Did someone order a post- apocalyptic story with a side of conspiracies, adventures and romance? After 25 years asleep in space, a crew comes back to Earth to see humanity has been wiped out by an invisible radiation. Is Earth survivable? Is any human alive? With the advanced technology of 2240, the post-apocalyptic life doesn't seem to be a fight for survival, but if humans are alive, there will always be chaos.
Did someone order a post- apocalyptic story with a side of conspiracies, adventures and romance? After 25 years asleep in space, a crew comes back to Earth to see humanity has been wiped out by an invisible radiation. Is Earth survivable? Is any human alive? With the advanced technology of 2240, the post-apocalyptic life doesn't seem to be a fight for survival, but if humans are alive, there will always be chaos.
           I was in my ship in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, talking through holotime with my boyfriend Marcus. He was on the space station in Earth orbit, waiting for our ship to come back from the belt with tons of liquid hydrogen to power cars, buildings and everything else.
           âYouâll be here soon,â he said eagerly. âYour mission is almost over.â
           âWhere should we go after this?â I said while trying to hold Marcusâs holographic hand. âItâs been one straight year in space. I need a little bit of Earth adventure.â
           âWe should go toâŚâ he began saying, when a loud fire alarm sounded in my ship which didnât let him finish. The sound was accompanied by red flashing lights that almost blinded me. Just then I knew I was about to face the worst nightmare for any space military force.
âItâs happeningâ I screamed. âFire on the deck! Red light, we need to go to cryosleep!â
âI love you, MiaâŚâ Marcus said before the hologram disappeared. All communications stop in the event of catastrophic failure.
I ran out of the room to get to the cryosleep chambers. I only had three minutes to get to it, to be frozen for a long time. We would be ejected into space in the emergency pod, a ship with not that much power acting as the motherboard. It would take at least a year to get to Earth with that engine; and depending on any malfunctions or failures, there was a possibility we would never get back.
Running through the corridors, I bumped into Eliza. We had been friends since middle school, but we became inseparable in 2202, when humankind stepped foot in Proxima Centuri B, the closest planet to Earth, 4.2 light years away. It was thought to be habitable, but even if it wasnât it gave hope to scientists to keep looking. We shared the dream to explore the stars. We both went to University of Wisconsin for aerospace engineering, and had registered together one year ago for the Space Force. This mission was our second together. I was a pilot and the second in command, and she was head of engineering for the extraction of liquid hydrogen in the asteroids.
âOne of the liquid nitrogen tanks was not stored properly and had a reaction withâŚâ Eliza said, almost crying and not finishing her sentence.
âIt doesnât matter now. Letâs go to cryo, we only have 120 seconds,â I said to her, pulling her arm.
âYou donât understand. The damage is too high. Most of the systems have failed, including the pod engine and navigation system. We may never get to Earth, or we may get there in years or decades,â she said with a desperate tone. Her brown eyes were wide open, showing how scared she was. I could see her long red hair starting to levitate lightly. The gravity generator in the ship must have also stopped working. My body felt light, almost if I was walking on the moon.
âEliza, have faith and trust,â I responded. âWeâll get back home when we get there. Theyâll look for us. Marcus will look for the pod.â We had met Marcus in college, and the three of us were great friends. We knew we would get to know space together, and we did. Our first mission together was to study Marcusâs favorite radioactive bacteria on Mars. He had a theory that the energy from these bacteria could be better than the hydrogen cells that currently powered Earthâs cities.
We both ranâor better said, we both jumped with low gravity forceâto the pod. We had 40 seconds left before the pod would be ejected. There were eighteen in the crew but only four had made it to the podâGabriela, Robert, Eliza and me. Eliza started helping Gabriela and Robert to get into the cryosleep chambers, while I was scanning the podâs damage in the holocom, a computer with a high definition 3D hologram screen. I could see in three dimensions the whole ship, and scan all its parts by scrolling with my fingers very quickly. I realized basically everything was down expect our artificial Intelligence. I knew that us returning to Earth was unlikely, but Sydney, our AI, was our only shot. When the clock hit zero, the system would close the doors automatically and fly away immediately, leaving everyone still in the mothership to die. For the few of us who had made it to the pod, we had to go into induced frozen sleep in a useless vehicle. There was not enough food, water or beds for all of us, for a trip of uncertain length, without cryosleep.
