Red Genesis

by Kailin Gow

  RED GENESIS

  Book 1 of the Red Genesis Series™

  A STEM/ELA Literary Book for Age 14 and Up

  By

  Kailin Gow

  Published by Sparklesoup.com

  Published 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Kailin Gow

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Any electronic copies of Red Genesis that appears on the internet or through sharing in whole, without written permission from the publisher or author, is an illegal copy. Please respect the hard work of the authors and publishers by not supporting illegal pirating activities.

  Published by Sparklesoup.com.

  For information, please contact:

  Sparklesoup.com

  First Edition

  Printed in the United States of America

  In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

  ~ Genesis 1:1

  Red Genesis is dedicated to Mom and my Grandmother as well as all mothers.

  ONE

  “Jana! Run! To the Shelter!”

  His handsome face, that reminded me of matinee idols on Vintage Earth, as Mom has called the Earth before the 22nd century, was contorted into horror as he stared into the camera, facing the person filming him.

  The person behind the camera asked, “But what about you?” It was Mom’s voice. She sounded younger, more vulnerable than I’ve ever heard her, and…scared.

  “Thomas?” She asked. “Where are you going?”

  Thomas, the handsome matinee idol-looking man in his late twenties or early thirties, looked torn, anxiety filling his face as he looked back towards the camera and Mom.

  “I’ll meet you back at the Shelter. When you get to the Shelter, activate all the systems. That will hold them

  off, keep them away. The barriers will hold them off. Jana, listen. Run now. We can’t risk losing you. We can’t let them get our technology. We can’t let them into the Shelter. Guard it and protect it. It is the only hope for humankind. Go now!”

  “Thomas!” Jana yelled. “I can’t do this alone. I need you!”

  “Jana,” Thomas came up to the camera, blocking it with his body as he hugged Mom while the camera filmed. “Document everything. We need a record of everything that happens here and before here…for the future generation. New Earth. We are the first. Do everything to protect that.” There was a sound of sobbing and some kissing. “I love you so much, Jana. I want to see our child grow up. I want to grow old with you. But now, I need to join the fight. I’m the Second in Command of Red Genesis. I have to return to the Landing.”

  “I understand,” Mom said. “I love you Thomas.”

  “I love you, Jana, and our child with all my heart. May my eternal love of you give you strength. May your pending motherhood give you strength. You are stronger than you think. I know that. I wouldn’t have fallen hard for you if you weren’t.”

  “I know,” Mom said tearfully. She took a deep breath and said, “Now go! Don’t worry about me and our child. We will survive. Go and kick those Monsters’ butts!”

  Thomas laughed, and said, “That’s my girl!”

  Then he left.

  *****

  I must have watched that video at least a thousand times.

  Mostly by myself. Once with Mom.

  The only time I watched the video with Mom was back when I was 5 years old and I had asked about Dad, when we were reading about the pairing of animals on Noah’s Ark. The animals were paired up as mates so they can re-populate Earth again after the floods.

  “Since animals and people have parents, don’t I have a father?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mom said, combing my long dark hair, parting them at the center of my head, and making two side ponytails with them. “You had a father. Babies are made when the sperm of a male human fertilizes the eggs of a female human.” Mom had always explained things to me without sugarcoating things…like the engineer that she was…clinically and scientifically.

  “So…” my logical brain went to work, “you and a male human somehow made me when the eggs and sperm met?”

  Other girls would be blushing and giggling through this discussion…what Vintage Earth parents and teachers would call discussion the ‘birds and the bees’. But I wasn’t a typical girl.

  “What I want to know, is who? How did he look like? What kind of a person was he?” I had read a digital textbook in the Shelter’s library about biology. Now I was reading one on genes and chromosomes.” I looked a lot like Mom with her pretty large almond-shaped brown eyes and shiny thick long dark hair. I have her high cheekbones, her full lips, her healthy glowing skin tone, and even her high-bridge nose, which some romance novels would describe as, aristocratic. But my eyes were a shade lighter with almost green and gold specks. And even at 5 years old, I was tall. According to the books I read on genetics, and the calculations to estimate my height at adulthood, I would be at least a head taller than my mother.

  Mom smiled slowly before she said, “Evie, you surprise me sometimes. I forget you’re just 5 years old when you ask these type of questions.”

  “What type of questions?” I asked.

  “The ones that require long explanations,” Mom said, tapping my nose. “Which is sometimes better explained with a video.”

  She walked over to our control panels and uploaded a file from the necklace she was wearing.

  “A picture is worth a thousand words?” I asked, quoting a phrase I read from one of the Vintage Earth’s textbooks.

