Worlds Apart: Immortal Rising, #1

By L. L. Keyes

A genetic accident. A superior species of human. With society torn apart, can a young mortal survive long enough to end the violence and hate?

 

Earth, 2355. Riva Dorn needs answers. After a century of stasis, hibernating humans have slumbered underground, safe from a lethal pathogen set to go off above. Expected to eliminate the dangerous, golden-eyed variants living on the surface, the untested Colony Manager awakens to an unimaginable mission failure: the immortal-specific pathogen has failed. Immortals are thriving.

 

When a chance meeting with a mysterious gold-eyed stranger leads to more doubt, a deadly deception unfolds. Are the immortal variants really a threat to mortal humankind? When things don't add up, Riva finds herself caught between the violent legacies of the Northern Alliance and the enigmatic truths of her new immortal ally.

 

With old hatreds flaring and her commander set on redeploying the bioweapon, can she prevent a mutual genocide?

 

Worlds Apart is the thought-provoking first volume in the Immortal Rising science fiction series. If you like delving into both sides of an issue, races against time, and fascinating what-ifs, then you'll love L. L. Keyes's emotion-packed journey.

 

Buy Worlds Apart to track down the truth today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: L.L. Keyes
• Release date: Feb 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9798989240807

L. L. Keyes

LL Keyes is an emerging science fiction author whose work explores the intersection of technology, biology, and human motivation. Her narratives speculate on humanity's future, challenging conventional ideas through dynamic characters. Writing from "the other Vancouver that is not Canada," she makes her home in Washington State—the magnificent Pacific Northwest—inspired by its natural beauty to create rich, speculative worlds.

Book preview

Prologue

Dusk

Restoring Quarter, 2355

The infancy of the biological age began centuries ago.

Then, we were like children playing as gods. We could not fully grasp the generative dynamics of cultural change and its inherent power: time. Millions of genomic combinations were bound to produce an unintended consequence, eventually. But knowledge without wisdom isn’t success, it’s raw power in the wrong hands. And the need to know is its own trap of the mind.

By the turn of the century, humankind’s will to learn exploded into the realm of the biological when we visualized the building blocks of life: the genome. Early molecular biology was a masturbatory fantasy warmup and paled in scope amid the dawn of genomics. Telomere shortening, DNA damage, and cellular senescence—all answers that once eluded, now unfolding. But we see through the glass darkly, as the saying goes. What is obscured from oneself cannot be seen by design. You never see yourself coming.

A powerful biology hides an insidious secret within us all, whispering a siren song, locking itself behind a Pandora’s box of trouble. And in our thirst for knowledge, we fill gaps of understanding with believable lies. Rationalizations that soothe us back into our unconscious lullabies. From cradle to grave, cracking our code was the new frontier, but we were no longer the tyrannical toddlers of old. No, we were the newer model of mankind. Forever capable, a shining promise of a future free from fear and pain.

Who the fuck were we kidding?

Then came the unregulated bioeconomy. The runaway train of first-to-market biosolutions. Xenobiology was here to stay, and it was a good thing, they said. But it had an underbelly. We’d stretched this world to its limits and beyond, so artificial solutions seemed reasonable. Worldwide mineral shortages, endless wars, climate disaster… and then, rising like a phoenix from the ashes, we’d taken a daring dive into the sea of our own intellect to Solve. All. The. Problems.

Science marched on as a torchbearer of change, when suddenly our self-created metamorphosis gave birth to something new. Washed up on the shores of our petrified psyches, we ran aground and were compelled to look away. Secretly we feared the very perfection that we craved, and our reflected glory rang unfamiliar in the afterglow of our creation. The shipwreck was real. What had gone wrong?

So, we regressed to an earlier time. One that feared the newness of the world in which it found itself, not unlike a newborn gazing first upon the one who bore them. Only now, a tiny form blinked back with eyes of shining gold. Innocents who peered into our eyes, and yet we wondered who was there.

It begs the question, what should creators do with their created? Theories abound. There are books upon books about it, and I have read them all. They ask questions which cannot be answered by such a solitary man as I. But I do know it was the eyes that took the leap of evolution first: the soul’s window. It was impossible to look away. Nature somehow knew this and obliged us at least this much.

