There are those in my audience whose precepts come into conflict with the events described here. This foreword is for those people, like the young man I overheard at the old drive-in theatre skeptically proclaiming that films are out of touch with reality, how even documentaries exaggerate a storyline featuring a brave heroine who always succeeds by a hair’s breadth you never doubted, how good always triumphs over evil, how strange coincidences always stack up. He thinks all these stories are lies. That young man has it backwards. The tellers are not falsifying information. Rather, they are selecting to share from a large set of truths only those of most interest to the reader, and that means excitement, action, deep passions, and yes, an appropriate victory. Never has any author lied to you; all his marketing was done at the initial stage where he chose the seed which blossomed into his work. It is a selection bias of the highest sort. And what is the probability, out of all the genomes you could have played host to, you were born as you? I think the answer is 1.0. The story of Carolyn Solon is only interesting because her experiment was a failure. Without blemish, if nothing had gone wrong, it is a different story I would choose to tell. “Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.” –Alexis Carrel SOLON By Joseph Collard. Art still to come Draft edition 9/20/15 This is a finished draft of “Solon”. Solon was originally planned to be a hybrid graphic novel, with comic style art aside the prose. For various reasons, this didn't work out. I've converted the scripts for these illustrations into prose, so I apologize for the lack of detail in some of those places. They were intended to be conveyed efficiently by artwork. One reason I decided to release this work as a free ebook is to build an audience for my future projects. If you're interested in staying in touch, visit solonexperiment.com and add yourself to the newsletter list, or simply check back periodically for updates. Enjoy. "...as Nikolas Tesla wrote in 1900, claiming discovery of a new fundamental axiom from which he could theorize a true perpetual motion machine: A departure from known methods – possibility of a "self-acting" engine or machine, inanimate, yet capable, like a living being, of deriving energy from the medium – the ideal way of obtaining motive power. No working model was ever engineered, of course, but…" “…sed nostros montis, quorum iuga celsa putantur, per bis sex ulnas imminet ille locus. hic Solis nemus est et consitus arbore multa lucus perpetuae frondis honore uirens. cum Phaethonteis flagrasset ab ignibus axis, ille locus flammis inuiolatus erat; et cum diluuium mersisset fluctibus orbem Deucalioneas exsuperauit aquas. non huc exsangues Morbi, non aegra Senectus nec Mors crudelis nec Metus asper adest, nec Scelus infandum nec opum uesana Cupido aut Sitis aut ardens caedis amore Furor; Luctus acerbus abest et Egestas obsita pannis et Curae insomnes et uiolenta Fames…” --Lactantius, The Phoenix, lines 7-20 Full text link (“But through twice…violent hunger”). It was resurrected by man… Carolyn Solon stood among a whirlwind of burnt pages, their tattered forms seeming to treat her as an intensifying focal point for the rare mild breeze which cut the heat of Cairo. She stooped to pick up a leather bound old book, almost entire. She wished to inhale the scent of its pages, for the book was well over two hundred years old and had been well-preserved up to this point. Now, however, her nostrils only picked up the pervasive dark scent of the carbon smoke on the wind. Black clouds still rolled off the extinguished lumber and drifted lazily in the stirring air. Carolyn snatched a few pages from the turmoil around her and glanced at them hastily. One was a fragment of a poem in Latin, and the other seemed to be the introduction to a physics textbook. She shoved them both into the leather volume anyway. She didn’t know why she felt drawn to Egypt; it was a slim chance in a slow oppressive scorch, a glimmer of a revelation that might be nothing more than a mirage. But here was data to be collected, in the scattered remnants of a rich library burned by a different sort of heat. It was an arson, of course – times in Egypt were turbulent. Perhaps it had even been an accidental part of riots where vicious fiery cocktails flung their flame through the sky. Volunteers had gathered to clean things up, hoping to recover the singed remains of the Institute’s famed historical documents. Amongst the smoking pages was a detailed history of Egypt from the point of view of Bonaparte’s best scholars. It connected many fields