Location: Indian Ocean, three years earlier

The earthquake whose epicenter lay deep beneath the Indian Ocean had shaken thousands, burying them beneath collapsed cities. Emergency response units from neighboring nations—prepared for the possibility of such a disaster—rushed to the ruins, fighting to pull survivors from beneath the wreckage. In the aftermath, the nations of the world mobilized, as if the whole planet had declared a campaign for Southeast Asia. Some teams searched with dogs trained to detect the scent of human bodies; others relied on thermal cameras, hoping to trace a flicker of heat and cut into the debris from the right angle.

But then the dreaded alarm sounded. A wave rose from the sea—tens of meters high. The sight alone foretold what would follow: a tsunami capable of tearing inland for hundreds of kilometers. Those who managed to reach high ground in the brief window after the alarm survived; most did not. Many met death directly—better yet, met the Angel of Death himself—while their lungs filled with the salt-thick grip of seawater.

Weeks passed.

Scientists examined which fault had ruptured, searching for both the expected consequences and the ones no one had anticipated. But the epicenter lay in waters that behaved like a locked fortress. A few hundred meters down and visibility collapsed into total blackness. At roughly fifteen hundred meters, the chances of finding any sign of plant or fish life were nearly zero.

The ocean’s message was unmistakable: Cross the boundary of darkness, and you will not return. For divers, the most lethal threat was not the darkness but the crushing pressure—an unrelenting force that could rip the body apart from within. The deepest place on Earth—the darkest, the most lethal—was the Mariana Trench. It marked the collision and fracture between the Pacific and Indian tectonic plates.

Although the epicenter of the earthquake had been far from it, calculations showed that the area worth investigating lay on an ocean floor almost as unreachable—if not quite as deep—as Mariana itself.

The nations struck by the disaster attempted to reach the epicenter beneath the sea with their own resources. They quickly realized that no human diver could reach the seabed, and even if one did, they would never return with footage alive.

Their first attempt relied on a robot they had designed themselves. But after descending several kilometers, the live feed from its camera began to distort—first with static, then with visual warping. Shortly afterwards, communication was lost entirely.

In other words, the robot had burned its last breath of energy in the dark, crushed under unimaginable pressure. Japanese and American robot designers, engineers, archaeologists, and geologists joined forces to construct a machine that could withstand immense underwater pressure. Or at least, they believed they had.

The new robot reached far greater depths than the previous one. Everything appeared to be going smoothly—until, once again, the signal vanished. Engineers with extensive experience in underwater robotics could not understand why they had failed. If the robot had been destroyed by hydrostatic pressure, there should have been a sudden burst of static and a violent collapse of the image. There were sensors all around the chassis; if the pressure exceeded the tolerance of its reinforced armor, those sensors would have sent immediate warnings to the main system. Yet the main system showed no such alerts.

Some of the engineers discovered that a virus had infiltrated the software controlling the robot—an intrusion at the command center, not a failure in the machine itself. Which raised a darker question: Who would sabotage a humanitarian scientific mission—and why? The engineers filed their findings with the institute overseeing the project. They installed a powerful antivirus system and promised that, this time, they would succeed. The final sentence of their report suggested that success was now only a matter of moments—almost guaranteed.

“The robot was almost at the ocean floor. According to the technicians in the control room, monitoring the live feed, the screen showed a fractured layer of stone stretching across the seabed. They believed the massive cracks within it were caused by the earthquake.

The same technician explained that the robot could enter through those fissures, descend beneath the stone layer, and reach the cavity underneath—the true ocean floor. But because of the virus that had infiltrated the software, none of these images were recorded.

In conclusion, installing a robust antivirus and deploying robots of the same design would almost certainly yield results. The question remaining was: who had sabotaged the system, and why? To identify the source of the attack, we would need help from the national cyber-security division.”

While the scientists waited for authorization to rebuild the robot, they received a notice that stunned them: the entire project had been terminated.

