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Korum smiled at her indulgently. “Of course.” He motioned to the waiter and relayed her order. “And I will have the watercress jicama salad and the shiitake parsnip ravioli in cashew cream. We’ll also get a bottle of Dom Perignon.”
Mia looked at him in fascination. She hadn’t known that Ks consumed alcohol. In fact, there was so much that she – and the public in general – didn’t know about the invaders who now lived alongside them. It dawned on Mia that she had the perfect opportunity to learn sitting across her at the table.
Feeling slightly reckless, she decided to start with the question that had been bothering her ever since their first meeting. “Is it true that you drink human blood?”
Korum’s eyebrows shot up on his forehead, and he nearly choked on his drink. “You don’t pull any punches, do you?” A big grin breaking out on his face, he asked, “Are you asking if we have to drink human blood, or if we do it anyway?”
Mia swallowed. She was suddenly far from sure this was the best line of questioning. “I guess both.”
“Well, let me set your mind at ease . . . We no longer require blood for survival.”
“But you did before?” Mia’s eyes widened in shock.
“Originally, when we first evolved into our current form, we needed to consume significant amounts of blood from a group of primates that had certain genetic similarities to us. It was a deficiency in our DNA that made us vulnerable and tied our existence to another species. We have since corrected this defect.”
“So it’s true? There were humans on your planet?” Mia was staring at him open-mouthed.
“They weren’t exactly human. Their blood, however, had the same hemoglobin characteristics as yours.”
“What happened to them? Are they still around?”
“No, they are now extinct.”
“I don’t understand,” Mia said slowly, trying to make sense of what she’d learned thus far. “If you needed them to survive,
how and when did they go extinct? Was that before or after you . . . um . . . fixed your defect?”
“It happened long before then. We succeeded in developing a synthetic substance before the last of their kind disappeared, and it enabled us to survive their demise. They were an endangered species for millions of years. It was partially our fault for hunting them, but a lot of it had to do with their own low birth rate and short lifespan. Just like you, they had a weak immune system, and a plague nearly wiped them out. That’s when we began to work on alternative routes of survival for our species – synthetic hemoglobin substitutes, experimentation with our own DNA, and attempting to develop a comparable species both on Krina and on other planets.”
A lightbulb went off in Mia’s brain. “Is that why you planted life here on Earth? Is that how humans came to be – you needed a comparable species?”
“More or less. It was a shot in the dark, with minuscule odds of success. We disseminated our DNA as far as our then-primitive technology could reach. We didn’t know which planets and where would be hospitable to life, much less bear any similarities to Krina, so we blindly sent billions of drones to planets that are located in what you now call the Goldilocks Zones.”
“Goldilocks Zones?”
“Yes, these are also called the habitable zones – regions in the universe around various stars that potentially have the right atmospheric pressure to maintain liquid water on the surface. Based on our knowledge, those are the only places where life similar to Krina’s could arise.”
Mia nodded, now remembering learning about that in high school.
Satisfied that she was following along, he continued his explanation. “One of the drones reached Earth, and the first simple organisms succeeded in surviving here. Of course, we didn’t know that at the time. It wasn’t until some six hundred million years ago that we reached this part of the galaxy and found Earth.”
“Right before the Cambrian explosion began?” asked Mia, goosebumps breaking out on her arms. It was public knowledge now that the Ks had influenced evolution on Earth to a fairly significant degree, the timing of their initial arrival coinciding with the previously puzzling appearance of many new and complex life forms during the early Cambrian period. But their motives for planting life on Earth and later manipulating it had remained a mystery, and it was incredible to hear him speak about it so nonchalantly, revealing so much to her over dinner.
“Exactly. We have occasionally stepped in to guide your evolution, particularly when it threatened to drastically diverge from ours – such as when the dinosaurs had become a dominant life form –”
“But I thought the dinosaurs had been killed by an asteroid?”
“They were. But we could have easily deflected that strike. Instead, we simply ensured that the necessary life forms, such as the early versions of mammals, survived.”
Mia stared at him open-mouthed as he continued the story.
“When the first primate appeared here, it was a tremendous achievement for us because its blood carried the hemoglobin. However, we no longer needed it by then because we’d recently had the breakthrough that allowed us to manipulate our own DNA without adverse consequences.”
He paused when the salads were served, and continued speaking between bites of his watercress. “At that point, Earth and its primate species had become the grandest scientific experiment in the history of the known universe. The challenge for us became to see whether we could nudge along evolution just enough to see another intelligent species emerge.”
Mia felt chills going down her spine as she listened to the story of human origins told by an alien from the gazillion-year-old civilization that had essentially played God. An alien who was munching on his salad at the same time, as though discussing nothing more important than the weather.
“You see,” he continued, “the primates on Krina were of the same intelligence level as your chimpanzees, and few of us thought that a species as short-lived as yours could develop a truly sophisticated intellect. But we persisted, occasionally stepping in with genetic modifications to make you look more like us, and the result has surpassed all our expectations. While you share a lot of the characteristics of the Krinian primates – presence of the hemoglobin, a relatively weak immune system, and a short lifespan – you have a much higher birth rate and an intelligence that’s nearly comparable to ours. Your evolution rate is also much faster than ours – mostly due to that higher birth rate. The transition from primitive primates to intelligent beings took you only a couple of million years, while it took us nearly a billion.”
