Arkendream

In "Zero Gravity Girl: Book I," Norma Christianstead is the first Earthling raised from conception to adulthood in zero gravity. The year is 2200. Norma combines her unique autistic processing ability with, as a consequence of growing up weightless, an ability to travel unimpeded across the intersections of time and space. As a young woman, Norma falls in love with Scarlet, a fellow student in their virtual classroom. But Scarlet is in league with a cunning con man who hopes his CRISPR-altered virus will lower mammalian body temperatures ten degrees worldwide to facilitate human adaptation, along with his own profits, to a globally warmed planet. And so, what could go wrong? In "Arkendream: Book II," the members of Norma's orbital family watch from above while a plague despoils Earth. Coincidentally, or so it seems, the divinations of an ancient genophotonic civilization, which vacated Mars to emigrate to Saturn's moon Titan three billion years earlier, are uncovered in a mine shaft under a Martian volcano. Norma's exposure to this so-called Tharsian Codex leads her to undergo a spontaneous epigenetic evolutionary alteration in which her genomic codes combine directly with coded photons. The result: Norma herself becomes a genophotonic being: a genie. Through quantum entanglement with Scarlet, the CRISPR virus attains a sentient capacity of mindful contagion, leaving Norma and her family no hope of returning to Earth or its lunar outposts, or even to mining stations on Mars. Homeless and desperate, the crew decides to undertake a harrowing seven year voyage to Titan. A year into the journey, however, the means to transport the entire ship and crew across spacetime on gravitational waves is discovered serendipitously. Surfing these entangled waves through the Horn of Gabriel, the Arkendream crew members venture to ancient Mars, to Earth in 33 C.E., and finally to Titan to establish a new Tellurian colony. In this, his fifteenth novel, Patrick pursues his lifelong quest to understand how and why gravity and perception are related to our experiences of dreams, memory, imagination, and love, and how we may know our place in the whole shebang. "Arkendream" attempts to redefine the meaning of life, time, space, God, purposefulness, and above all love, for it is Patrick's guess that the attractive force we know as love is the ultimate agency holding it all together.