They could make no sense of it—and no reasonable explanation was offered.
Cost could not have been the excuse; they already had leftover materials and components from the previous build. Reluctantly, they had no choice but to pack up their knowledge and walk away.

The disaster-stricken nations, determined to map potential new fault lines, still needed imagery from the ocean floor. Realizing they could not acquire help from the world’s technological superpowers—Japan, America, Russia, China—they turned to the private sector.

Most robotics companies refused, intimidated by the required depth. But one firm—Millennium Advanced Technologies—declared they could do it. Officials distrusted them. The company had been established only shortly after the earthquake; it had no proven field experience. Yet, somehow, it had rapidly recruited scientists who had worked on world-renowned robotics and artificial-intelligence projects.

It was obvious they were paying extravagant salaries. The authorities assumed the company would demand enormous funding in return. But CEO Stephan Mankind needed only a single sentence to convince them:

“We don’t want your money—just give us a symbolic amount. Announce that Millennium carried out the mission. That publicity alone is worth more than any contract.
If we did this by spending millions on advertising, we’d lose. But if you declare that state-funded institutions have failed, while Millennium succeeded with ease, that would be priceless.”

The hardware, software, components, and design of the robot built by Millennium were in fact no different from the second robot—the one that had failed, or rather, lost communication due to a virus attack. Some of the scientists had noticed this and were all thinking the same question, yet none of them dared voice it aloud. After all, no one wished to antagonize a corporation as powerful and financially dominant as Millennium.

Millennium Advanced Technologies successfully delivered its robot to the ocean floor. The incoming footage confirmed what the earlier reports had described as the cause of the failure—massive rock formations, torn apart by colossal fractures, likely produced by the earthquake. Illuminated by the robot’s beams, the scientists were perhaps witnessing, for the first time in hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of years, this hidden region of the ocean floor.

Given that there existed no scientific evidence or written record suggesting that this part of the Indian Ocean had ever been terrestrial land—and considering that ancient humans could never have reached depths spanning kilometers beneath the sea—the scientists could reasonably consider themselves the first humans ever to set eyes on this place.

One defining trait shared by scientists is an immense capacity for imagination. It is this driving force that lies behind discovery and invention. Had N. Tesla—and those who followed him—not dreamed of sending voices across great distances, how could radio and television ever have come into being? Had early engineers not imagined something faster and more comfortable than horse-drawn carts, humanity might still be breeding horses today.

But every dream must contain a fragment of truth; otherwise, fantasy replaces science. Worse still, productive minds suffer from a peculiar disease: over time, they can lose the ability to distinguish imagination from reality.

To transform a dream into a hypothesis is normal. But when that hypothesis, like a ship that has lost its bearings, drifts aimlessly from one shore to another, and the dreamer stubbornly clings to it with needless arrogance—ignoring well-established facts—then fantasy becomes pathology. And if those who criticize the hypothesis are dismissed as backward clerics, there is little hope of self-reflection.

As the robot’s light swept across the massive rock formation on the ocean floor, one of the geologists attempted to put the significance of what they were seeing into words.

“Roughly sixty percent of our planet is covered by ocean. If we consider that the average ocean depth is around four kilometers, that a large portion of it reaches 1.6 kilometers, that the oceans have preserved their current volume for billions of years, and that even robots can barely descend beyond a certain depth, we can safely say that humanity is largely ignorant of the ocean floor.

The fact that we have no idea what lies even a few dozen kilometers offshore beneath the sea implies, does it not, that there may be countless things we do not know about the planet we call home?

Some scientists argue that life began with a “primordial soup” of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, phosphate and other elements in the sea, somehow ignited into forming DNA, and subsequently amino acids and proteins. Since most scientists recognize that a protein such as collagen, with its 1055 amino acids, cannot emerge from a chain of random coincidences, they reluctantly resorted to a word they dislike: miracle.

