The book starts out by introducing the main characters which happen to range from young adults to teenaged kids. Of course they’re all growing during the book so most of the story takes place when the youngest are teenagers. The two main characters are Stephen and Stella, twin brother and sister, with Stella about 6-minutes older of the two.
The year is around 2165 and we’re on Earth, I think. It’s a different Earth than we know since there is now a world government led by the Wold Consensus, whatever that means, and backed up by major corporations of which UniCorp is the largest and most influential. We find ourselves, along with the twins, Stephen and Stella, at the Antarctic Research Center (ARC), in, of course, the Antarctic. The twin’s parents, Zuma and Johan, are more or less in charge of the ARC, with Zuma as the actually overall boss of the place. There are a large number of people working at the ARC for whatever reason and we don’t really ever find out exactly what everyone is doing. They were doing some kind of research on the oceans, studying the impact of existing environmental conditions on Earth and how it’s affecting sea life.
It also seems as though some one had a brilliant idea a while back to begin drilling holes in the earth in order to pipe all the toxic gases into the ground instead of letting it float around in the atmosphere. Right off the bat, this doesn’t sound like a very smart thing to do. It seems that so much drilling has taken place and so much toxic gases have been pumped into the earth, that it’s causing fault lines to either increase in size or grow new ones where they didn’t exist. The Earth’s population has grown tremendously and there isn’t a lot of space left for people much less for growing the food they all need to eat. Now, the team in the ARC has discovered something more and wants the government to get the word out to save people who might be living in dangerous locations. But, how do you move several hundred million people, or even a billion people from one place to another and have them a place to live at the new location? Who’s going to pay for all the new construction and moving expenses? And what happens if they don’t have enough time to move every body?
So, that’s kind of what the book is about. It’s pretty slow at the beginning because you go around reading about these various people, or at least the eight who are the “Chosen”, but you don’t know what they have been chosen for nor why. And the book never gets around to telling us about either the what or why. Most of the story is about the two twins and their time at the ARC. It’s not all that exciting, just two young kids trying to stay out of trouble while having something to do. Apparently, most everything will happen in then next book, but I don’t feel very motivated to read the next book, if and when it comes out. The whole story just isn’t that interesting to me anyway.