  Mom laughed. “Your father…his name was Thomas…he said to record everything. Seeing is believing.” Mom said, as she took a remote to control the video we were about to see.

  “Another Vintage Earth’s sayings,” I said, joking along with my mother.

  “Yes,” she said. She turned to me and said, “This was the last time I saw your father.”

  She turned on the video, and I was mesmerized. By the strong and noble-faced man on camera looking agonizingly at the camera as he told the woman he loved to run. By the sheer urgency in his voice that could shake anyone up. By the strength of his conviction for him to go back and fight the Monsters that were killing everyone. Mom’s trembling wailing voice as she asked him to come to the Shelter brought tears to my eyes. Then when she told him to go and not to worry about her and the baby… made me proud. Mom and this Thomas would have made the most beautiful couple. Their love for each other was so strong.

  I turned to Mom and noticed the tears running down her face. It was the first time I saw her cry in 5 years. It was the only time I saw her cry after that to the last time I saw her when I was 13 years old. She must have loved my father so much.

  TWO

  The New Earth

  My food and water, the absolute bare nitty gritty necessity of survival, had run out.

  It had been 5 years since Mom set out Above Ground to go look for food and supplies outside the Shelter.

  She never came back. Now I was 18.

  Back then when I was 13 years old, Mother and I went through the rows of food containers and supplies to see how much we had left.

  “How many full containers do we have of flour?” Mom asked, taking notes.

  I went down the aisle with the flour and other dry goods. I lifted the neatly-labeled containers and looked inside. “Mom, we have 5 full containers of flour,” I said. I lifted the other containers along the shelves. “And we have 4 full containers of dry vegetables. And here we have dry soup. 2 containers of split pea. 2 con
tainers of chicken noodles soup. About 10 small packages of ramen noodles, too.”

  “Good,” Mom said. “We have some small bags of dry mangoes, persimmons, apples, pears, and bananas.”

  “Mom, here are some bags of rice,” I said.

  “Good job, Evie!” Mom said coming over. “That’ll last about a year.”

  “Here are some dry potato flakes,” I said. “Not much left though.”

  “The dry potatoes are good for making mashed potatoes,” Mom said. “We have enough fresh potatoes from our garden to last a while, though. Somehow potatoes grow well on New Earth. But, it will be just our luck if gravy came with the dry potato flakes.”

  I held up a bag. Gravy powder.

  Mom laughed. “And we have soy.” She pointed at the bags in the corner.

  That night, we sat at our dining table. Mom had decorated the table with some vegetables and edible flowers we grew in our hydroponic garden in one part of the Shelter.

  While I waited, she brought out a large silver platter with a lid. “Ta Da!” Mom said, laughing, whipping open the lid.

  I clapped my hands as we came close to smell the wonderful aroma of roasted vegetables from the garden, mashed potatoes with gravy, and something covered in gravy.

  “I know this is the 13th time we’ve celebrated this holiday since you were born, Evie,” Mom said, “but I still couldn’t get this right. Hopefully it’ll tastes as it’s supposed to. We have to make do, though, since we don’t have access to what this is supposed to be.”

  I peered down and saw that at least it had legs. Drumsticks. “Mom, it does look like a turkey this time.”

  “It’s the best I can do with what we have available,” Mom said. “And in this Below Ground Shelter, we don’t have turkeys.”

  “Or cows,” I said.

  “Chickens,” Mom said.

  I took out my digital reader and thumb through the pages on Farms. “Sheep, goats, and pigs,” I said.

  “So, I made a vegetarian turkey for Thanksgiving,” Mom said.

  “Tastes pretty good,” I said, munching down on the drumstick on my plate.

  “Make do with what you have,” Mom said, “and with some creativity, you can make more out of anything.”

  “I like that,” I said.

  “What?” Mom asked. “What do you like about it?”

  “That you can always make something more out of something little when you apply creativity,” I said.

  “Like what you did with your room,” Mom said.

  “You like it?” I asked, widening my eyes. Mom had told me that I can do whatever I want with my room. To decorate it anyway I want. To arrange it anyway I want.

  “I like that you painted it to give it more color. But I love how you captured that time period…Vintage Earth Early 21st Century Americana.” Mom said.

  “I found photos of teenage girls’ bedrooms from that time period,” I said. “Videos even straight from the girls whose rooms were showcased. They called themselves “bloggers” back then.”

  “What they put up online into the ‘cloud’, as they called it back then somehow got preserved by the satellite orbiting in space,” Mom said. “So we have visual recordings from that time…lots of historical data for us to recreate images and technology.”

  “That’s one thing I’m thankful for,” I said.

  “Preserved records?” Mom asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of Earth. What Earth had looked like and was back then.”