Ironically, we know more about the surface structure of Mars—millions of kilometers away—than we do about the ocean floors of Earth. And considering that most of the fossils we possess today come from places that were once underwater, or from depths suitable for fossilization, or from rocks eroded by waves, we may very well be on the verge of a major discovery.”

The geologist fell silent, sensing from the exchanged looks in the control room that the scientists already understood, even if it was outside their specific fields. The company CEO broke the silence.

“What does this massive rock mean? How could it have formed?”

“Earthquakes at sea are both more frequent and more violent. And near Japan, at the convergence of multiple tectonic plates, sediments of mud and clay accumulate as a result of these events. Over hundreds of thousands of years, heavy elements settle on top of this slurry, compressing it into stone. I believe the enormous fractures we see were formed when the recent major earthquake split the rock. The deep fissures at the end of the stone layer, aligned with the fault lines, support this hypothesis.”

“So what do you suggest?” the CEO asked.

Geologist Sam voiced what everyone else had been thinking.

“The cracks in the rock are wide enough. And from what we can see, the underside of the rock seems hollow—as if the entire formation is a crust encasing an empty space. If the robot can descend through the fissure, it may reach the cavity below. And if it gets stuck, reverse propulsion could push it back upward and free it from the rock.”

With the support of the other scientists, the idea of guiding the robot into the fissure was approved. Each scientist awaited the possibility of uncovering something mysterious and forgotten, filtered through the lens of their own discipline.

This colossal stone buried beneath kilometers of ocean could, they imagined, be the hardened sediment of a lost city like Atlantis. Some researchers, referencing age-old mysteries surrounding the pyramids, speculated that ancient extraterrestrials might have visited Earth and constructed such advanced structures. They even claimed the pyramid’s shape served a particular purpose—channeling some kind of cosmic energy—built deliberately in specific locations. Consequently, countless conspiracy theories emerged, where legend and myth dissolved into each other.

So it was not surprising that someone secretly fantasized about discovering an abandoned spacecraft beneath the stone crust. Another imagined confronting a demonic, metaphysical creature: red-eyed, black-bodied, with pointed ears and a triangular jaw, ruling this hidden abyss as its fortress.

The robot moved two or three meters through the fissure before the stone shell abruptly ended. Beyond it was nothing but a vast, consuming darkness. Everyone remembered what they had secretly hoped to find, and each person smiled inwardly at their own naïveté. With sideways glances, they silently communicated the same conclusion: there was nothing here for them.

Just as that sense of disappointment settled, a voice from the technical staff cut through the room:
“Look there—something is rising upward from the ground.”

The engineer entered the necessary commands, steering the robot toward the object. It was clearly solid, yet something about it didn’t resemble rock. Under the harsh, artificial light, they realized it was made of some other material entirely, though they could not yet determine what. The first hypothesis whispered through their minds was that it might be the column of an ancient city.

But whatever it was, it did not stand upright—its body angled upward, narrowing as it rose. The robot approached the tapered end, and in the background another thick, slanted shaft came into view. When the robot moved toward it, they found a third behind it, then a fourth, then dozens—stretching in a fractured line for seventy to eighty meters.

Another detail emerged: the further along they went, the shorter the structures became. The first columns were nearly three meters long, shrinking to one meter, then half a meter, then to tiny, stump-like remnants until they vanished entirely.

At the point where the tapered columns ended, the robot descended low and the camera caught something significant. Lying parallel to the ground was a long, straight structure—pillar or beam—marked with evenly spaced cavities. The robot could illuminate only nine or ten meters ahead, but in that narrow band of light a stone wall appeared. The crew realized they had reached the boundary of an enclosed chamber.

They reversed direction, tracing back along the path they had come. Only now did the pattern become obvious: all of the angled, narrowing columns fused into the long, horizontal beam embedded with cavities.

Watching the footage, the team’s paleontologist tilted his head, then burst into laughter.
The others turned toward him, their expressions sharp and cold, offended by the levity in the middle of a discovery. But the man continued laughing—uncontrolled, almost manic.

