"The Third Humanity" by Bernard Werber, summary

The planet Gaia gains consciousness and tires of the parasitism of its mindless inhabitants, who suck up its oil and detonate its depths with nuclear weapons. Earth requires a protector species capable of stopping future meteorites, but humanity is maturing too slowly. In the Antarctic depths, an expedition discovers the skeletons of seventeen-meter-tall humans who lived eight thousand years ago and bas-reliefs chronicling the catastrophes of an extinct Titan civilization. Professor Charles Wells dies in a sudden ice crack, having managed to hide his notebook. In Paris, his son David Wells defends his hypothesis about the decline of biological species at the Sorbonne, and endocrinologist Aurora Kammerer proposes a plan for civilization’s survival through female hormones. The author wrote the manuscript of the novel over the course of two years and was published in 2012.

The book opens the series of the same name, “The Third Humanity,” which later included the novels “Micro-People” (volume two) and “The Voice of the Earth” (volume three).

Secrets of Past Species

At the Sorbonne’s "Evolution" competition, the jury selects three finalists: David, Aurora, and artificial longevity advocate Gérard Saldman. Upon receiving news of his father’s death, David goes to the municipal morgue, where Charles’s body is removed from a transparent cube of compressed ice. Along with the paleontologist’s personal belongings, the young biologist takes a waterproof bag containing a travel notebook. From his father’s notes and the tomes of his great-grandfather, Edmond Wells, a fact emerges: the giants of the past are destined to be replaced by a miniature intelligent species.

Aurora finds her biological father, Professor Thomas Pellegrin, but the conversation leaves only bitterness. The scientist leaves for Turkey to find a tribe of bee-women who have developed resistance to radiation in abandoned nuclear wastelands. Following the trail of ancient Themyscira, she discovers Amazons led by the warrior Penthesilea in caves. After undergoing a brutal rite of bee stings and ritual ablution, Aurora takes blood samples to analyze estrogen mutations.

David arrives in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His Bantu guide dies in the jaws of army ants, and the Frenchman is rescued by Nuxxia, a researcher from the Twa pygmy tribe. In the wilderness, the sorcerer Mayempa feeds his guest a mixture of crushed roots, vines, and the brain of a butchered male gorilla. The ritual opens a corridor of past incarnations for David: in his first life, he was the Atlantean Ash-Kol-Lein, studying human stature reduction.

Seven Paths and a Laboratory in the Forest

At the Élysée Palace, military intelligence colonel Natalia Ovitz outlines seven future developments for Earth to President Stanislas Drouhin. Among them are wild capitalist growth, Iran’s nuclear fundamentalism, engineer Francis Friedman’s intelligent androids, billionaire Sylvian Timsit’s space ark, and biological mutations. Ovitz insists on secretly supporting projects to reduce height and feminize the Earth.

Saldman wins the Sorbonne competition. Left without government funding, Aurora dances at the "Apocalypse Now" nightclub, and David sleeps in an old car after a fight with his mother. Intelligence recruits both biologists to the secret "Hobbit" program, disguised as an agricultural institute in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Nuxxia and Penthesilea, rescued from conflict zones, join the research team.

Lieutenant Martin Janicot, Natalia’s husband, leads the scientists to the underground levels of the complex. Experiments with primates are reaching a dead end: female Uistiti monkeys are aborting hybrid embryos early in pregnancy. Under the influence of a repeated trance, David recalls an ancient Atlantean experiment: embryos must be induced to lay eggs using a magnetic field. The team studies the Australian platypus, deciphers its genes, and achieves the first viable human egg with a hard shell.

The birth of Emma and the coming of the plague

A tiny seven-and-a-half-centimeter-tall girl emerges from the eggshell of MC-121. The newborn is named Emma, classifying her as a member of the Homo metamorphosis species. She matures ten times faster than normal children: in a couple of months, she reaches the age of a two-year-old, maintaining her body proportions and high intelligence.

In a Cairo hotel, pathologist Michel Vidal drinks whiskey with Iranian General Gulbahar Moqaddam. The Frenchman coughs heavily, releasing droplets of sputum containing an ancient virus from the ice cave of Lake Vostok. After infecting the clinic’s guests, he dies right in the doctor’s office. Airplane passengers spread the airborne infection to every continent.

The Egyptian flu pandemic begins. The plague decimates entire cities, and the death toll exceeds one hundred million. In France, supplies collapse, looters storm warehouses, and gangs roam the streets wearing plastic bags instead of spacesuits. Defying Natalia’s isolation orders, David and Aurora break through to Paris. David’s mother dies in his arms. The young scientists burn their contaminated clothing and car at the institute gates, undergo decontamination, and return to the incubators.

The Fontainebleau base holds the line against armed marauders waving a white flag. During the battle, Emma accidentally touches the corpse of an infected bandit, but her blood immediately produces antibodies. The first thousand eggs hatch in incubators: nine hundred females and one hundred males. When canned food supplies run low, the researchers eat the museum’s dwarf animals. Humanity is saved by a sudden, freezing winter, which destroys the virus strain but claims two billion lives.

The Lord of the Rings

The surviving Emchi build a Microland within a sealed terrarium. Riots break out in the confined space: after accidentally intoxicating themselves with alcohol, the micromen engage in brawls and cannibalism. Queen Emma the First is killed by the fanatic Emma-666. To curb their aggression, the researchers declare themselves gods, coronate Emma the Second, and punish the rebel with a rat-infested cell. Reformed, Emma-666 becomes the Supreme Pope of the Cult of the Great Creators.

Iranian leadership is preparing to launch a nuclear strike on Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, using the Eternal Vengeance-2 nuclear missile. French intelligence launches Operation Lord of the Rings: eight hundred microgirls in Israeli flying discs are dropped off at Iran’s missile silos. Emma-109 penetrates the bunker’s ventilation system, evades the claws of a guard cat, and mines the command post. The launched nuclear missile loses control and crashes into the sand, blowing up the missile launchers.

Political bargaining

Two female saboteurs fail to return to the submarine. Emma-109’s apparatus is damaged by a jumping dolphin, and the saucer washes up on a beach in Cyprus. The girl is captured on camera by a CNN journalist and declares herself the savior of Ursa Major.

At an emergency session of the UN, Secretary-General Avinashi Singh receives the tiny guest at the podium. Iranian President Jaffar ruins the occasion. He brings a cage containing the captive and tortured Emma-523 into the hall, presenting fragments of a disk containing Hebrew-language microchips. Emma-109 picks the cage’s lock and escapes with her wounded sister into the Manhattan sewers.

Hiding in the sewers, the fugitive fends off hordes of rats with a knitting needle. Emma-523 dies from her wounds, and her friend buries her under the trees of Central Park.

Meanwhile, President Drouin saves the day: he proposes to the Japanese leadership that twenty-four microgirls be sent to the tsunami-ravaged Fukushima nuclear power plant. After traversing deadly zones of radioactive steam, the tiny rescuers, at the cost of their own lives, manually turn a broken coolant valve.

Having prevented a planetary catastrophe, the micro-humans prove their right to exist. The President announces the creation of a private company, Pygmy Prod, and fifteen meters beneath the streets of New York, an armed Emma-109 begins preparations to save the world.