Dura

Part 7

The food they gave me here was a little better than the food we were given before. It was mostly vegetarian, although sometimes it contained meat – perhaps mammoth? – but I didn't like it that much. It was, according to my standards, undercooked. I was kept inside of this room for a long time, constantly monitored. Every day followed the same routine. First they tested my physical durability and strength, trying to determine my limits, then they tested my cognition with different kinds of problem-solving tests – similar to standard IQ-tests – and lastly, they interrogated me with different methods. The most successful way to communicate was by drawing. I wasn't a very skilled painter, but I was still able to explain certain basic concepts. I did try to learn as much as I could about their language during this time though – I was even given a lexicon – but it was extremely difficult. I couldn't understand more than a few words, signs and names. I had some success in translating their numerical system. The main difference was that they didn't use the decimal system, but the duodecimal system.

Their objectives with communicating with me seemed to be to understand the technology we had brought with us and where we came from. They always gave me our phones – both mine and Alex's – and instructed me to explain. Their batteries had died, which they seemed to understand, but they didn't believe me when I claimed to be ignorant about how to charge them up again. I did, however, draw communication satellites orbiting a globe, and although that was beyond their current level of technology, the idea didn't seem completely alien to them; if anything, they seemed rather impressed by it, as if they had just begun to think about such things themselves.

As to my place of origin, I deliberately lied to keep them from blocking the passage for me in case I would be able to escape later on. Interestingly enough, they never resorted to torture. They appeared to care a lot about my health, even though I was still losing weight at an alarming rate.

One day, during one of the interrogations, they showed me black and white photographs of fossils. On one of them, there was a skull. It had belonged to an anatomically modern Homo sapiens. The interrogator put a world map on the table and pointed to an area in East Africa. I nodded and inspected the region more closely than I had done before. To my surprise, I noticed a pair of large lakes – but still tiny on the map – in the vicinity of what would have been Tanzania in my world. First I didn't think much of it, but after I returned to my room later I thought about them a great deal. They didn't belong there. I couldn't be entirely sure, because I didn't have a perfect picture of the world map in my head, but I became more or less convinced that those lakes weren't a part of my world.

Perhaps, I thought, they were the point of divergence. Maybe they were craters. "Something must have hit us in this world before we had time to leave Africa," I thought, "but after the ancestors of the Neanderthals did." I opened my eyes and said out loud: "My God... we went extinct!"

After a month or two – I hadn't learned how their calendar worked so I'm not sure what unit of time they would have used – the doors opened in the middle of the night. I could see the silhouettes of the researchers and officers on the other side of the window. A red light lit them from behind and the shadow of cigarette smoke rose to the ceiling. A small, dark figure, entered the room.

A loud voice came from the speakers. It wasn't speaking to me, but to the figure that had just come inside my room. My heartbeat went into overdrive and I thought it was going to burst out of my chest. I hid under my covers. As the figure stepped into the red light coming from the window, I saw that it was a girl. Given how much smaller she was compared to the other women, and how youthful she looked, it became clear to me that she was a teenager, not older than sixteen years old. It didn't take long for me to understand what was going on. Their reproductive ethics were nothing like my own. I quickly got up from the bed, covering my naked body with the covers, and walked over to the window.

"You can't do this!" I yelled, banging on the glass with both of my hands. "Get her out of here, please!"

It was hopeless. I tried to open the door, but it was locked as usual. The girl hid away in a corner when she saw me, and I hid away at the other end of the room. The speaker kept talking and after a few minutes, the Neanderthal girl tried to approach me. She slowly walked toward me, but as soon as she came too close I quickly ran to the other side of the room. Was she forced somehow – perhaps they threatened her family? – or had she volunteered out of honor? It didn't matter... I was being forced.

They had tested my abilities, compared my hereditary potential to their own, and decided to mix their species with mine to create a superior being. Perhaps to finally outcompete the Denisovans.

"You don't understand!" I yelled. "It's a mistake! You're dooming yourself into oblivion!"

I didn't know how to explain it so that they could understand. I kept running away from the girl as soon as she came close. In the morning, when the lights turned on, I could see her more properly. She was wearing thin fabrics, revealing her naked body underneath, and her hair was black. She looked sad, but there were no tears in her big eyes. Her rapid breathing made it clear to me that she was just as afraid as I was, if not more.

They didn't feed me – nor the girl – this day. I began to cry, for the second time in this place. They knew what they were doing. No food or water until... Realizing this, the futility of it all, I once more banged on the window.

"She's a child goddammit!"