The company CEO finally asked,
“Professor, why are you laughing? We're in the middle of something significant. We’re trying to understand what we’re looking at.”

The man raised both hands, motioning for patience as the last of his laughter tapered off. Then he said,
“There’s nothing mysterious here. What you’re staring at are fossilized bones—massive ones. And they belong to a species you already know well. The great whale, the kind made famous in fiction—Moby Dick. According to maritime logs, the last sightings of this giant were in the late nineteenth century. We assumed they were extinct. A few fossil remains have been found in various places.”

“So you’re saying we’re inside the fossilized remains of one of these colossal whales?”

“Exactly,” the paleontologist replied, and continued.

“The structures we saw earlier—those slanted, tapering columns—are fossilized ribs,” the paleontologist explained. “And the thick, horizontal element on the ground is the spine. As far as we can tell, we’re looking at the tail region of a giant whale. The head is absent. It’s rare to find fossilized remains of extinct species with their skeletal integrity preserved. Discovering the ribs and vertebrae intact like this makes the find exceptionally significant.”

The CEO seemed convinced—or at least pretended to be. When the time came to reveal this discovery to the world, he would present it as the fossil of Moby Dick.

The robot continued forward, moving between the ribs that arched over the vertebrae. The paleontologist noticed large cracks along parts of the spine and several ribs snapped off and lying on the ground. He assumed the creature either suffered severe blows before death or that the bones shattered when the carcass struck the ocean floor. But one detail disturbed him: the shattered fragments scattered all around.

If the whale’s body had broken apart after death, the impact would likely have caused a single break, maybe two. The soft tissue would have decayed, and the broken pieces would have simply fallen where they lay. But here, countless fragments were spread out in every direction—like a stone that had hit the ground and exploded outward.

The paleontologist was about to voice this contradiction when something made him freeze. Resting on top of the whale’s spine was a rounded object. Breath caught in every throat.
The crew stared, stunned, as the robot’s camera illuminated what looked unmistakably like a skull.

Because the robot was approaching from above, the face could not be seen clearly. But a few meters on, the shoulders and arms became visible. The creature had died lying on its side, and the surrounding ribcage had kept its posture intact for ages. Now the entire body lay revealed beneath the robot’s light.

The scientists estimated the fossil to be around a meter and a half tall. Its curved spine suggested a tailless primate, yet the long femur and straight foot bones pointed toward a human form.

All of them felt the same unspoken whisper pass through the room.

They were staring at something half-human, half-ape.

The missing link.

And nothing was missing.

The robot moved directly in front of the face. Everything was visible now. The mouth was open, revealing teeth, though the molars were obscured and could not be meaningfully analyzed. Still, the cranial vault—the swelling where the brain would have been—suggested something alarmingly human.

The scientists each murmured observations about the fossil. Half of the team openly declared that what they saw was clearly a transitional species, while others remained silent, and a few opted for vague, evasive sentences—as if circling the truth without touching it. Their sidelong glances toward the CEO made it obvious: they were afraid to say what they truly thought.

None of them knew the real owner of Millennium Corporation, yet there was one fact they were absolutely certain of: the financial cartels who fiercely defended evolution would never permit a company that supported the idea of creation to make a discovery of this magnitude, especially in such a short time.

Money and authority were in their hands. No nation or institution would dare oppose them. They dictated what was to be believed, and those who had “failed to evolve”—the slaves of the old world and the obedient subjects of the new economy—bowed to their orders.
They knew perfectly well what would happen to them otherwise: the credit lines would close, and with them, everything they relied on would collapse.

But there was always a minority who refused to bow—idealists who, despite every form of torture, slander, and humiliation thrown at them by subcontracted agents, would not abandon the higher values and universal moral principles they believed in.

