The Song of the Jubilee (The Phantom of the Earth Book 1) (2 page)

Source: Department of Communications and Commonwealth Relations.

Solar System’s Population

*Years based on a combination of the Gregorian and Livellan calendars.

**Data from 368 AR to 370 AR is estimated.

Source: Campanian Consortium.

Solar System’s Population: Before and After Reassortment

*Years based on the Livellan calendar.

**Data from 368 AR to 370 AR is estimated.

Source: Campanian Consortium.

Solar System’s Population: After Reassortment

*Years based on the Livellan calendar.

**Data from 368 AR to 370 AR is estimated.

Source: Campanian Consortium.

For clearer versions of the maps, settings, and charts, please visit:
http://www.raedenzen.com/

On a late summer day in South Florida, 1969, I became the world’s youngest scientist.

Papa lounged on a hammock between four palm trees, his face tanned, his black hair splashed with gray, a book open on his belly. I slid the porch door open with my piglet fingers. The heat and humidity and citrus smells struck me.

I slunk down the wooden steps, waded through our crabgrass lawn, and clutched a strand of rope. “What’re you doing, Papa?”

“I’m resting for a bit,” Papa said. “It’s reading time now, Nicky.”

I craned my head over the hammock without disrupting his balance. “The Anthermometer Strelane.”

“The Andromeda Strain,” Papa corrected. He closed the book and set it on his chest.

“Do you like it?”

“I do.”

“Can you read it to me?”

“Nicolas,” he said, now wearing that grin of his—calm, soothing, inviting, with a hint of caution. “This isn’t for boys.”

“But
you’re
reading it.”

Papa laughed. “It isn’t for little boys!”

“Well that’s good,” I said, “because I’m a big boy now.” I was, after all, in the third grade. I slid to Papa’s side. I didn’t think he’d scold me for interest in a book, especially one he’d talked about with Mom all day.

“All right, big boy,” he said, “I’ll read some of it to you.” Papa skipped over the novel’s disturbing and gruesome sections. I listened that night and for the next three weeks each evening before bedtime.

A month later, Mrs. Henninger asked our third-grade class what we’d like to be when we grew up. Mark Masterson gloated how he’d be the next Tom Seaver. Pamela Zowoloski assured us she’d turn into Audrey Hepburn, while my best friend, Arnold Lilley, dreamed of being the next Neil Armstrong. I shouted that I wanted to study the “Anthermometer Strelane,” though I had no idea how far I would take the declaration, all the way to a doctorate degree and the exciting world of scientific research.

My expertise in molecular biology led a young novelist named Raeden Zen to contact me about his new project. He said he wanted to create a futuristic, believable, memorable world. He inquired about research he’d conducted over the years on the budding field of synthetic biology. He told me about the May 2010 so-called breakthrough by the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), which created a new chromosome from artificial DNA, then transferred it to an empty cell and watched the cell multiply. (The ability to reproduce or replicate is considered a basic definition of life.)

The JCVI team utilized species of
Mycoplasma
bacteria,
M. mycoides
and
M. capricolum
, to conduct the experiment. They chemically synthesized an
M. mycoides
genome, oligo by oligo—the
M. mycoides
genome is 1.08 million base pairs of DNA in length, as compared to the human genome’s three billion some base pairs—and they called the synthetic genome
M. mycoides
JCVI-syn1.0. Next, they transplanted the synthetic genome into an
M. capricolum
recipient cell. According to the JCVI, “There was a complete replacement of the
M. capricolum
genome by our synthetic genome during the transplant process. … The cells with only the synthetic genome are self-replicating and capable of logarithmic growth. … This work provides a proof of principle for producing cells based on genome sequences designed in the computer. DNA sequencing of a cellular genome allows storage of the genetic instructions of life as a digital file.”

I told Mr. Zen that we have entered a new stage of evolution—the era of synthetic biology, or synbio, the writing of life: yesterday’s science fiction, today’s reality. The achievement of the JCVI provided synbio with its most visible success, important for fostering interest, development, and funding in a new industry. Yet this breakthrough represented only the nub of synbio’s capacities, which include the manipulation and rewiring of an organism’s internal workings rather than replicating a known genome.

