Anthem's Fall Read online

  Table of Contents

  Part I Annihilation Chapter One - Kristen

  Chapter Two - Kristen

  Chapter Three - Ryan

  Chapter Four - Ryan

  Chapter Five - The Imperial Council of the Epsilon

  Chapter Six - Vengelis

  Chapter Seven - Vengelis

  Chapter Eight - Kristen

  Chapter Nine - Vengelis

  Chapter Ten - Gravitas

  Chapter Eleven - Ryan

  Chapter Twelve - Vengelis

  Chapter Thirteen - Ryan

  Chapter Fourteen - Kristen

  Part II Apotheosis Chapter Fifteen - Huntington, Vermont

  Chapter Sixteen - Vengelis

  Chapter Seventeen - Kristen

  Chapter Eighteen - Vengelis

  Chapter Nineteen - Kristen

  Chapter Twenty - Vengelis

  Chapter Twenty-One - The Lord General and Royal Guard

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Vengelis

  Chapter Twenty-Three - The Lord General and Royal Guard

  Chapter Twenty-Four - Ryan

  Chapter Twenty-Five - Vengelis

  Chapter Twenty-Six - Kristen

  Chapter Twenty-Seven - Kristen

  Chapter Twenty-Eight - The Lord General and Royal Guard

  Chapter Twenty-Nine - Gravitas

  Chapter Thirty - Vengelis

  Chapter Thirty-One - Vengelis

  Chapter Thirty-Two - Gravitas

  Chapter Thirty-Three - Vengelis

  Chapter Thirty-Four - Kristen

  Chapter Thirty-Five - Gravitas

  Chapter Thirty-Six - Kristen

  Chapter Thirty-Seven - Vengelis

  Chapter Thirty-Eight - Kristen

  Chapter Thirty-Nine - Gravitas

  Chapter Forty - Kristen

  Chapter Forty-One - Vengelis

  Chapter Forty-Two - Kristen

  Chapter One

  Kristen

  It had its certain comforts and learned familiarities, but New York had never felt like home. The initial novelty of Manhattan and all of its cultural and architectural grandeur had long waned, and what she once regarded with wonder, she now felt only a moldering cynicism. These days Kristen Jordan considered the soaring edifices and crowding streets to be the material shape, the substance, behind the insatiable and thoughtless ambition of the modern. Nudging her straw against the melting ice cubes at the bottom of an empty vodka tonic, Kristen looked about the shabbily decorated and dimly lit college bar. Glowing neon beer signs and television screens hung on walls that enclosed a dozen booths and tables. A distinct smell of stale beer and hot wings hung in the air, yet the nearby conversations of fellow academics, exultant and self-assured, ignored this atrophy.

  Kristen studied genetics at Columbia, and her brilliance was unrivaled. Sitting quietly and gazing across the young faces of the bar, Kristen wondered if she stood out among her outwardly preoccupied and self-satisfied peers, or if they too were all carrying unspoken anchors of anxiety and doubt. On some level, though, she knew her general restlessness was an unfortunate byproduct of her intellect, and not an affliction shared by the masses.

  From across the table her fellow graduate student Steve Armstrong had started rambling over the loud rock music, his hand clutching a perspiring glass of beer. “My point is that there’s a difference between intelligence, or even consciousness for that matter, and awareness. They’re two entirely different phenomena that are always lumped into the same category. Don’t you think?”

  Kristen Jordan groaned and rolled her eyes, which elicited a laugh out of another graduate student sitting beside her, Cara Williams.

  “I don’t care, Steve,” Kristen said, her voice distracted and leaden. “I hardly think it’s a topic worthy of lengthy discussion. There’s no way of knowing for certain because that kind of technology doesn’t exist.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Steve gulped his beer and glared at her, his words faintly slurred. The alcohol added a note of indignation to his tone. “You’re saying we shouldn’t consider how a new technology will operate?”

  “Please not another booze-fueled theoretical science argument,” Cara said. Steve and Kristen ignored her.

