The Neanderthal Codex
Status: In Development / Medium: Screenplay + Novel / Category: Adult > Humor / Timeline: Feb - May 2025 / Job Board: Active
“When a monk discovers plans for a time machine in an ancient codex and is sent by the Pope to 300,000 BC to recruit Neanderthals for the Crusades, he must choose between his faith and a truth that may destroy it.”
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He found it buried under a stone slab in the floor of an ancient monastery that stood beside an oxbow bend in an endless river. The manuscript was not unlike the many other bound vellum tomes that filled the library’s shelves, waiting to be illuminated. But this was no ordinary manuscript. Within its pages were the designs for a most curious machine, as well as a phrase book of translations from an unknown language into Latin. There were faint scribbles in the margins, and cut into its pages was a rock as blue as a robin’s egg. Because he was the curious sort, Brother Ignatius “Iggy” Agapitus, who liked to tinker and had filled the monastery grounds with ornate bird houses of his own design, followed the instructions and built the machine in the work shed in the courtyard, which took the better part of that year, 1519. The other brothers assumed the project was to be a large bird house, albeit one somehow powered by the monastery’s waterwheel. Their vow of silence was enough to keep them from asking too many questions. When it was complete, Iggy sat inside with the book on his lap and wondered just what it was he had built. He placed the blue rock in its place. Suddenly the machine spurred and rattled and hiccuped and hummed and ...
ejected him out into a grassy steppe where he was surrounded by a group of strange-looking men in animal skins holding spears which they pointed in his direction. He opened the book, and after some pained consideration, broke his vow of silence and read the translation for “Hello”. The men, surprised but still fearful, lowered their spears slightly. Brother Iggy read the next translated passage in the book. “I have come from Catalunya.” At this, the men fell to the ground. “Hmm,” thought Iggy. He paged through the phrase book, which was titled “Latin to Neanderthal.” He wondered what Neanderthal meant. “I’ll be right back,” he said. He stepped inside the machine, which whirred and hiccuped and belched and ejected him back into the work shed in the courtyard of the monastery.
Iggy was troubled by the machine and went to see the Dean. The Dean was troubled by the machine and showed it to the Prior. The Prior was troubled by the machine and asked for an audience with the Abbot. The Abbot was nonplussed. He had his sights set on an Arch Deaconship, and wasn’t looking for trouble. But trouble there was, because according to the book, which came to be known as the Neanderthal Codex, the machine was a portal to the year 259,321 BC. The Abbot was nonplussed because, as everyone knew, the world was only 10,000 years old, tops. You could work out the math from the Bible. There were no people before that. There was, in fact, nothing at all before that. End of story. So he sent Brother Iggy back into the machine, along with the trusted but expendable Prior, just to double check. After a brief round trip, the Prior reported back that it was all true. Wherever they’d gone, it was quite muggy, but populated with souls that could possibly be saved, if only there were a Bible that could be translated into Neanderthal and a willing missionary. The Abbot considered this. Maybe this was his ticket to Arch Deacon afterall. And after that, who knows? Saving souls was a currency that might just take him to Rome. So Brother Iggy was given the honor of translating a copy of the Bible into Neanderthal. Meanwhile, the Prior, who wasn’t one for keeping secrets, wrote the Bishop and spilled the beans. The Bishop promptly alerted Pope Leo X, who summoned Iggy, the Abbot, the Prior and the machine to Rome, where he convened a Secret Synod to discuss the Neanderthal Codex.
