Prologue : Deja Vu

Bailey Foster is at the beach again. She’s lying facedown on a big blue towel in a strapless white bikini with the top untied to prevent tan lines. It’s July in South Florida, high noon, and hot as hell.

Bailey feels her back start to burn. She reaches around and deftly reties the top, then flips over in place like a freshly landed fish. The brightness from above forces her eyes shut. From inside the lids, she sees the fluorescent red-orange glow of her own blood.

A light ocean breeze carries the squawks of seabirds and the squeals of children playing in the surf, but it does little to sooth her searing skin.

Bailey Foster knows the Sun’s danger well, knows she’s playing with the fire of all fires. Still, she can’t resist. She loves the Sun. She loves the way it makes her hair blonder and her eyes bluer. She loves the cosmic glow it leaves humming inside her.

Here eyes still closed, Bailey feels around on the towel beside her head, finds her ear buds, and pushes them in. A strange song is playing. She’s never heard it before. The singing is angelic.

We have all been here before.
This is not our first time ashore.
We have lived and lived some more.
For we have all been here before!

Bailey imagines a single photon as it screams out of the Sun and barrels toward Earth. After an eight-minute trip, the tiny particle of light zooms into a bead of sweat on her flat abdomen. The convex droplet refracts the photon into one of her sizzling skin cells, where it collides with a molecule of DNA — deoxyribonucleic acid — and blasts a hole in it like a bowling ball hurled against a ladder made of matchsticks.

Luckily, she thinks, she’s still young, only twenty-six. She imagines her battered cell’s repair molecules leaping into action. Evolved to fix her damaged double helix with an elegance indicative of a clever creator, the littlest paramedics put Bailey Foster’s DNA back together again.

She knows she won’t be able to abuse herself like this forever. As she grows old, the microscopic medics will grow old, too, and lose their knack for healing. The result could be skin cancer. Melanoma.

Maybe one day, Bailey thinks, she herself will find a cure for the deadly cancer, but she’ll have to do it somewhere other than Bayner Genetics, where she works as a DNA researcher. Ever since the founders left the company to their quirky daughter a dozen years ago, Bayner Genetics research teams have studied only the rarest of diseases. Many of them Bailey had never even heard of before being assigned to hunt for their cures, which even if found would typically save only a relative handful of lives.

I have to find a new job, she thinks for the thousandth time.

You have all been here before.
This is not your first time ashore.
You have lived and lived some more.
For you have all been here before!

Bailey presses her palms against the lumpy sand beneath her beach towel and feels the awesome mass of the Earth. She imagines herself stuck to the sunlit side of the gigantic blue ball as it glides around a dent in space-time created by the even more gargantuan Sun, a sphere so huge it could hold a million puny Earths.

Oh! That incredible Sun! Even from ninety-three million miles away, its nuclear heat makes her feel lightheaded. Her eyes, seeking refuge from the light, roll back in their sockets. The red-orange glow fades to black. Her thoughts begin to drift.

She’s daydreaming.

Bailey Foster sees a small wooden house sitting alone in an endless grassland. There are chickens meandering about. As they wander, they scratch at the dirt with their long toes, then step back quickly to inspect the place they’ve just disturbed, hoping to find an unearthed seed or the tail end of a fleeing worm.

To the left of the little house there’s a pen holding a family of goats. The adult goats stand as still as statues and appear not to notice as the kids bound about as if on springs.

Nearby, in a separate pen, two pigs are luxuriating in what’s left of a mud hole. A few yards from the pigs a stoic milk cow stands in the shade of a solitary tree no taller than the peak of the little house. A big brass bell is tied around the cow’s neck with a red ribbon.

To the right of the house is an immaculate vegetable garden about the size of two tennis courts, its rows manicured and straight as laser beams. Beside it, a steel windmill squeaks as it turns.

A girl comes out of the house. She looks to be maybe five. Her feet are bare. She has long blonde hair and is wearing overalls with the legs rolled up. She’s holding a rope handle attached to a wooden bucket. She swings the bucket as she skips toward the windmill. Once there, she places the bucket on a worn wooden platform, reaches up, grabs a pump handle with both hands and pulls it down with all her might.

Water begins to flow into the bucket. She gives the handle three strong pumps, then lifts the bucket and puts it back down. She considers for a moment, then adds two more small pulls of water. She grabs the rope handle with both hands and lifts the bucket away. As she carries it back toward the little house the bucket’s new weight forces her to top every few steps to rest and improve her grip.

One of the pigs grunts. The girl looks toward the sound and notices that the mud hole has almost dried up. She sighs, lugs the bucket over to the pen and, with more than a little difficulty, lifts it up onto a sturdy fencepost. The pigs grunt and jockey for position beneath the bucket. The girl pours the water onto them. They lap happily at the cool waterfall and, when it’s done, settle back down into the new mud.

The girl takes the empty bucket back to the pump, refills it, and carries it to the house. She must have put in a little less water this time. The bucket is easier to carry.

Finally, she’s at the door. Before she reenters the house, she lowers the bucket carefully on the doorstep, turns, shades her eyes, and looks up at the Sun. She pulls a red cloth from a back pocket and wipes her face. Then she lowers her gaze and looks straight at Bailey. She has blue eyes.

We have all been here before…
We have all been here before…