  “No,” Kristen said to Steve in her ever-composed manner. “I’m just saying this specific discussion is comparable to cavemen arguing whether a gas-powered or an electric-powered car is superior. It doesn’t matter—a hybrid won’t exist for thousands of years. You know? Yes, it’s a worthwhile topic, but not at the present, and certainly not while we’re out having drinks.”

  “I take it this is the type of conversation I should start to get used to around the Columbia crowd?” Cara asked.

  Kristen nodded with a begrudging smirk. “Honestly, and shamefully, yes, this is pretty much par for the course. Professor Vatruvia likes to handpick researchers who are big on ideas and less caught up in practicality. The result is a strange group of argumentative theorists.”

  “And a staggeringly high ratio of undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome to boot,” Steve added. Kristen laughed.

  “Well, however Professor Vatruvia chooses his people, it clearly produces results.” Cara said, leaning back as a waitress hurried by and plopped down a fresh basket of cheap chips and salsa. “I must say I’m a little intimidated to be working on the same research team that actually created the Vatruvian cell. Were you two working with Professor Vatruvia when he won the Nobel Prize?”

  “I was,” Kristen said, gratification in her tone. Her gaze moved across the table with a satisfied expression. “Steve hadn’t joined us yet.”

  Cara regarded Kristen’s youthful features with confusion. “Were you an undergraduate assistant?”

  Steve chuckled, nearly spitting his beer. Nonplussed, Cara looked from him to Kristen. “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to say something insulting. What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing, nothing.” Kristen lifted a hand from the table and waved off Steve’s amusement. “It’s fine. I get that reaction a lot. No, I was on the actual research team when we invented the Vatruvian cell. I wasn’t an undergrad. I was head geneticist.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean offense. You just seem a little young, you know, to be halfway to your PhD.” Cara spoke with genuine surprise. “And I totally mean that as a compliment.”

  Kristen blushed. She’d heard it all before, but this reaction to her age still made her uncomfortable.

  “Kristen Jordan here is the resident teenager of the research team.” Steve spoke into his glass, taking some pleasure in Kristen’s embarrassment.

  “Yeah, I’m really a teenager.” Kristen shook her drink, indicating the empty vodka tonic. “And I was overseeing the genetic sequencing for the Vatruvian cell while you were struggling to get accepted into graduate school and cheering your nerd friends through World of Warcraft.”

  “Wow, that’s unbelievable. I had no idea you were that young,” Cara said.

  Kristen cast a wan smile at the hardened glass rings engrained into the wood of the table. “I’m twenty-one.”

  “If you hadn’t already noticed it about her, Kristen’s a genius who missed out on a childhood. It’s a shame really—overambitious mindset, overbearing parents, closet insecurities, the works.”

  “And you have it all figured out, huh?” Kristen threw an ice cube at Steve, which missed its mark and fell to their feet under the table. She would not admit it, but her somewhat intoxicated coworker was not far from the mark.

  Kristen was a biologist by degree, though she was well learned in several academic fields. Now in her third year of a doctorate program at Columbia, she had become the renowned Professor Vatruvia’s right-hand colleague, more of an associate than a student. Technically speaking she was the youngest researcher on the team, though
at the same time Kristen was also a leader within the team’s ranks. She had been involved since the very beginning of the groundbreaking Columbia Vatruvian cell research project. No one could deny that—aside from Professor Vatruvia himself—Kristen knew more about the inner workings and nuances of the Vatruvian cell than anyone else on the research team, and therefore in the world.

  Kristen’s looks were a common source of discussion among the male portion of the laboratory teams. She never wore any makeup, not seeing the use in such vanities. Yet try as she did to avoid accentuating her looks, her discreet beauty penetrated through. Even though they were usually concealed behind her glasses and dark bags from late nights spent looking over DNA codes, she had enthralling green eyes and graceful features. Her dirty blonde hair was often pulled back, revealing her exquisite cheekbones and the soft skin of her neck. With the slightest bit of effort, Kristen could have been called stunning. Most of her acquaintances would have classified her as gorgeous regardless—her lack of cosmetic efforts only providing an air of refinement to her often-overworked countenance.

