The Ark

AFTERWORD

In a contemporary thriller, sometimes it’s difficult to tell which of the technologies and locations are real and which are made up. If that’s the case in The Ark, I take that as a compliment because it means I’ve done my job and made them believable, at least in the context of the story. For those who are curious, I spend a little time below talking about what’s real and what’s not. Yet.

Prions do, in fact, cause mad cow disease, among others. What makes them so fascinating is that they are not alive. They are infectious agents formed by complex proteins that have mis-folded. The diseases caused by them are especially scary because they are untreatable and always fatal. So far, no prions have been discovered that affect the body’s cell integrity. The Arkon disease is obviously made up, but prions are still not well-understood. Let’s hope Arkon stays a fantasy.

Some of the technologies used by Locke and Gordian do not exist. The G-Tag system for tagging airplane crash debris, the speech-to-text translator that projects onto Aiden MacKenna’s glasses, and the 3-D mapping tool used in the Ark are fictitious, but there is nothing scientifically impossible about them. Something similar to these tools may even exist, but I haven’t found them. The IBOT wheelchair used by Miles Benson, however, is an impressive real product developed by Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway.

Most of the vehicles in The Ark are real. The Liebherr dump truck is the largest in the world, and the Tesla electric roadster is an actual car, though none of them has been crushed by a Liebherr to my knowledge. Although the Genesis Dawn cruise ship is fictitious, new megaships such as Royal Caribbean’s 220,000-ton Oasis of the Seas are rolling off the slips every year.

Polycarbonate panels do become brittle when treated with acetone, a discovery I made when reading Mark Eberhart’s excellent book, Why Things Break. I leave it to Mythbusters to verify that.

The Massive Ordinance Penetrator, or MOP, has already been tested, and the bomb is scheduled to join the Air Force’s arsenal soon.

Khor Virap is as described in the book, a beautiful monastery and revered Armenian shrine situated in the shadow of Mt. Ararat.

Noah’s Ark may indeed be a cavern filled with a vast treasure, but until it is found, it remains only a theory.