We were golden; the color of riches, yet subject to the poorest of treatment, reflecting the condition of our shared human souls. Instead, the chance for transformation became the broom that swept fear and doubt back into the darkest corners of the mind. A place where disquiet can do its worst and feed the blindness we seek to rise above. For it is in our nature to be ruled by passion, free from reason, until we tame the fire within.

Tick, tick, tick. That’s the sound of humanity’s biological clock. Do not look away. Each age will have its reckoning. Ours is coming.

Thoughts on the Change

Personal Journal of Edam Martin

Area 31, Northern Americas

Part I

Secrets & Lies

1

Countdown

One hundred years earlier

Area 31, Northern Alliance

Day Zero. Then rebirth. They’d wake and be free from the Uprisings at last. The thought flowed through her like a welcome oasis, a shelter from the storm of internal conflict. Area 31’s Colony Manager Riva Dorn moved robotically through her preparations, which were now not a drill. The noise from the automated voice overhead pierced the underground cavern of Hibernation Chamber 31B. Speakers barked their countdown warnings to life.

Colony Management was the final cavern to sleep. In a long line of staggered starts, they must keep the grid safe. The system’s power was life. As were the final checklist items. She reviewed her last duties as carefully as last rites. She was colony manager of the most important area in the Northern Alliance, and everything would go perfectly if she had anything to say about it. Riva was ready, in whatever way you could be ready for the unthinkable. But now was not the time for thinking; it was time for stasis.

She scanned the spotless silver siding of her subterranean cleanroom environment and marveled at how untouched it looked. Nothing like the world above. She could almost see the dirty rafters behind those glistening walls, their sides billowing with a fine dust that got into everything—infiltrating the eyes, noses, and mouths of the workers who so diligently raised it up.

Dug under the cover of chaos and an off-world mortal exodus, the abandoned tunnels had been forgotten nearly a century earlier. An ancient passenger-transportation system of the past, it laid fallow beneath the earth for over a century. Lots of train tracks, but she’d never seen a train. Instead, the tunnels were now home to hollowed-out, man-made caverns. Constructed as modern cleanrooms, their hibernation PODS stood ready to house humanity. All the Alliances had replicated these very rooms throughout the world, in hundreds of thousands of locations, for this very moment.

The sudden beep of the hibernation monitors barked their status, drawing Riva back to the present. Surge monitoring was at Level 0 with no error packets showing on any unit. So far, so good. The system would stay stable if they could keep the power flow within optimal range. Redlining the system wasn’t an option. Their underground power had upgraded cabling and shouldn’t give way to cracks in the insulation until well after they emerged. Still, she couldn’t shake that most of the chambers still relied on some measure of topside grid power. She tried not to think about it. Algorithms would monitor these lines for a century. But algorithms didn’t make physical repairs because of extreme-weather events.

Riva refocused on the terminal in front of her. Its blue light bored a hole into her tired, bloodshot eyes. Her fasting schedule’s toll left her low on energy but not for much longer. Soon she would drag her own twenty-five-year-old body into the last unit, the special one for colony managers. Her hands flew along the panels, so practiced from endless drills, and now the end sequence was close. She shuddered and shook off her mood. Riva rescanned the display. Intravenous nutrients were good. Flow rate in range. Pressurization system, optimal. Coolant levels adequate. Muscle-stimulation system reporting ready. She hummed along, her mind whirring through memorized checklists. Her chest was tight, though. These procedures were meaningless if the equipment careened into power failure over power success.

Sleep tight, she said, patting the dome at the head of row one. Her friends and colleagues now filled each rounded window. All around her, monitors flashed and whirred over their crucial contents. Identical rows of stasis beds hummed with the sound of mechanical arms, faithfully tending to their human passengers. Most had entered stage-one stasis. Heart-pounding thuds echoed in her ears, filling her with apprehension for what came next.

