warner escape, Sloane prepares to descend into the tunnel and enter the structure himself. Before he goes, he shares a theory with Grey: Warner’s time in the hibernation tube—in utero—has given her immunity to the effects of the Bell, which is why she not only survived the test inside the China facility but actually caused the Bell to shut down. Since Sloane also has immunity from his time in the tube, their child “is the first offspring of two Atlanteans—the first of a new breed of human, the eventuality of human evolution” (399). The child is not dead as Warner has assumed all these years but kept in stasis in a hibernation tube in San Francisco. Sloane insists on exploring the structure for signs of his father, although Grey argues there’s no way he could still be alive. At the urging of his research team, Sloane agrees to wait a few hours before descending, and then orders several more warheads to be deployed in the drill holes; he wants them detonated if anyone other than himself or his father emerges from below the ice.

Vale wakes up lying on a strange bed, a black paste smeared over his old gunshot wounds which never fully healed. The man who “incapacitated” him watches over him, promising the paste will heal his wounds in a few hours. He draws a gun and demands answers. When Vale tells him about the journal, the man responds, “‘I wrote it’” (402).