The Risen City

Fiction by Matthew Rettino

Farah Dukakis never thought Atlantis would've been quite so muddy. The dripping, soft earth clung to her boots with every step. It gripped her as if it didn't want to let go, dragging her down into the muck of millennia, its salty reek, like that of a tidal pool, following her wherever she went.

The impassable mud had been right there, in Plato's account in the Critias, posing an obstacle to any Greek ships that sailed past Gibraltar. No one had remembered it, yet she was leaving tracks in it, and it was spread all over her boots and waterproofs as she served as tour guide for the Atlantis Archaeological Society's private donors.

She'd been showing Cyrus Burgess, CEO of Milton Rare Earths, around the Temple of Poseidon. Its porphyry pillars were bare of the silver that once covered them, their sections braced with planks and foam sheeting, restored with financing from the MRE's charitable trust. Tarnished Nereids lay half-buried in mud, hardened silt caked onto the slick backs of the salt-encrusted dolphins they rode. Split and rotted ivory ceiling coffers lay on the floor, displayed to show their silver tracings, so evocative of the natural patterns of ocean life. It was hard to tell where nature's ravages ended and art began.

That's when she received the call. It was Yanni's team at the villa. "You've got to come down here. We found a tomb."

Dukakis frowned. In the year since the continent rose to the surface, they had not discovered any human remains. Not a bone. They were all thought to have been dissolved by time, salt, decay.

"Intact?"

"Sealed shut and dry."

Her heart pounded in her chest. "I'm here with a donor. Can it wait?"

"I suppose. If you don't want to be the first person to set foot in it in ten thousand years."

"Stop. I'll be there. Wait for me." Dukakis hung up. Stared across the island, thinking of how it would feel to see an Atlantean up close, even if only their bones. "We just found something at the villa," she said. "Pardon me, but I have to go."

"What, and not take me with you?" said Burgess, standing nearby in a designer windbreaker and trousers the mud seemed to glide off of. "I trust it's a moveable object this time."

"It's a major discovery," she said. "Bigger than the mosaic."

His smile receded. “You promised the demolition could proceed in a few days.”

It wouldn't be a problem if your drilling claim wasn't in the middle of an Atlantean villa, she thought. But she had to remain professional, think about donor stewardship and keeping Burgess interested in ATLAS's long-term mission.

She told him about the tomb, though she doubted he'd be interested in it for its own sake. Part of the funding deal had involved ceding mineral rights to MRE, and Burgess's startup had been in deep legal trouble ever since the continent surfaced. He needed to keep his investors from skinning him alive. At least, that's how he’d put it several times this morning.

So Dukakis never expected him to grow curious. "A tomb, you say."

"A burial site for an Atlantean noble, likely their whole family. How many generations back, I don't know. But it's a breakthrough. A real one."

"Well, I might as well see what's been found." He gave a condescending smile. Even if it is outside the prospective borders of the UNESCO World Heritage Site, he might as well have added. After all, his charity only extended to the temple.

Dukakis led him along the plywood pathway from the temple to the villa. The planks had sunk in the sediment-rich mud after a recent rain. The stench of rotten fish seeped into the air like petrichor. Boulders, low walls, and fossilized coral reefs were nearly all that showed above the quagmire. That and the odd elephant skeleton. A surprisingly common sight here.

In the distance, Dukakis could still make out the wreckage of the MRE drilling ship, stranded improbably on land, its rusting derrick bent against the unyielding rock of the continent. Like so many whales and fish, it had been stranded when the continent rose, after drilling through what was believed to be the remains of Atlantis's port. A few remotely operated underwater vehicles had been recovered on the island too, one beached on the surface, another prospecting a cave beneath the temple.

MRE's deep sea mining rights had become land mining rights. It was even whispered that MRE had, somehow, caused the land to rise to cut down on costs. Dukakis did not know what to make of that but doubted it was possible. So little was known about Atlantean technology, and the world was looking for an enemy to blame for why their homes were suddenly underwater.

Three hundred thousand people had died in the first twenty-four hours of Atlantis's surfacing. A calamity from which the world was still struggling to recover. Dakar, Lisbon, New York City, Boston, Halifax. All flooded. The emergency bell that had started pounding that day had never stopped dinning in her ear.