  Mom smiled gently and reached out her hand to pat mine. “I’m thankful for such a wonderful, wise, and introspective daughter. All these years on New Earth by myself was worth it because you were born.”

  I couldn’t help getting tearful. I heard it so many times, but I wanted to hear it again. “Mom, tell me about my birth.”

  “After Thanksgiving dinner,” Mom said.

  “Oh, okay,” I said disappointedly.

  Mom laughed. “We don’t want the food to get cold. And we don’t want to waste any of it. It’s hard to come by so make the most of it.”

  “True,” I said, thinking about how much time we spent on the cultivation of food, or as Mom put it, the “Farming” of food. On New Earth, the soil was so sandy and rocky, it was nearly impossible to grow anything directly in the soil. But water was plentiful as the night air was so Arctic cold, that when daytime arrives, the sun’s heat would turn the air into rainwater, which would collect into crevices all around. Some of these crevices were long and narrow, but always filled with water. Mom called these crevices of water… “rivers”.

  “Since we have plenty of water,” Mom had said. “It is a strength of our environment. We can use it to grow plants. We can use it to generate energy.”

  Mom said that the Shelter we lived in had been built and designed for hundreds of people. She was one of the designers and architect of the Shelter, which was supposed to be the first colony on New Earth.

  Unfortunately, the only people who actually got to live in the Shelter was Mom and me.

  “What happened to everyone else who was supposed to live here?” I had asked Mom when I was a toddler. “People like us?”

  Mom shook her head. “We were attacked,” Mom said. “First they wiped out nearly everyone on Old Earth. Then when we thought we had escaped them, taking about a hundred of us on Red Genesis to New Earth; they were there, too. The Monsters…that was what Thomas, your father…that man in that video, went to fight. And died. That day, I was out scouting with Thomas, pregnant with you…but close to the Shelter…when the Monsters suddenly appeared and attacked. Luckily, we were close enough to the Shelter to get to it quickly. When Thomas and I parted, I ran to the Shelter, activated the security lock down on it, and waited and waited for anyone to come by so I can let them in. It had been days, which turned into weeks, then months… No one came to the Shelter. I had wanted to go out of the Shelter to search for any survivors, but I couldn’t risk it in my physical condition. I was about to give birth to you. And everyone knew to head for the Shelter if they can. If they can’t, it was presumed they didn’t want to go or they were dead. Everything we have down here must be preserved. Archives and data from Old Earth, including formulas to technology, were all stored here, in the safest place we created on New Earth. Even the way of life. Our knowledge, our belief systems, our form of society.”

  “That’s why you couldn’t go Above Ground for a long while?” I asked.

  Mom nodded. “I was given the responsibility by your father, as the 2nd in Command of New Earth, to carry out our plans to re-colonize New Earth, to protect and preserve everything in the Shelter, and most importantly, to protect you. When I had you, it was the most sacred, the most fulfilling moment I’ve ever had…giving life to a new being. Then watching and helping you grow into the amazing complex, intelligent, strong, and beautiful person you are now.”

  I smiled widely and hugged my mother. “See, I got you to tell me about my birth.”

  Mom reached out and tweaked my nose.

  “Clever, but I saw that coming.” She poured me a tropical smoothie and handed me a plate of sweet potato pie.

  “Yum!” I said, “I feel like I’m in Vintage Earth Hawaii on Thanksgiving.”

  “That’s the theme I was going for,” Mom said. “Eat up, because afterwards, I’m going to show you a few more things.”

  I quickly finished our Thanksgiving dinner, and followed Mom into an area I’ve never been to at the Shelter. It was a hidden wing.

  Which looked like an ordinary warehouse from the outside.

  “I always thought this part was where the computer generators are,” I said.

  Mom nodded. “You’re right about that. It is where we have the generators. It is also where we store our data, have backups, and where you can find the more sensitive information we want hidden. Files of our civilizations, technology, and even the history. I’ve already spent years organizing, classifying, and combing through what we have, which is just a tiny fraction of
everything. This is where most of our knowledge is stored. But also, Evie, this is where I have our personal histories, what I’ve recorded everyday for you so you would know what to do should I’m not around. How to survive. How to fix the computers. How to fix the pipes that carry the precious water from Above Ground to the Shelter. How to plant almost anything in our garden. How to make your favorite dishes. How to use solar panels above to get energy for us at the Shelter. For the past 13 years, Evie, I’ve documented, recorded, filmed, everything I can think of that you might have questions on into videos and manuals so you can have the knowledge and awareness to take care of yourself…should anything happen to me.”

  “Mom,” I cried. “Nothing is going to happen to you, right? You’re just saying that, but nothing really is going to happen to you.”