Soon an ecclesiastical crisis emerged. The Abbot’s plan was debated. Do these Neaderthals even have souls to be saved? How could they, when the Bible said nothing about them. They poured over Iggy’s drawings of the animal-skin-clad creatures. Their heads were flat, their limbs were curved, and they had no waists. They were human-like, but were they human? Things were getting complicated. The debate grew heated. The Cardinal argued the machine was an illusion and cursed with black magic. The Bishop argued for the facts, even if they were troubling. The Prior and the Abbot began to have misgivings and weren’t sure what to think. As for the Pope, he had been born a Medici, which meant he thought about money. And what he knew most of all was that he didn’t have enough of it. The papal finances were in disarray. There was some kind of reformation in the works and combating it was going to get expensive. He began to see the outline of a money-making plan involving value-priced soldiers for a new crusade. And to top it off, if he played his cards right, he might even get credit for a second miracle, since the first one was self-proclaimed and a little shaky, as it involved the Vatican City football team’s “miraculous” comeback from a 2-0 halftime deficit against Florence in the Cortile del Belvedere.
It didn’t seem strictly necessary to convert the Neanderthals in order to recruit them into a super-army, but Pope Leo figured it couldn’t hurt. Yet the question of whether or not they had souls to convert continued to perplex the Synod and Pope Leo decided to sleep on it. As the weary clergy retired to their chambers, the Prior was plagued by his conscience and wandered down into the necropolis below St. Peter’s Basilica where the machine was hidden in the catacombs for safekeeping. He thought about smashing the machine to bits, but soon arrived at a simpler plan. He took the blue stone from the control panel inside and carried it with him as he walked the Vatican grounds in the moonlight, searching his own soul. When he arrived at the Ponte Sant'Angelo, he heard a low, booming voice command him to throw it into the Tiber River and be done with the whole business, which he did.
The next morning, as the Prior fought the urge to confess, the Pope proposed an answer the question of Neanderthal souls. He proposed a test. “Everyone knows the soul weighs the same as a robin’s egg,” he said. The assembly looked collectively from side to side, and then nodded slowly in agreement. “Which is why I wear this ring.” He slipped off his ring, which held a stone the size of a robins egg and equally blue.
The Prior sank in his chair as he gazed on the ring, knowing it to be the exact dimensions of the stone he had cast into the Tiber the night before. The same voice that had told him to cast the stone into the river muttered “Hmmmm...” as the Prior rubbed the back of his head. And then Pope Leo stood from his chair and said “Brother Ignatius, go and weigh a Neanderthal just before and right after one dies, and record the weights. If, after death, the body weighs less by my robin’s egg ring, we will have our answer.” The source of Pope Leo’s knowledge on this matter was murky, but he said it with authority, and he was after all, infallible, so everyone continued to nod and murmur in agreement.
Iggy was conflicted. He didn’t like this plan any more than the Prior. But he was overcome with curiosity, beguiled by history, and he was, after all, given an order by the Pope. And so down into the catacombs and back into the machine he went. When he discovered the blue stone was missing, he searched his pockets and in the darkness, took Pope Leo’s ring, shrugged his shoulders, and inserted into the control panel. The machine whirred and buzzed and hiccuped and burped and carried him away again into the past.
And that was the last anyone ever saw of Brother Ignatius Agapitus. Anyone in 1519, anyway. In the course of carrying out his mission, Iggy’s better angels prevailed and conspired with him to foil the Pope’s plan. And when they did, he simply decided to live in the past, spending the rest of his days among his adopted tribe of Neanderthals, where despite his protests, he was worshipped as a god. It wasn’t a bad life really, if you were already a Neanderthal. But as creature comforts go, the monastery was better. When Iggy happened to mention this once, they built him a great temple of stone where he prayed and preached and taught Latin and hosted regular dinner parties. He became fluent in Neanderthal, but with a heavy Basque accent. Curiously, he never did record the result of his experiment with the robin’s egg, if he ever conducted it. He did, however, add notes of his own to the pages of the Codex.
It was some years later that Iggy died peacefully in his sleep. He lived to a ripe old age, and had no regrets. He was buried in a great Neanderthal burial ceremony, along with his strange book, beneath a large rock slab in his great stone temple, which sat beside an oxbow bend in an endless river. -Arthur Trope
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The Neanderthal Codex
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