Like many archaeologists on Atlantis, Dukakis had not wanted, at first, to extend protected status to a land whose birth had resulted in so many deaths. After a year, she had changed her opinion. Atlanteans were, after all, human beings. They had built homes, kept fires, erected places of worship, filled warehouses, maintained docks. Built tombs for their dead. She had decided they deserved to have their stories known.

Dukakis bypassed the earth-moving machines near the villa, behemoths with big wheels that would like nothing more than to chew away the mud and the hidden walls beneath it, breaking it apart for rare metals. Once out of their shadow, she shook hands with Yanni, the salt-and-pepper-bearded site manager with a wide-brimmed hat and a tan scarf around his neck.

He greeted Burgess courteously enough without shaking hands and led them to the mosaic floor the archaeologists were freeing from the mud, removing it inches by inches to expose an ocean scene teeming with dolphins, octopi, and shellfish. The tesserae glimmered in silver and gold—and that stranger, silver-gold metal mentioned in the Critias, orichalcum.

The survival of such beauty could be transporting. The stylistic similarities to Minoan frescos suggested a history that might bind this island to the rest of the world. The prospect of uncovering more greatly excited her. She hoped it would excite Burgess too.

Yanni received a call. He stood straighter, lips tightening as he answered.

"What happened?" asked Dukakis after he hung up.

"It's the Coast Guard. There's been an attack on the north side of the island. A few drones were hit and some pirates made landfall. We're to shelter in place until the danger passes."

"Is this a regular occurrence?" said Burgess.

Dukakis sighed. "More than you'd think." There were rumours of a black market in Atlantean artefacts. Scientists had discovered orichalcum had high-temperature superconductor capabilities. ATLAS could only safeguard so much of the coastline from those looking to sell to tech companies and manufacturers.

It wouldn't take long for its secrets to get out there. One reason MRE had staked its claim, cornering the market before competition moved in.

They set up a lookout. One bodyguard kept watch north of the earth movers, drawing his blazer aside to reveal a pistol. Dukakis hoped it wouldn't have to be used. The breeze from the ocean brought a damp spray as they waited for the pop of gunshots.

"We might as well show you what you came here for," said Yanni after some time had passed.

"I would like that," said Burgess. Dukakis nodded. She was still interested in the tomb. A major discovery.

Yanni led the three of them—including Burgess's other bodyguard—behind the villa to a volcanic rockface exposed from under meters of compressed undersea sediment. A twelve-foot-high stele stood there, carved from the rock, its face smooth as obsidian, multiple columns of Atlantean script shimmering orichalcum gold in the sunlight. Its mix of trident-like glyphs and circles reminded Dukakis of a more complex form of Linear A, the still-undeciphered Minoan writing system.

"It's probably a tomb of the noble family that lived here, a member of the ten founding clans, maybe even a king," said Yanni. "We can't yet read Atlantean, so who knows?"

"Fascinating," said Burgess. "This looks like it complicates things, though, doesn't it? As far as my claim is concerned."

"We're working on photography now," said Yanni. "If allowed enough time, we could hazard removing the mosaic."

"And the tomb?"

Dukakis could tell Yanni didn't like the idea of removing the stele, let alone the rest of the tomb. It was likely it would simply be destroyed if they could not win an injunction to stop the mining.

"There could be a necropolis down there for all we know," said Dukakis, stepping in. "Unknown wonders."

"You realize that would cost me a great deal," said Burgess. "I invested more into exploring this territory than you ever have. I'd hate for it to come to nothing. So would the MRE stakeholders. People have bet their retirements on the Yttrium deposits under your feet."

Dukakis tightened her grip on her tablet. She breathed the hot air and let her anger pass out of her. "Why don't you come and see what's down there? Maybe that'll change your mind."

A series of steps by the stele led to an onyx doorway with a nearly gapless seam. Yanni descended them and the door panels swung inward to his firm but delicate touch. A strong smell of wet stone rose from the chamber within.

Dukakis followed him inside, shining a flashlight along walls covered in the same eerie Atlantean script. There was no stench of decay, not even of dead fish. She began, instinctively, to narrate what she was seeing, so Burgess could appreciate the chamber's uniqueness, even if the border of his charity stopped just outside the temple a quarter mile away.