  “How is it possible that you’re so far along in your career at twenty-one?” Cara asked.

  “Oh god,” Kristen sighed and shook her head. “I’d need another drink for that tale. It’s pretty unspectacular really. I graduated high school young because I skipped just about every other grade of elementary and middle school. I have my parents to thank for that one. Then I hurried off to MIT and graduated in two years. The next thing I knew, I was here at Columbia working with Professor Vatruvia. Basically the tone of my life has been a hurry with no clear purpose.”

  “Wow . . . I thought you looked young for your age . . .” Cara trailed off. “MIT in two years . . . that’s unheard of.”

  “Yep,” Kristen sighed, greatly desiring a change in subject. Her age had always been a touchy issue, having generally been the youngest individual in any given social situation since as long as she could remember.

  After graduating from MIT at the top of her class, Kristen Jordan had been unsure which direction to take her career. She knew she wanted to continue in the field, though into which specific sector she could not say. Working for some faceless pharmaceutical company in a lucrative attempt to cure obesity or male pattern baldness seemed so mundane and fruitless. Medical school felt like a colossal waste of time and effort: to spend the majority of your days fixing people who were either unwilling or simply too lazy to fix themselves.

  Graduate school seemed to be a logical progression, but in truth Kristen did not know how much more there was to learn from textbooks and lectures. Furthermore, graduate school was merely a mechanism by which to delay her inevitable career decisions. Kristen had been only eighteen years old, staring down the barrel of the settle-down-and-get-a-salary world, and she resented it deeply.

  It was during this post graduation stagnation that Kristen received an unexpected email from a research professor at Columbia University, the renowned synthetic biologist Professor Nicoli Vatruvia. Professor Vatruvia had happened upon Kristen’s senior thesis in an open-access journal to which she had uploaded it on a whim. The basic idea of her paper had stated that the DNA double helix was the most elegant model for an information network. Kristen had proposed further research into modeling computer and mechanical databases after natural ones, such as genetic codes. Most scholars had read her thesis and quickly shrugged it off as interesting, though purely theoretical. Even Kristen had thought it was a little lofty and out there, but nevertheless she had supported her data and presented an interesting case. Her professor at the time had given her an A, with a comment scribbled in red pen, Laudable work, with points defended appropriately, though ultimately impractical.

  Evidently, the famous Professor Vatruvia had not agreed with her MIT professor, and Kristen was stunned one morning to see his name sitting amid the spam of her inbox.

  Everyone in the upper echelon of academia and private sector research knew Professor Vatruvia of Columbia University. During the research for her senior thesis Kristen had read a number of his published papers. A few of Professor Vatruvia’s works had even been noted in Kristen’s lengthy citations section. Professor Vatruvia’s research in synthetic biology was on the cutting edge of modern science, and his creativity eclipsed all other minds in the field. Many people held the belief that Professor Nicoli Vatruvia would prove to be a modern visionary: a Da Vinci, Newton, or Einstein of the twenty-first century.

  After staring at the name Nicoli Vatruvia and the subject heading, Let’s Schedule a Meeting, Kristen had clicked on the email.

  Ms. Jordan,

  I have read through your senior thesis and am very intrigued by your proposal. We should speak immediately. Please reply as soon as possible and we can arrange a face-to-face meeting. Got to run.

  Best,

  Dr. Nicoli Vatruvia

  Kristen had read over the email a number of times in disbelief. It was surely a weird prank orchestrated by one of her friends. She immediately checked the email address: [email protected] by opening up the Columbia website and performing a staff directory search for him. It was not a hoax. Why would an internationally renowned synthetic biologist want to have a face-to-face with her? Kristen sat back in her desk chair and gazed out her window with uncertainty. There she was, sitting amid the relics of her childhood bedroom, having moved back to her parent’s home outside Boston. Beyond her window, the bleakly overcast November morning and naked tree branches mirrored her internal feelings. The excitement of a warm spring and a hopeful graduation day had since faded into a bare and discouraging autumn. Staring into the drab yard, she decided to take the trip to New York and meet Nicoli Vatruvia.