What we’ve learned over the last few decades is that the letters of the genetic alphabet—
A
(adenine),
C
(cytosine),
G
(guanine), and
T
(thymine)—can be transformed into the ones and zeros of binary code, allowing for the easy electronic manipulation of genetic information. As a result, biology is morphing into an information-based science and advancing exponentially. The fundamental tools of genetic engineering designed for the manipulation of life are radically falling in cost and rising in power. From 1970 to 2004, the sequencing field advanced at a one-point-five-fold rate annually; it accelerated to a tenfold rate from 2004 to 2014. Andrew Hessel, cochair of the Biotechnology and Bioinformatics track at the Singularity University located at the NASA research campus, speculated about the budding field of synbio. “This is one of the most powerful technologies in the world,” he noted. “I advocate that cells are living computers, and DNA is a programming language. … It is growing fast. It will grow faster than computer technologies. … I want to see life programmed to solve global challenges so that humanity can achieve a sustainable relationship within the biosphere.”

Synbio makes DNA design, synthesis, and assembly easier. Presently, we’re moving from adjusting existing genetic designs to constructing new ones. Synbio labs the world over seek to create species that have never before been part of the Earth. One day, synthetic organisms will spawn economically competitive fuels, vaccinate against disease, and cleanse the planet, among other benefits.

The common counterpoint views to development of synbio technology are (1) humans shouldn’t emulate God, and (2) accidents happen, even in labs with stringent safety standards, and if a unique organism escaped containment, what was a harmless laboratory species could become an ecological catastrophe. Mr. Zen focused on the latter argument in the context of the inevitable depletion of the Earth’s extractable natural resources, setting a containment breach beneath the Earth’s surface. For this reason and others, The Phantom of the Earth struck me as an ambitious modernization of both Verne’s
Journey to the Center of the Earth
and Heinlein’s
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,
and while Mr. Zen took creative liberty with his application of synbio tech, I found his literary vision of a futuristic Beimeni, the mythical subterranean land of the fountain of youth—undone and redone with synbio at its core—fascinating and frightening.

May 2014

The Second Hundred Years’ War had concluded. So had human dominance of the Earth’s surface.

The Earth has orbited the sun 368 times since then, replenishing much of the renewable surface.

Nonrenewable resources, plentiful for most of the Earth’s history, had disappeared prior to the war, prior to the Reassortment Atmospheric Anomaly, which wiped humanity from the surface.

No one truly knows how the Reassortment Strain escaped containment, or what its intended purpose was. A zeropoint attack upon the Western Hegemony’s synbio laboratories and defense network destroyed all records of the strain, while 340 scientists on the team that designed it were stored in stasis at a temperature near absolute zero. Now all but one of those scientists, Dr. Kole Shrader, are dead.

The Reassortment Strain still thrives in the Earth’s atmosphere and bedrock. It’s a synthetic organism that was designed with the four traditional bases of DNA and their mirrored versions; it contains eight nucleotides and thirty-nine amino acids, and functions in ways unpredicted by science. After it escaped containment, it learned to live off sunlight and nitrogen and spread rapidly over the Earth’s atmosphere and in its soil. It recodes portions of its genome every few minutes and does so with many more combinations given its characteristic of chirality. It only kills humans.

Reassortment was born out of the Second Hundred Years’ War. Battles fought throughout the solar system for possession of asteroids and minor planets, which held the last vestiges of nonrenewable resources, had come to their inevitable end—the Reassortment Atmospheric Anomaly and Death Wave. The Reassortment Strain killed more efficiently than any transhuman weapon, silencing more than twenty-five billion people in less than one year.

The survivors, who had lived and worked beneath Antelope Canyon in the self-sustained and contained Livelle Laboratory, had mistakenly believed they survived the plague. But a new war for survival had only just begun.

Early setbacks in the newly founded Livelle city-state, mainly from Reassortment scares in the underground, were followed by unprecedented and unpredicted expansion. Transhumans used mineral crushers to travel deep inside the continent of North America to escape the strain. They formed a country called the Great Commonwealth of Beimeni some two thousand five hundred meters deep, spreading civilization coast to coast, to the arctic, and to Central America.

Scientific discoveries abounded, including rapid evolutionary advances, flexibility to high heat and pressure, growth acceleration, and age reversal, among others; humanity, which had come so close to extinction, used the same synbio technology that created the Reassortment Strain to design gene therapies that gave
Homo transition
its theoretically infinite life span.

It also birthed a new conflict, with stakes as high as Before Reassortment. The decades-long Evolutionary War between the Masimovian Administration and the Liberation Front has touched all parts of Beimenian society. The diversion of resources from Reassortment research to the conflict and to maintaining an unsustainable standard of living amid a historic population explosion may have dire consequences. For unless the Reassortment enigma is solved, the pressure from the weight of the Earth above, the burn from radioactivity driven outward from the planet’s core, and seepage of the strain throughout the underground—an equation of extinction—threatens to finish what the Death Wave started 368 years ago …