The tomb consisted of a single chamber with eight burial niches—three on each side and two dead ahead, though only five contained sarcophagi. In them Dukakis came face-to-face with the dead. An elderly man with furrows on his forehead, a youth with wide-set eyes and a scar on his cheek, an older woman with freckles and a crown of gooseberries. The delicate pigment that remained on the busts suggested the brown tint of their skin.

Dukakis stared at the older woman, her expressive eyes, the quirk in the mouth that suggested wit. It was like she knew her. It was impossible, but she felt familiar, as if she'd passed her in the street, at a bus stop, or in the high school gymnasium the first few weeks after the flooding.

Their deaths would have been dignified at least. They had expected to be recognized after death, had prepared for it, made arrangements. She wondered about the empty niches. Had those family members been killed in the sinking itself, and so left unburied, their bodies trapped under rubble or left floating? Or had they fled Atlantis to make their way to the shores of Morocco or the Yucatán, dying, eventually, far from home in a strange land?

She blinked and dabbed a tear. God, how'd that happen?

"You were saying?" said Cyrus Burgess.

She picked up the thread of her narration, catching her breath. She must've stopped mid-thought. "Bottom line is there are human remains here from a culture to which we may all trace our ancestors. It's...really something."

"Hmm," he said, stepping to the left to admire one sarcophagus. A man in the prime of life, chin thrust out defiantly. "What do you think, Professor Dukakis? Does he look like me?"

Dukakis forced a smile. She found the resemblance spurious, though there could be something to it in the eyes, slightly weighted down with ennui. "It does, a little."

"Imagine that. A long-ago ancestor. Dukakis, do you believe ancestral memories can be passed down through blood?"

She had not expected that question. "No. I can't say I do."

He kept studying the statue that bore his semi-likeness. "Well, I find the idea quite fascinating. Some believe the blood descendants of Atlantis still occasionally have dreams about the city in its glory. Dreams that are really memories. Perhaps it draws us to the city as well."

"I find that unlikely, sir." She grew wary, remembering an article she’d read from five years ago where former employees had distanced themselves from his more esoteric ventures, like a startup that claimed to predict the IQ of newborns based on parental DNA. It had reeked of eugenics, and this talk of bloodlines somehow reminded her of it.

He half-turned toward her. "You should keep an open mind. In theory, given time, would you be able to sequence their genome? Trace their descent to the modern day?"

"I'm an archaeologist. Not a geneticist."

"Of course. Forgive me." He stepped back, sighing in self-satisfaction. "It would be fitting, though, wouldn't it? A great-great-times-a-thousand grandson, returned to his family villa at last."

"Still thinking of bulldozing the place?" She meant it as a rebuke. The powerful were always finding new ways to insert themselves in ancient stories that had nothing to do with them.

Burgess did not reply to that remark. "Perhaps it's best if I wait outside."

Dukakis was considering following him out when Yanni said, "Wait. There's more." His flashlight splayed against two niches in the far wall, the upper one empty while the lower one contained a sarcophagus with a spectacular bust of a noblewoman.

Her face had undeniable character and was realistically, even unflatteringly carved. Dukakis remembered that morning, seeing herself in the mirror, all crow's feet and creeping jowls. The sculptor had kept those sorts of details. The seahorse earring on the noblewoman's left ear hinted at a lover's gift—or a child's. Perhaps her own whimsy.

"Astounding," she said. The noblewoman's diadem, of course, was beautiful, an architectural construction of coral and pearls. She felt as if she had stepped into the bedchamber of a regal sister lost to her ten thousand years ago.

She had, in fact, lost a sister, though not in the flooding. That was another story, an old and painful one.

She stepped closer to the bust. Maybe she'd been wrong to be too dismissive of Burgess's ideas. A silvery-gold glint sparkled in the niche above, the one that had seemed empty.

She shined the flashlight directly inside.

There gleamed a skeletal dodecahedron, formed of equal-armed pentagons sheathed in the finest orichalcum Dukakis had ever seen.