Riva swallowed and looked up. She was almost positive she could see faint dust particles filtering down. Would this room kill them as they slept? Even the Knowledge Streams weren’t broadcasting daily anymore. No one felt safe in the mortal colonies, and she didn’t either. And if this room didn’t kill them, then the world above certainly would. The people were frightened.

She turned toward the large steel side walls to her left. They gleamed against a matching gray flooring and contributed to the bland and disorienting sense of the space. Their Primary Organic Support Devices, loosely known as PODS, were gray with white trim and added to the sterile feel to the rigid, medicinal environment. She hoped the nickname did not hold true: Piece of Shit Device. Whispers had circulated that they rushed the fabrication process.

That aside, their subterranean chamber would house and sustain their lives, in stark contrast to the death soon to be meted out above. The dirt behind the walls may not be showing, but she knew it was there. Just like she knew there was a stain of a question mark about whether this hibernation was necessary. Radical but necessary. That’s what her commander had said, and he was no ordinary commander. He was Northern Alliance Commander Jaxom Troyer who sat on the World Council.

Riva rescanned the panel. Body-temperature gauges reporting in range. Backup systems… No! The backup system was flirting with yellow-light status again. Her stomach lurched as she stared at the gauge needle. Fluctuation jitters, they called it. When you could see the needle jiggle, not jump, you’d better pay attention. It was the scariest part of the whole cavern.

Just then, the emergency siren began wailing.

Where was it coming from? She traced it down on the panel. Surface feed was good. So it was coming from inside? No, it looked more like a branch-circuit problem. Her eyes darted around the room. She needed the fault box. Riva ran from POD Control back to the main console near her unit. She swung around to the right of it and smacked the large, four-foot-square panel on the side of the cabinet, popping it open. Then she ducked into the small space to run through the inspection.

The jiggle meant a potential main-breaker trip, and it would be tricky doing reroutes to run diagnostics now with PODs drawing max power. She tested the branch breakers one at a time, bypassing power for the PODs on each row as she went. When she flipped Branch 7 the needle jiggled to red on her handheld gauge. More alarms rose in the cavern, then the main breaker tripped. The entire system heaved under the load, lights dimming with the sudden power draw on emergency reserves.

It was Branch 7, and it needed a repair! Most likely a physical one. She couldn’t do it, and now there was no time. It would have to be bypassed, but… the people. It was an emotional body slam. No. She could save them. Riva calculated the additional load for the PODs on Branch 7 and averaged it spread across all circuits. Managing the power-draw rate would be critical to handle increased capacity. And the flow rate. It would hold if she didn’t bring them all online at once. Her mind fogged. Think, Riva!

She ran back to the front of the console and logged into maintenance-mode, opening her droopy eyes as wide as she could for the authorization scan. It worked. Then Riva quickly located the power algorithm and added the sharing sequence for Branch 7. She pressed compile and held her breath. It returned within range! With safety protocols for energy sharing in place, Riva took Branch 7 off bypass and stared at the gauge, willing its rise to green. The needle staggered in the yellow, doing its jiggle-jump dance. Then it leapt into the green. Riva could swear she heard the system heave as big a sigh of relief as she did.

Crisis averted, she steadied herself. The World Alliances had agreed to this, and they were rarely unanimous. The future of Earth was at stake, and they must take measures. Riva didn’t agree, but she didn’t know everything. She was a cog in the wheel of the Northern Alliance—and a damn good one at that. A cog in charge of Area 31 staff and their families, something she did not take lightly. This was her job, and she wouldn’t let her commander down.

Riva set the auto-shutdown sequence and stepped up into her own unit, laying herself down inside. The heat sensor took over, scanning her signature as the lid slid shut with a soft, mechanical hum. She sucked in a deep breath and savored the feeling in her lungs. Would they be sore when she awoke? Beep… beep… beep. The tones came more quickly now.

Cold air slicked across her dry throat, and her tongue felt thick. A light mist filled the chamber, fogging the curved window above her. Fighting back an initial reaction of claustrophobia, she resisted the urge to scream. Breathing in and out, her extremities tingled as the airborne sedative kicked in. The intravenous tube stung as it pricked her arm. It… was… cold...

