FREE
The Song of the Jubilee
(The Phantom of the Earth Book 1)
(The Phantom of the Earth Book 1)
by Raeden Zen
The Song of the Jubilee, the first book in The Phantom of the Earth series, is FREE for a limited time. Also available: The Gambit with Perfection, The Synthesis and the Animus, The Descent into the Maelstrom, The Restoration of Flaws, and The Phantom of the Earth (Books 1-5 Omnibus Edition) (read my blog post).
Make sure you check out the fantastic concept art on the Home page and the Settings page of the author's website. Here's an example:
Description
The Phantom of the Earth is a thought-provoking post-apocalyptic science fiction series. It
relies heavily upon synthetic biology and quantum physics.
A clinical trial upon the Earth's surface ...
To test a treatment against reassortment ...
Will alter the course of transhuman history.
To test a treatment against reassortment ...
Will alter the course of transhuman history.
In the Great Commonwealth of Beimeni, a subterranean civilization in
North America, expansion long ago gave way to peace and prosperity in the face
of the history's most devastating plague. Immortality is the reward for service
and loyalty in Beimeni, a place where the physical blends with the metaphysical
and power consolidates in the hands of those with a genetic edge. The fissures
first spread slowly, then swiftly, until now the Great Commonwealth finds
itself on the brink of economic devastation, challenged by forces from within
that know its secrets and its crimes. At the center of the conflict lie the
Selendias of Piscator, founders of the resistance with an uncanny connection to
the zeropoint field, and the Barão Strike Team, three researchers tasked with
finding a cure to the Reassortment Strain, the plague that nearly wiped
humanity from the Earth. Traveling from the uninhabitable but pristine surface
to the habitable but inhospitable underground, this is a story about dedication
to dreams, battle for survival, discovery and connection, song and celebration,
undoing past misdeeds, and sacrifice for the greater good.
In The Song of the Jubilee, Captain Broden Barão, Striker Nero Silvana, and
Strategist Verena Iglehart, together with the elite Reassortment research team,
release a protohuman on the Island of Reverie, testing a serum designed to
thwart the Reassortment Strain. They must find a cure to the plague or suffer
the inevitable consequence for failure: demotion or worse, exile to the Lower
Level some four thousand meters beneath the Earth's surface. Meanwhile, in the
Great Commonwealth, two thousand five hundred meters deep, the resistance
movement known as the Liberation Front suffers a disastrous defeat when its
leader, Jeremiah Selendia, is captured by Lady Isabelle Lutetia, Supreme
Director of the Department of Communications and Commonwealth Relations. With
Jeremiah held by the government, his middle son unexpectedly finds the weight
of the war on his shoulders. It falls to Johann to lead the Front, to rescue
his father from one of the commonwealth's most impregnable fortresses, and to
keep his younger, underdeveloped brother hidden from the chancellor, who forces
foes to undergo clinical trials against the plague upon the surface. Johann's
efforts draw the attention of powerful enemies and start a chain of events that
will forever change his family, the Barão Strike Team, and the Great
Commonwealth of Beimeni.
Excerpt
Prelude
Equation of Extinction
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 near absolute zero. Now all but one of those scientists, Dr. Kole Shrader, are dead.
The Reassortment Strain still thrives in Earth’s atmosphere and bedrock. It’s a synthetic organism that was designed with the 4 traditional bases of DNA and their mirrored versions; it contains 8 nucleotides and 39 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 transhumans.
Reassortment was born out of the Second Hundred Years’ War. A century of battles fought for possession of asteroids and minor planets throughout the Solar System, which held the last vestiges of nonrenewable resources, came to its 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 transhumans in less than one year.
The survivors, who lived and worked beneath Antelope Canyon in the self-sustained and contained Livelle Laboratory, had mistakenly believed they had 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, led to unprecedented and unpredicted expansion. Transhumans used mineral crushers, traveling deep inside the continent of North America to escape the strain. They formed a country called the Great Commonwealth of Beimeni some 2,500 meters deep, spreading civilization coast to coast, to the Arctic, and to Central America.
Scientific discoveries abounded, including rapid evolutionary advances, resistance to extreme 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 a human genome with a theoretically infinite life span.
It also birthed a new conflict, with stakes as high as the one Before Reassortment. For unless a cure is found, the pressure from the weight of the Earth above, the burn from radioactivity driven outward from the planet’s core, and the seepage of Reassortment throughout the underground—an equation of extinction—threatens to finish what the Death Wave started 368 years ago …
Praise for the Book
"[The Song of the Jubilee] is a major SciFi book.
It is extremely well-written and has a compelling post-apocalyptic hook. The
characters and their situations are interesting (scientist, rebel leader,
etc.). The underground but highly technologically based setting is vividly
described." ~ David Estes, Author of
The Moon Dwellers
"In a post-apocalyptic world, trans-human scientists fight a deadly
disease while rebels battle with the leaders of Earth's last Commonwealth. ...
This is the beginning of a complicated and intricate science fiction epic. ...
The characters' personalities and backgrounds are revealed bit by bit in the
course of the story, naturally and believably, so that they appear as
three-dimensional people with real backgrounds and understandable motivations -
no cardboard heroes or villains here. The Song
of the Jubilee is a vigorous yet thorough introduction to a very promising new science
fiction world." ~ IndieReader
Official 4-Star Review
"Dazzling. That's the impact of this intro to an extensive dystopian
sci-fi saga. The first book in a series of five, [The Song
of the Jubilee] sets the scene and themes in a complex, carefully crafted future
history. ... [It's] a relatively short book. It contains a complete story arc,
but it is only the tip of the overall tale. If you find yourself intrigued by
the extensive cast of characters and the unfolding multiple scenarios, then
you'll want to hop straight on to the next in the series, [The Gambit with Perfection]." ~ Rowena
Hoseason, Top 50 Reviewer (Amazon UK)
About the Author
Raeden Zen is a speculative and supernatural fiction author. When he isn't writing, you can find him hanging out with his family and friends, reading, eating exotic foods, enjoying movies, swimming, procrastinating with social media, or watching sports. He lives in New York City.
Giveaway
Enter the Goodreads giveaways for a chance to win the paperback editions of The Phantom of the Earth (including Books I-III Omnibus Edition and Books IV-V Omnibus Edition, each about 750-800 pages). All up, 18 prizes are on offer. Enter here (US, CA, GB, and AU only; ends 1 February):
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