[2] John Hobson, a geneticist involved in a project concerned with manipulating DNA, awakes in his hotel room in Thames, New Zealand, after a nightmare of falling from a great height.

The next morning Hobson procures weapons and supplies, and leaves for Auckland, finding the city deserted.

Hobson hurries to an apparent smoke signal coming from the North Shore, only to find suburban homes destroyed by the impact of a jetliner.

Hobson travels to the research unit, where he worked to reactivate dormant genes in humans and animals using high-frequency sound waves and radiation.

The unit's head, Perrin, believed that awakening the dormant genes would lead to a quantum leap in evolution.

Hobson retrieves Perrin's papers, then begins journeying to Wellington, hoping to find survivors or clues as to what happened.

A search of Gisborne and the East Coast yielded nothing, and a visit to the power station at Tokaanu led him to believe the electrical grid was knocked out by a massive surge.

Hobson recalls the worm, but notes a complete lack of rats, surmising that only animal life below a certain size has escaped the Effect underground.

Hobson plans to run tests to see if he can determine the nature of the Effect and the reason why he and Api survived.

Api goes skin-diving for shellfish – he pretends to drown as a joke, and Hobson reacts unconsciously by holding the other man's head underwater.

Visiting the Beehive, Api speculates that they could be lab rats on some kind of duplicate Earth; it is they who disappeared.

6:12 relates to the Number of the Beast, 666 (6–12 = 6 and 6 plus 6) and to Revelation 6:12, with the Biblical chapter's talk of men hiding from the face of God.

Breaking open Perrin's box, Hobson realises his colleagues considered him unbalanced and kept him under surveillance.

Perrin believed that Hobson's DNA was altered due to radiation, which caused his child's autism.

The project he worked on caused the unravelling of animal DNA; only those with the dormant gene pair were spared.

Perrin charges Hobson with negligence, as the sample slides for insects and animals in the machine are blank, while the ones for plants are normal.

This event cements for Hobson his long-growing misgivings about the experiments, and what he believes are Perrin's motives for pursuing them.

In a later flashback, Hobson relates how he sabotaged the sound wave machine before going on leave to output a much higher level of infrasound than the controls would register.

The idea was to put the machine out of action temporarily, ruining Perrin's chance to use Hobson's theories.

Believing his boss insane and consumed with a desire to play God, Hobson subconsciously altered his own memory to hide this fact from himself.

This ability to edit his own recollections, and to take refuge in a kind of mental "super-reality", is purely automatic.

Recovering from the nightmare of falling, all he can remember of the dream he was ripped from, he notices that his wrist watch has stopped at 6:12.