  Later that same week Kristen anxiously sat by the sun-filled window of a Starbucks just off the Columbia campus in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. When they had spoken briefly on the phone, Professor Vatruvia had told her to meet him at that specific time and place. He had told her nothing else. Even as she sat in the busy coffee shop, Kristen had no idea what part of her thesis had piqued the celebrated scientist’s attention so completely.

  Knowing his face from various articles she had read about him, Kristen sat upright when the man she recognized as Nicoli Vatruvia opened the coffee shop door. She wondered if he could be considered a celebrity? In scientific circles it would certainly be true, but to the others in the coffee shop he was probably just another bookish intellectual.

  Kristen swallowed hard and quickly suppressed her rising apprehension. She waved and smiled politely.

  “Kristen Jordan?”

  “Yes, hi, Professor Vatruvia.”

  Standing up, Kristen took his outstretched hand. For a moment Professor Vatruvia regarded her age with unmistakable surprise, before sitting down and taking out a packed manila folder from his briefcase. His looks did not demand attention, yet his features seemed inquisitive, and—although not youthful—he had a young way about him.

  “Thank you for coming down to meet me.”

  “Of course,” Kristen said, attempting to sound as polite as possible. The man before her was a superstar; a man so renowned that accomplished PhDs would be uneasy in his presence. Professor Vatruvia opened the folder and began flipping through dozens of loose pages as Kristen sat uncomfortably, unsure if she should engage the prominent synthetic biologist in small talk. People were shuffling in and out of line, and baristas hurried around taking orders for the customers.

  “Are you from the Northeast?” Professor Vatruvia asked as he skimmed through many pages.

  “Cambridge.”

  “Nice town . . .” He murmured with little interest. “Ah, here it is.”

  Finding what he had been looking for, Professor Vatruvia passed a solitary paper across the table. Kristen recognized the words at once. It was an excerpt from her senior thesis—the specific section that had caused most experts to write off her whole work as theoretical and bordering on science fiction. Kristen had spent many an hour in the MIT student li
brary debating whether to include the section she was now looking at.

  A knot tightened in her gut.

  In short, the section suggested that the growing field of synthetic biology limited itself by researching synthetic cells only in terms of biological form and function. Kristen had proposed the idea of expanding synthetic biology to the next level of innovation, attempting to create not only improved synthetic cells in terms of their use by people, but also synthetic cells that differed in nature from all other cells ever studied. Now that a synthetic cell had been created—an incredible feat in its own right—it was now time to climb inside the double helix and see what new marvel could be created with this newfound control over genetics. Kristen had proposed that this extensive approach to a synthetic genome might give rise to new proteins, cellular functions, or perhaps something more. They were daring assertions, and she did not relish the notion of defending them against the world’s preeminent thinker in the field.

  “Do you really believe that?” Professor Vatruvia asked after letting her examine the page.

  Kristen could feel her face flush. “Yes, on a theoretical level I do.”

  “A theoretical level?”

  “Certainly, in theory.” Kristen paused and sighed before begrudgingly pressing on. “But the number of potential DNA base pairs is practically infinite, and a means of testing all those base pairs to determine which could facilitate viable synthetic functioning would take forever. It’s taken evolution millions of years to create the form of natural cells we already know, so I think it would be unrealistic to expect any drastic changes in a single lifetime.”

  Kristen’s answer came out more smoothly than she had expected, which was encouraging. This was after all her thesis, and she had defended it against many hard-lined doctrinaires.

  “I agree,” Professor Vatruvia said after a moment, glancing with little interest through more pages of the manila folder. “But if it did exist—a means to code and test base pairs at a rate never before seen—and the theoretical of your thesis turned into scientific reality, what do you think could result?”

  “That type of research has never been done, so it would only be speculation,” Kristen said.