across the years and across the floodplains of the Nile: old arts, pioneer natural philosophy, linguistics, geography, mythological literature. It connected worlds, from the ancient Egyptian city sulking and sweating underneath the modern district of Ain Shams, the Eye of the Sun, to Alexandria, the chief port and cultural center of the wise Greeks. Yet Carolyn was a microbiologist. She didn’t volunteer in order to save Egypt’s cultural history; she lived in New Mexico. Her only concession to the charcoal in the air was a dense lock of dark hair spread around her neck and across the lower part of her face as a filter. In fact, she rather liked the black dust of destruction. It smelled nice, like balsams and resins and campfire. She didn’t wear her labcoat like the helpful Egyptian citizenry did; she wore loose breezy clothing in light grays so she wouldn’t have to worry about the marring of charcoal. Smoke still rose in places. Embers glowed. “Hic Solis nemus est et,” she muttered, quoting a shred of a poem she had recently scavenged. “Here, then, is the Grove of the Sun.” A sarcastic comment, given the lack of enlightenment she expected to find. Still, many of the documents she found scattered about were interesting, with that extra cultural flair of Egypt enhancing otherwise mundane literature easily available from her laptop or an American library. Photographs of runed obelisks flanked sheaves of chemical equations in an enriched mishmash. Carolyn had visited many great centers of learning recently, touring much of the world on the dime of her employer, conducting researches - but this burned-out hulk was secretly her favorite. She wished she could have the run of the place instead of furtively shoving crisped papers into the broad, flat pockets of her charcoal grey pants. This was a good quest, but the rays of the unfiltered African sun had been making her irritably moody, queasy in the stomach, and a bit numb in the mind. Unusual, for Carolyn, and it was high time she gave up. Her illicit haul on virology and in silica genomic calculation was small but new to her collection. She stalked the distance back to her decrepit hostel, dodging the lunatic shouting about the resurrection foretold to him in a rotting pigeon claw, avoiding the sane demonstrators and their haunted looks, calmly permitting the pickpocket to make off with the decoy wallet she kept in her back pocket. Stone monuments to a time gone by, obelisks, tributes pointed skyward to the gods of the omnipresent Saharan sun, swept past Carolyn’s reference frame. The scholar mumbled another passage: “Protinus exsculpunt sacrato in marmore formam – They carve her image on consecrated marble.” Carolyn felt drawn to the phrasing of the ancient poet. It echoed in her mind like a chant. She gained the gateway of a lodging optimized for compulsive tourists. Ain Shams was too famous to pass up; the only way to be any more steeped in the feel of ancient Egypt would be to camp in the shadow of the great pyramids instead of the ruins of Re-Atum’s age-old temple. An email on her laptop, connected to the networks of the world by expensive satellite service, asked confusedly why she had flown to do research at a destroyed college instead of an intact one. She set her boss straight, trying not to be nasty to the exec. “A bit off on the order of events there, Aaron. I actually booked my flight to the Institut d'Égypte before the rioters burned it down, hoping its interesting history might have promoted some good insights into the problem at hand. The place is, or rather ‘was’, well networked to several hospitals, to the Desert Research Center, and to Helwan University, which I plan to visit next. The Institut was founded by Napoleon Bonaparte. Isn’t he the one you always quote? I have essentially finished here (found some hints and a very useful compound formulation) and have already booked the next leg of my trip, the last before returning to NM. Will talk to you then for a more thorough report.” An answer came almost immediately. Aaron must have been sitting at his desktop, and Carolyn was too jetlagged to calculate the time difference. “Carolyn! You’re always so formal, Miss Solon. Email updates are fine. The more I hear from you, the better! Aaron Shombs Vice President, PlasmiCorp, NM HQ” Miss Solon’s mood had improved. The tension she’d been feeling had diminished slightly at a touch of moving air from her tabletop fan, even though Aaron never appreciated her abstract reasoning skills on their own merit. Aaron was a bigshot with no scientific background, but Carolyn had to admit a grudging admiration for his skill at corporate ladder climbing.