“Back Cover Blurb”
Historian Kai-Lee Fox has a problem. She has come face-to-face with an unavoidable historical truth:
They say history repeats itself, and it obviously does. Mankind recycles ideas, trends, fashions, political movements, and I’m sorry to say, mistakes. But that night I saw people had never been recycled; there hadn’t been a single repeat among all the faceless billions born to walk the Earth. Instead, there had been an ages-long procession of individuals—some light, some dark, some neutral—but each one unique. One Aristotle. One Adolf Hitler. One Great Sage Sagar … and one Ella Fitzgerald.
She comes to realize both the beginning and end of each individual life are integral to the historical process, an unwelcome epiphany that blows the lid off Kai-Lee’s personal Pandora’s Box. How does the existence of a third-generation clone impact history? Is she even the woman she was engineered to be? Thoughts like those set her at dangerous odds with her society.
Determined to breach the Known Span—the inexplicable 120-year barrier every individual reaches but nobody crosses, despite the eradication of every known disease and genetic mutation—the Alpha Quingenti fled Earth when the Global Assembly refused to allow them to replicate. Rigidly adhering to their Prime Tenet for more than 400 years, the 500 colonists aboard the spaceship Janus have lived serenely confident in their immortality. Suddenly, Kai-Lee finds herself a traitor to the cause, an imposter desperately trying to play an expected part, in order to avoid falling prey to the Alpha-Genesis Option, a brutal involuntary psychological intervention designed to return wayward colonists to their mandated Alpha states.
One by one and in a relatively short period of time, a handful of other individuals reaches the same conclusions about the immorality of the Colonial program, the question of self-identity, and the meaning of life. As they drift together, this small band of rebels discovers each life as a priceless adventure, a journey of self-discovery.
Unfortunately, not everyone in the group exercises discretion. Overestimating the receptivity of his fellow Council members, geneticist Ke-Ling Yan decides to confront the issues head on. The establishment’s reaction is swift and uncompromising. As the situation aboard the Janus deteriorates into a near-police state, the Awakened struggle to find a way out of what appears to be an inescapable trap.
© 2009, Kathy DiSanto, all rights reserved