The masters of money and power couldn’t even find a vocabulary to define such people.
According to evolutionary logic, human beings would do anything to survive or dominate.
These idealists were neither animals—recklessly driven by sex—nor creatures ruled by primitive instincts that made a mother push her offspring away.Nor did they believe in metaphysical beings, so they could not be called angels.

Yet, in secret, some had a name for them—a name they would never dare speak aloud:

"A species between human and angel."

The CEO cleared his throat, eager to recapture attention, and said:

“The fossil’s size—somewhere between human and ape, or more precisely between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens—the curvature of the spine resembling an ape, while the legs and feet clearly resemble a human… these features suggest it could be a transitional form.
But…”

According to the men on the team, everything the CEO had said up to that point was predictable. The real tension lay in what would follow after the word but. None of them had the slightest idea how that sentence would end.

“But I still believe this fossil belongs to a human,” he continued.
“A person’s spine can become curved from heavy labor. We all know many people of short stature—dwarfs, as we commonly call them. We don’t classify every short human being as a transitional species. And beyond that, there is something here you have failed to notice—something that proves a story from the holy books, a story long deemed unbelievable, is in fact real.”

The team of scientists was stunned.
The CEO wasn’t merely distancing himself from evolutionary theory—he was openly defending divine revelation. Yet none of them understood what “unbelievable story” he was referring to.

“In the Qur’an, and likewise in the Torah, there is a similar narrative,” he said.
“The Prophet Yunus—known in the West as Jonah—called his people to believe in God and serve Him. Years passed, yet they neither listened nor changed. When Jonah saw that he could neither reach their minds nor their hearts, he prayed for their destruction. God accepted his prayer, but still granted them a brief period of grace—one last chance to repent. Jonah warned them: signs of destruction would appear, and after three days, their people would perish.”

“As the final three days approached, his people remained arrogant, unjust, indifferent. Jonah, unable to bear their heedlessness, abandoned them. But when the signs finally appeared, the people panicked, repented collectively, and begged for mercy. And history records them as the first—and only—community ever to be spared after the signs of annihilation had already begun.”

The CEO continued, under the bewildered stares of the scientists:

“Because Jonah left without permission, he was punished. The ship he boarded fell into violent turbulence, the captain declared that someone aboard was the cause of misfortune, and they would draw lots to determine who. The lot fell to Jonah three times. He was thrown into the sea, and swallowed by a great fish. Inside its belly, he realized his mistake, repented, and the creature later cast him out onto an island.”

The CEO explained that, according to scripture, Prophet Jonah survived the belly of the great creature and emerged alive—but the fossil before them told a different story:
this human had not escaped from the belly of the monstrous whale.

He paused, preparing to explain why.

“Yes, this fossil is not the remains of the Prophet Jonah. But this image proves that the story of Jonah was not, as some claim, an impossible myth or a poetic legend. It happened. And what is more—near this location lies an island known as ‘Jonah’s Island,’ whose features match the very description found in the holy text: the island onto which the great whale cast Jonah, where abundant gourds grew.”

“Environmental groups often travel to Jonah’s Island,” he continued, “and attempt to save beached whales there. Curiously, the whales that wash ashore on that island are significantly larger than those found anywhere else in the world. They say the dolphins—‘whales,’ to be precise—that drift to this island are several times larger than the dolphins known to inhabit other seas.

In other words, even if modern science claims that the great species of Moby Dick is extinct—and therefore we cannot expect to find such titans stranded on its shores—the fact remains: Jonah’s Island continues, for some unknown reason, to attract the largest whales still living on Earth. Taking all of this into account, we may say that science, in its own way, confirms the sacred narrative.”

The team listened with their mouths half-open. They had not expected the CEO to defend creation so fiercely, so confidently. If anyone else had spoken like this, they would have laughed, dismissed him as a fanatic, or told him to stop joking. But the last sentence they heard from Stephan Mankind proved their bewilderment was justified.

“Put simply,” he said, “God won. Science lost.”