âSydney is on,â I said to Eliza with hope, while I rebooted Sydney. Her hologram appeared in the pod two seconds after.
âYou have twenty seconds before the doors close,â she said calmly. âYou need to go to sleep. I will wake you up when we are back in the space station on Earth.â
âSydney, pod engine is partially damaged,â Eliza said, scared. âCommunications are out, navigation system, everything.â
âYou have to trust me, commander. I will get you home,â she told me, looking directly into my eyes. When I heard that, I realized Henry, our first in command, was not there yet, which made me the officer in charge. I froze and I turned to Eliza to hug her.
âSee you on the other side,â Eliza said with no hope of seeing each other again.
âMay we meet on Earth,â I told her, while I heard the podâs doors closing behind us. Only four of us would be trying to go back home, and I was the commander of a ship of death.
Eliza and I got into the cryosleep chamber, as we call it, but it was more like a glass closet. You stand up in the three-by-three-foot closet the whole time youâre in hibernation at 20 degrees, getting the minimal nutrients your body needs. The maximum amount a person has ever been in cryosleep was five years. This was in 2187 during the Saturn expedition, when there was a malfunction in the system because the mothership was hit by an asteroid. The emergency pod with the cryosleep chambers was ejected into space, and it took half a decade to bring eight Space Force members to Earth. My dad died on the wrong side of the doorâs pod while my mom, with me in her belly, came back to Earth in cryosleep. Other than for emergencies, cryosleep is only used nowadays for long-distance missions out of the solar system. Our nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) goes at half light-speed, which allows us to go anywhere in the solar system in hours, not needing cryosleep. However, since my parentsâ accident, scientists have designed the chambers to be able to sleep for thirty years, since the malfunctions could be so severe that the pod could float in the solar system for years.
And here I was, seeing my pod getting frozen, just like my mom did twenty-two years ago, leaving my dad on the other side of the door without being able to do anything. I was leaving fifteen of my crew on the mothership to die, and Sydney had thirty years to get to Earth with a broken engine before we would die in our sleep. What I was most afraid of, actually, was to make it to Earth in five, ten, twenty years, to learn that my mother was dead and Marcus had moved on to someone else. But I woke up to something much worse than that.
2240 RETURN TO PLANET EARTH proved to be a truly rousing action-adventure of a SciFi story set on a post-apocalyptic Earth. I quite enjoyed the plot featuring four Space Force astronauts who are rushed into cryosleep and ejected into deep space in an escape pod after an accident destroys their spaceship and kills the rest of their crew. When the pod is delayed for 25 years in its AI-monitored return to Earth's space station, the four sleeping survivors miss the apocalyptic event, which results in the elimination of most of humanity back on the home planet. That alone sold me on this book.
The main characters are all young, 20-somethings, and fairly new to their professions at the book's start. Successful completion of missions before the current action has advanced them to positions of authority and skill, presenting good role models for younger readers. And since the story unfolds from two points-of-view, Mia's and Blake's, there is both a male and female perspective to the storytelling, which is nice. The author has included a variety of characters who are confronted with big decisions to make and must then deal with the consequences of those decisions. Each character is revealed to have experienced tragedy in their lives with the loss of family members and friends during the invisible radiation event, which has wiped out 99.99% of the human population. The friends and coworkers display both personal flaws and strengths but stick together to help each other overcome adversity.
I enjoyed the combinations of settings for the action in the book. The story begins in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, goes to the Space Station, returns to Earth, and the emptiness of post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, a high-rise smart building, and the surprisingly fresh destination of Venezuela.
Yet, with all its good points, this book still needs a lot of work on language, grammar, and continuity. These three issues were numerous enough to inhibit the story's flow, and I had to constantly stop and re-read sentences to understand what the author was trying to say (i.e., missing words, the wrong words used, words used improperly, and typos.) Phrases were often repeated over and over again. Action described in one paragraph would be duplicated two paragraphs later. These things took away from what would have been a very good reading experience. However, all of the problems mentioned above are things that an editor could help resolve.
Without a lot of hardcore SciFi tech-talk and featuring a cadre of quite young protagonists, the target audience seems to lean toward YA, teen, and perhaps even upper middle-grades (once the grammar and language issues are corrected.) I urge the author to have this book looked over; I think the end result would be golden. Until that time, I recommend this book with reservations.