Yanni jerked back, yelling at the team members stationed outside, though Dukakis barely heard him. She was in awe, approaching it as if down a long corridor, Yanni's panic coming from a different world. She saw herself from above, no longer inside her body, and she no longer feared death. The lifespan of a human being was tiny, insignificant, civilization itself a kind of atavism forgotten at more advanced stages of evolution in which one's mind could swarm with others' in networks of orichalcum. Kleito, the queen, the woman depicted in the bust, whispered to her from the humming pentagons, her language growing more distinct.

We have banished death to a distant memory, like the folktale of a vanished race, one remembered for its long-ago terror. Yet, you languish in its grip, erecting monuments to deny your impermanency, even extinguishing other life as if it could keep you from your own dissolution. Is this what you call civilization? It is not our wish to re-awaken only for you to use our memory to justify such barbarity. We implore you, return us to the domain of Poseidon and you will share our one mind, partake in our deathlessness. This is all we ask.

Dukakis reached out to answer Kleito's call. All she had to do was touch the dodecahedron and she would join her in eternity.

Yanni wrapped his arm around her stomach and dragged her backward. Her fingers closed shut, clasping nothing but air as she fell back.

"Farah! Farah! Look into my eyes. Look at me!" His face looked blurry to her and out of focus. "Come! We have to get out!"

A piercing pain, like remembered grief, burned deep inside her. When she came to herself again, she was lying on her back outside with a wet towel around her head. Yanni and the site medic sat near her.

Yanni fanned her with the wide brim of his hat. "Thank God, you're back. Are you all right?"

"What happened?" Her head was thudding like a snare drum.

"You were mumbling in another language for about ten minutes. Then you drifted off. If you had touched the hedron, it would've been over for you."

"Really?"

"Well, you know what happened to Don."

"Gone like Don." It had been their dark little joke on site. Made the risks that much easier to live with. "Where's HazMat, then?"

"They should be here soon. But with the shelter-in-place, it seems they're delayed."

 "Can't they get an escort?"

"Apparently not." Either the danger was worse than reported or securing a hedron just wasn't a priority right now.

Everything she knew about the incident with Don she knew second-hand from ATLAS and Yanni. He’d begun speaking a strange tongue. Atlantean, most likely, though linguists were still parsing the recording. He too had touched a dodecahedron, one found in the Temple of Poseidon when the first scientists arrived on the island. He was sedated and quarantined while they tried to work out just what the hedron was. That night, he broke containment, stole the hedron, dove off the research yacht, and swam to shore.

What precisely happened after, she did not know.

His coffin was taken for airlift afterward. That much she knew.

The authorities had treated the incident as a violent psychosis resulting from the trauma of Don’s losing his whole New York City neighbourhood to the tsunami. A cautionary tale.

Now she understood Don's story in a new way. Kleito's offer and request lingered in her like a dream half-remembered on waking.

"Something happened to me in there," she told Yanni. "It felt like another mind entering me, taking over."

Yanni looked down at his hands. "We believe they used the hedrons to record the voices of loved ones after death, so they could speak to them. But there's more to them than that."

"Like what?" she said.

He hesitated. "This is going to sound strange, but I think there's a will locked inside them, or a program so finely tuned it resembles one. You had to see what happened to Don to believe it. It took over his body like a cordyceps spore takes over an ant."

“You mean he became possessed?"

"He was taken from the crypt beneath the temple. Dead from multiple gunshot wounds. I talked to one of the security guards, and he told me he'd railed about a nodal point in which the power of Atlantis was contained. Said he wanted to sink the island."

Dukakis shivered at the thought. All their work would have ended before it began. Yet, that was what Queen Kleito had demanded of her. For all she knew, it was what the rest of the Atlanteans wanted.

"That node probably controls the technology keeping the entire continent afloat," she said. "Were you ever in the crypt where they found him?"

"They bricked it up after. So no. I'm just telling you what I saw."

Dukakis frowned. Beneath the temple. Like the cave where the ROUV had been found. She doubted it had been outfitted to interface with Atlantean technology. MRE would not have had time to develop such a device. But still, the correspondence was there.

A way to lower the island. Or even raise it.

She looked across the dig site where Burgess was inspecting the mosaic. Those tiny, glimmering fragments of orichalcum.

