Ascension by Laura Hall (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📕

The apocalypse didn’t go as expected. No volcanic eruptions or tidal waves. No asteroid, aliens, or celestial horsemen.

That’s not to say it wasn’t bad.

It was devastating.

Two years after the fateful day that changed the world, the remaining powers-that-be named the event Ascension. The intent was for a literal interpretation, but someone didn’t do their research.

For those who’d been struggling with the spiritual implications of the event, it cemented the belief they’d been left behind. In the following months, mass suicides happened on the regular. By the time discussions began to find a new moniker, it was too late. Ascension had stuck.

As far as I knew, no one actually went anywhere in a spiritual sense. Not unless those who died—horribly and painfully—caught piggyback rides on angels’ wings when no one was watching. Granted, we were all a little distracted.

There were riots, fires, and food and water shortages lasting months. It took more than five years for the wildly swinging pendulum of normalcy to find balance on its newly fashioned scale. Now, fourteen years after Ascension, we’re finally—mostly—there.

The New Normal.

Funny how the passage of years will shift perspective and how adaptable the human species is when faced with reality-bending circumstance. What once seemed so catastrophic is now a worldwide holiday, celebrated with festivals, retail markdowns, and used car tent sales.

July 28. Ascension Day.

Or, in more personal terms: The Day Fifty Million People Died.

Scientists have spent the last decade-plus trying to figure out why, out of the blue, all human brains on the planet decided to change over the course of a day. And why did the sudden activity in formerly quiescent gray matter kill so many? For that matter, why did our brains alter our bodies’ abilities to procreate and age, and for a good many, radically alter DNA?

Numerous theories have arisen over the years, but no definitive answers. None that satisfy the scientists among us, anyway. The truth is, no one knows what happened, or in what order. It’s a Chicken and Egg quandary.

Was it an environmental factor, or more plausibly, multiple factors, that spontaneously altered our DNA, which in turn woke up portions of our sleeping minds?

Or did some evolutionary trigger in our brains depress, which then prompted cellular mutations?

Was it environmental, biological, or circumstantial? Was it biowarfare gone wrong? (Denials all around on that one).

And why the hell did it happen exclusively on July 28?

Before Ascension, I was a Statistician. My master’s thesis had to do with predicting ovarian cancer survival rates, which landed me a dream job out of college at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.