Riva Dorn entered her unit at 03:00 Universal Alliance Time, along with 1,237 members of her colony staff who shared cavern 31B. The year, 2258. Across the globe, underground caverns full of anesthetized mortals rested in these PODs, allowing intricate algorithms to prepare their bodies for long-term stasis. Riva floated toward the darkness, her thoughts drifting into a jumbled haze. Her commander had led the charge that brought her, along with all mortal humans on Earth, to this moment: to lie torpid for one hundred years below ground. It had to be done to save humanity. The Long Sleep, he had called it. She hoped it would be over soon.

Five hours later

08:17 UAT

The sun was angry. And today it burped. Hard. From the center of the photosphere, a solar tsunami was just getting started. A monstrous wave of searing plasma roared upward in a burst of charged particles careening outward from the sun’s surface. It produced a giant circular wave which shot up over 75,000 miles, speeding at 620 miles per second toward the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Monitoring equipment gauged the eruption at around 20x, the most powerful category of flare for which our sun is capable: an X-class. And on this day, in 2255, solar luck was not on our side. The resulting coronal mass ejection, or CME, hurled toward Earth. It was a catastrophe not unlike the Carrington event in the nineteenth century. And, just like before, we weren’t ready this time either.

Deep below the ground, inside Area 31’s colony-ops hibernation chamber, alarms began beeping. First one, then another. Soon, a cacophony littered the room. The sound bounced off walls, creating an unmelodious racket, while enclosed capsules of sleeping life lay in silent slumber unaware. The pew, pew, pew of the machines powering down peppered the air, joining the alarm sounds in a symphony of surrender.

In time, the urgency of the alarms drained away, along with the power to the cavern.

2

One Hundred Years Later

Restoring Quarter, 2355

08:00 UAT

Riva drew in a gulp of century-old air. She sputtered and expelled it back out just as quickly, her muscles screaming with the effort. The system relentlessly pumped in the pink, heavily oxygenated revival mist, and she choked and heaved in one terrible spasm toward consciousness. They’d trained her to calm the stomach muscles with visualization. Her rib cage ached, and her muscles spasmed with each tiny effort to reinvigorate the inert musculature that was her famished body.

Breathe. This will pass.

Ahhh… she croaked. Rusty… voice. Her throat hurt. Her mind felt something like overgrown shrubbery must feel waiting for a trim. Cobwebs cleared, replaced by clarity of thought as her circumstances roared back into focus. Cavern. Stasis.

Okay, she said. Her voice sounded disembodied and foreign. Enclosed! Can’t breathe! Riva took another gulp of air and controlled the rising panic. It would pass. There was nothing stopping her from breathing. Heart pounding, she tried to swallow again and couldn’t. Riva’s eyes snapped open to a view of the domed lid.

Hold on.

She wiggled, managing a small amount of autonomous movement, but the muscle stims held her in place. They did their job too well. Through blurred vision, she could see her unit’s dome lid was partially open. That meant her cycle was nearing its end. Her muscles still scorched inside with the slightest movement, and a migraine-level headache dominated her skull. Her body warmer was still on, sending waves of relief pulsing through her dormant frame. The system continued to guide her toward her green light release.

Muscle sequencing, begin, a mechanical voice boomed from somewhere.

Riva stretched, gingerly now, staring upward through the fogged glass dome. The system prompted her to begin eyebrow arches. This struck her as funny. She let out an awkward laugh and wondered whose sense of humor had coded that in. She relocated her head a few inches to the left to get a visual beyond her dome. Still too much pink mist.

Lights were noticeably dimmer than she expected, but her personal overheads were working. She relaxed into the waking sequence and followed the rest of the prompts. Her thoughts darted back to the last moments before stasis. Each minute brought increasing awareness of time and her growing urgency to reenter the world.

Exercise sequences finished with no major bodily anomalies to report. The sleep sequence had left her refreshed. Time to move and eat.

Riva grabbed the safety bar above and pulled up to a sitting position. Her dome thudded to a stop, now fully open. Green light. Several strands of her long hair caught in the lid joint and pulled.

Ouch!