The more she put one and two together, the less she could avoid the bitter taste of bile in her mouth. But she had to be sure. She had to know.

"Is the crypt the cave where they found the ROUV?"

Yanni hesitated. "Why would that be important?"

"For what it could expose."

Silence. Yanni looked uncomfortable. He moved his lips, but no words came out.

"Well?"

He hung his head. "Yes. It was."

I invested more into exploring this territory than you ever have, Burgess had said. He’d funded scientific surveys and feasibility studies going back decades. It made you wonder what he might have learned and kept secret all these years.

Flooded streets. Crowded shelters. Homes ripped from shore disintegrating into the ocean. The tsunami that had crashed into Manhattan. Into the port of Lisbon. Inundating Dakar.

He had no right to be here. She felt dizzy simply watching him, the emergency alarm ringing in her ear rising to a piercing pitch.

Yanni received another call. He stood and addressed the team. "The pirates have been dealt with," he announced. "We're being told to shelter in the visitor centre with the other teams. For now."

The archaeologists sighed in relief and packed up their personal belongings, leaving the equipment behind. Dukakis stood up for the first time in an hour, a little wobbly in the knees. "I'm okay," she said shooing away Yanni's arm as he steadied her. "Go on ahead. I'll follow you."

Yanni saw no problem with this. Dukakis paused and took a deep swig from her water bottle. Her eyes never left Burgess. She wanted him alone.

He pushed two tesserae together, idly, on the table where they had been placed for cleaning. He left, ahead of the last of the archaeologists, but she caught up to him just outside the circle of MRE earthmovers.

"You didn't take anything from the table, did you?" she said.

He stopped, his bodyguards watching from a few steps away. "You think I did?"

It was completely out of line to accuse a donor of theft. She didn't care. "Let me see your hand."

He showed her his open palm. She half-expected to see a tessera there, but he could have easily slipped it into his pocket with the same sleight-of-hand.

"Does that satisfy you?" he said. "I'm not a thief. Not like those pirates."

"Interesting that you would try to qualify that statement."

Burgess smiled. "Rare earths were only ever the beginning. I believe orichalcum to be the most powerful superconductor on the planet. We can use it to build quantum computers for advanced machine learning. For proof, you need only look to those hedrons. A sign of the incredible computing power the Atlanteans achieved."

"They're dangerous, you know."

"To most people," he said. "But not to a blood descendant."

That's when Dukakis saw an opportunity. History could be muddier than we like to think. More wrinkly than the pretty, flattering face we might wish to give it.

It would be a lesson Burgess would soon learn. Provided he ever recovered his mind.

The wind blowing off the ocean ceased. Went still. "You know, the tomb is unlocked," she said. "Site records can be misplaced. People might remember a dodecahedron. Then again, they might not."

He lifted an eyebrow. "Are you suggesting...?"

She winked in such a way there could be no doubt about what she meant. "I'm heading to the visitor centre and don't plan on heading back. So long as you agree to forget your claim to the villa?"

Burgess smiled. "Lovely." He brushed his chin. "You know, I heard the pirates come inland sometimes. You never know what they might be capable of stealing. Some might have even gotten this far inland."

She did not offer further words. There was no need. She couldn't prove he'd sent a rover to activate the surfacing protocol, flooding half the world to build a rare-earths mine. But if he was as rapacious as she thought he was, he would find the chance to steal a hedron from ATLAS irresistible. He would not think Don Bernard's fate could become his own.

A tingle worked down her spine as she returned to the visitor centre, wondering if she'd done the right thing. The cloying complicity stuck to her. She had to lift her feet to avoid being sucked down into it, to keep walking through it no matter how boggy. She might have achieved a measure of justice here tonight. Or vengeance, if she was being honest with herself. Vengeance for the thousands drowned. Yet, there was a chance she'd been wrong, that bloodlines did matter, and Burgess would find ways to exploit the material that lay at the very heart of Atlantis.

Only time would tell.

There was, however, no escaping her choice. She would have to learn to live with it, whether the villa yielded up new secrets, whether the powers of the world carved up the continent as it had the others, whether the ocean, in one dark night of swell and storm, finally returned Atlantis to the sea.