Riva plucked the blonde hairs from the lid with irritation. Her voice had steadied. Pausing, she took a few deep breaths and pulled the IV unit from her arm. She shifted her legs and dangled them below her POD, hoisting herself up to sit. A musty smell pierced her nostrils, and she felt sickened by the stale air in the cavern.

Soon her eyes adjusted to the lowered light, and Riva scanned the cavern. Overhead lights had failed in every row, but a single bulb above her manager’s station shone brightly amid the din and dark that surrounded her. Squinting, she slid down from her unit and took a few lurching steps in the semidarkness. There was a spot on her control panel where the light shone to the right of her unit. Her area, separated and set apart from the other rows of PODs, gave her a sense of being the focal point inside the cavernous room. A sense of déjà vu jarred her. Cognitive perception told her no time had passed since shutdown, but of course, her body knew the difference. Her footfalls made an eerie echo that gave her chills. She shook off her aloneness and quickened her steps.

Riva approached her hibernation cavern’s main control panel and froze. The display was dark. Only her unit’s readout active. Her legs wobbled, and she grabbed the panel to steady herself. There was no scenario they’d trained for under which only the command staff awoke early. That was, unless the system had failed. That was the single reason Riva had access to the most precious and stretched resource in their world: thermally sourced power.

A cold sweat spread a growing chill across her body, and she began shivering. Riva felt held back by an invisible force and slow-shuffled, dragging her feet over to the first row of PODs. The cavern’s silence felt oppressive. She stopped at the first unit and willed herself to look down the row, the hairs on her arms bristling. Riva gasped.

Stretched before her were rows of domed stasis units with no power. She gripped the rail beside her. Time slowed, and the quiet of the room filled with the sound of her heart thumping in her ears.

Riva moved toward the lead unit in row twelve. Why is no one up? She found no outward signs of tampering; that was good. She bent down and opened the lower-left panel of the first unit and pulled out an emergency light stick, smacking it hard on the surface area below. The room lit up with a greenish hue. She saw the ID tag on the side: Barker. It was Carol, her second in command. She smeared the dust off the unit’s window, her hand shaking. The cavern smell stuck to the back of her throat and she gulped, as if to swallow it away.

Riva raised the light stick to the glass. Her body exploded in a surge of terror before her mind understood. Before her was a hollow-cheeked, emaciated Carol Barker. Now a mere waxwork figure, pallid skin clung to the frame of her body like a shroud. She’d been gone a while. She was a perfectly preserved… corpse. Riva yelped, jumping away as if she were a hot stove, and crashed back-first into the adjacent row. A wave of horror enveloped her. The sudden proximity to Carol took her breath away. She’d first met her in colony-ops training and immediately liked her. They’d both finished top of their class in electronics, fiercely competing against each other but eventually becoming the closest of friends. Tears clouded Riva’s vision. She dropped into a heap on the floor, sobs racking her body.

Riva crumpled against the unit for a while. Fighting the urge to run, she sat up and scanned the room. She had to inspect all the darkened PODs. She grabbed her light stick and walked gingerly down the first row. Then the second. And the third. Every row the same. All dead. Everyone. The pressurized capsules had slowed the process, but it was clear this wasn’t recent. The room swirled, and her stomach spasmed deep within her abdomen. She stopped, but her stomach could not. Riva vomited. The force of it left her gasping for breath, and she slid to the ground again, unable to control her shaking. In time, she stood again.

Moving to the optical-communication panel, she determined it, too, was without power. And with no Opti-Comm, she couldn’t contact any other hibernation chambers. Had there been a catastrophic power failure beyond her cavern? What about the backup systems? Her subterranean power source had saved her, but that did little to explain the rest of it.

It was at that moment Riva felt her adrenaline kick in. Emergency stick in hand, she made her way out of the hibernation area to the sealed exit hatch at the front chamber. No power. She vaguely remembered the manual-release procedure. Grab the emergency hatch tool! She whirled around and spied the wall-mounted clear cap covering the tool and pulled with all her might. It popped free, releasing, clanging to the floor. Scooping it up, Riva inserted it to the left of the joint by the circular exit door and pushed the tool into the opening with all her strength.

A loud pop emanated from the interior of the mechanism, and the door unfastened, opening a crack to the tunnel system outside. The air displacement made a mild pahhh sound that blew across Riva’s cheek. Outside, the familiar blueish hue of the tunnel’s emergency lights beckoned. She paused. What was out there? Shaking, she recalled how unstable the biomatter inside the device was. Genomics wasn’t her strength, but she remembered some of it from academy training.

First, a molecular profile had to be built from immortal living cells, which gave them the genetic mutations missing in aging humans. The result was a blueprint for mortals to build an immortal-specific pathogen. Spliced into an ancient virus, it delivered an effective and invasive viral assault resulting in rapid death. The only problem? It was extremely harmful for mortals, too. Because they were genetic cousins, the immortal variant had blood proteins specific to their own mutations, but both still shared identical proteins, too. Over time, their mortal cellular structures would break down as well, it would just be slower. And more gruesome.

After the pathogen research, that’s when the hibernation idea had really taken hold. Not before. And once the idea was broadcasted to the knowledge streams, the public consciousness embraced it. The immortal threat. They’d all been told time would decompose their bodies back to dust. That, it turned out, was bullshit. It ate people alive. Painfully. That was the actual truth but by that time, it hadn’t mattered.

Choking back tears, she wondered if she might be the only person left in the world. The rows of bodies confirmed her worst fear: she was the sole survivor of hibernation chamber 31B, and she didn’t know why. Her colony-operations staff were dead, along with the family members included in the lottery for her chamber. Riva leaned her shoulder into the thick, circular hatch door and shoved. Whatever she lacked in strength, her adrenaline made up for. There was no staying here now. The train tunnels would lead her to the surface and into a world that now held more secrets than safety.

3

Pushing Forward

Riva spilled out into the underground passage and stumbled to the ground, her energy spent by forcing the who-knew-how-heavy hatch door open with her shoulder. And, ouch. It really hurt now. She rubbed her throbbing appendage and took in the blue-tinged atmosphere of emergency lighting. Its hue gave the tunnel the appearance of stepping back in time. If only that were so. The musty darkness enveloped her, and she lifted her light stick higher, wincing when her shoulder strained upward.

Her stick did nothing to help her see. The tunnel dissolved into nothingness just feet ahead. Then the stick went dark. Immobilized for a few seconds, she shook the stick back and forth. It blinked back to life. There was really no choice; the only way out was through the tunnel. Riva stumbled again, and a billow of dust hit her lungs, sending her into a coughing spasm. At least the dust smelled better than the smell of death in the chamber.

The tunnel was cavernous, maybe twenty feet tall. She trudged through the decades of dust, her footfalls echoing off the eerie silence. Riva continued to pick her way along the uneven ground, the light stick bouncing in a wild shadow dance across the rounded walls. In contrast, the darkness ahead gave the appearance of walking into a smear of ink. Motion-censored lights, unused for more than a century, remained dark as she marched on.

The tunnel system had once housed underground-rail operations, but had been abandoned for longer than anyone could remember. They were a genuine achievement, albeit from a very different human era. The whole thing had been crumbling below them for a century. Her light stick flickered again, signaling a last gasp. Alarmed, Riva patted the bulge in her arm pocket. Extra sticks. Reassured, she picked her way along the tracks, using care to avoid the railway ties. She progressed slowly.

The light stick danced shadows across the wooden support beams running along the arched ceiling. It was probably five stories high in some places. The beams encircled the top of the arch and looked out of place. More like bent ladders that had been glued a ceiling in a giant half circle. Every segment, about a quarter mile, she guessed, held large gray metal rods which had been inserted into the ceiling-top at impossible angles. Riva guessed they were support struts added during the hibernation build-out.

All of it looked how she felt now—unsteady in her infrastructure and a stabbing fear in her gut. Fatigued, her legs wobbled with the increased demand on her musculature, and Riva crouched down to take a break, breathing hard. Her mind circled back to the stasis shutdown sequence. Had she done something wrong? Her eyes filled again, and she stifled a sob. She’d left them there,