The Clones: The Virtual War Chronologs--Book 2 by Gloria Skurzynski (English) Pa

Description: The Clones by Gloria Skurzynski Corgan now lives on the Isle of Hiva, his reward for winning the Virtual War with his genetically altered teammates Sharla and Brig. Brig has died, but Sharla has created clone-twins with Brigs DNA, which leads to devstating results. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Clones are supposed to be identical... arent they? Corgan, hero of the Virtual War, has been living a blissful, if placid, life on the Isles of Hiva, his reward for winning the War with Sharla and Brig. But what he doesnt know is that Brig died soon after the War, and yet is not truly gone. Sharla had saved some of Brigs DNA and has created clone-twins with it. Corgans world is disrupted when Sharla brings one of the clone-twins, Seabrig, to him to raise on the island, while she keeps the other, Brigand, with her in the Domed City. However, when circumstances force Sharla to bring Brigand to the island, they find that while the boys may look identical, their temperaments are not. Brigand is haughty, willful, power hungry, and despises Corgan because of his relationship with Sharla. And, as a result of the cloning process, both boys are growing at an astonishing rate. In what may or may not have been an accident with his clone-twin, Seabrig is badly injured and must be airlifted from the island to receive medical treatment in the Domed City. This leaves Corgan alone with an increasingly dangerous and unstable Brigand, who is now his size, and looking to get rid of Corgan once and for all. A gripping sequel to Virtual War that could be ripped straight from the headlines -- in eighty years.... Author Biography Gloria Skurzynski is the author of more than fifty books for children and young adults, including Virtual War, The Clones, and The Revolt. Her books have won numerous awards, among them the Christopher Award, the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, the Golden Kite Award, and the Science Book Award from the American Institute of Physics. She lives with her husband, Ed, in Boise, Idaho. You can visit her website at gloriabooks.com. Review Quote "The Dream Machineis the gripping story of the quest for the Osprey, an ideal flying machine that transfixed the aviation world and eventually cost billions of dollars and dozens of lives. Like the helicopter-airplane that tantalized generals, engineers, and pilots for decades,The Dream Machineis also an irresistible hybrid Excerpt from Book Chapter One The sky was blue. A real sky, a real color, with real clouds, not a collection of pixels in a virtual-reality Box. Every once in a while, when he had a brief moment to himself, Corgan would let this real world seep into his senses, reminding him how much better even one minute of reality felt compared with the fourteen years of virtuality hed experienced inside his Box. He bent down to pick up a rock, a hardened piece of the lava that a couple million years earlier had spewed out of the ocean to create the Isles of Hiva. The rock filled his cupped hand with a satisfying weight. He ran his thumb across its porous surface and then, taking aim, hurled it toward the top of a tall coconut palm, smiling when he heard the thwack of rock hitting nut. The coconut hed chosen fell neatly into the sand at his feet. For no particular reason Corgan calculated the speed of his throw and the arc of its trajectory. At one time hed been able to split microseconds in his mind, but not anymore. Glancing again at the treetop, mentally computing its height to be 11.47 meters, he happened to notice a small black dot moving in the sky above the palm fronds. Too high for a seagull, it might be a frigatebird, but frigatebirds didnt fly that fast. As the object grew larger he heard the drone of an airplane. The Harrier jet! But the lab at Nuku Hiva wasnt scheduled to receive a flight for a couple more weeks, so why would the Harrier be coming now? Corgan ran toward the landing strip and reached it just as the jet dropped vertically onto the concrete pad. After the engines slowed and quieted, the hatch opened, allowing the passenger seated behind the pilot to climb out. A helmet and a blue LiteSuit hid the passengers identity until gloved hands reached up to remove the headgear, releasing a cascade of golden hair. Sharla! Corgans heart beat loudly enough that he could calculate its rhythm without even trying. Four months earlier he and Sharla had said good-bye, not long after celebrating their fifteenth birthdays together. Now here she was again, for whatever reason -- it didnt matter. Shed come back to Nuku Hiva; that was enough. He reached her and threw his arms around her, but she returned only a one-armed hug because her right hand clutched a flight bag. "Wait!" she told him as she carefully set the bag onto the tarmac. "Make sure you dont step on it," she said, laughing a little, and then both her arms flew around him, and she kissed him until he grew dizzy. "Where can we go to talk?" she whispered. "Privately, I mean." "Uh...you remember the barn where I work with the transgenic cattle?" "Its only been four months -- of course I remember. Ill meet you there. Take this bag, handle it very carefully, and dont look inside until I get there. I have to check in at the lab first. As soon as I can get away, Ill come to the barn." Waiting beside the Harrier jet, Pilot called out, "Sharla, hurry," and then both of them were gone. Corgan stood there, bewildered, growing even more perplexed when he thought he saw the bag move slightly, not more than a few millimeters, but...no, he must have imagined it. When he picked it up, it was heavier than hed expected. Trudging up the hill toward the barn, he started to swing the bag, then remembered Sharla telling him to handle it carefully. The barn smelled of hay and manure, which Corgan didnt mind. During the fourteen years hed spent inside his virtual-reality Box, hed never smelled anything the least bit unpleasant. Here on Nuku Hiva this pungent, earthy order in the barnyard was just one of many signals that he had his freedom now. He set the bag on a shelf in the back room where he stayed when he waited for the cows to give birth. The herd numbered forty-seven now; no bulls, all cows, and twenty-eight of them were pregnant. Nuku Hiva was such a lush, green, overgrown island that a hundred times as many cattle could have grazed there without depleting the forage. Since one of the cows was due to deliver any day now, Corgan went to check her. "Hey, Fourteen, hows it going?" he asked her. "Gonna give us what we want?" They were trying to create one perfect calf with a human clotting gene, another with a gene to help diabetics, and others that would produce disease-fighting compounds in their milk. Cow pregnancies lasted 284 days, a long time to wait to find out whether a genetic transfer had worked. Fourteen answered with a loud moo. Corgan never named the cows; hed been instructed not to treat them like pets or get attached to any of them. That rule wasnt hard to follow. Cows were not especially endearing. He kept wandering out to the brow of the hill to search for Sharla. She had to be down there in the lab with the pilot and the two scientists -- except for the barn, the lab was the only building standing on Nuku Hiva. Enough of his time-calculating ability remained to let him know that seventy-two minutes and fourteen and a half seconds had gone by since shed left him at the landing strip. At last he saw her coming, and he ran down the hill to meet her. "Race you to the barn," she said. Sharla -- always competitive. The first time he met her shed beaten him at Go-Ball. Virtually. She was panting a little when they reached the barn. Noticing that, Corgan felt satisfaction because his breathing hadnt sped up at all -- he might have lost his mental time-splitting ability, but physically he was in superb condition. Although his heart might have been beating a little faster at the moment, that was because he wanted to kiss Sharla again. She pulled away, saying, "Later. Lots to talk about now. Did you open the flight bag?" "No. You told me not to." She smiled. "Still Corgan the obedient. Never does anything hes told not to do, no matter how curious he is." Flushing, he asked her, "So, whats this all about? Should I open it now?" "No. Let me give you all the news first." Corgan glanced at the flight bag and again thought he saw a fleeting ripple of movement against one of its sides. Whatever was in there, whether mechanical or biological, seemed to be capable of motion. "Come sit beside me," Sharla offered, curling herself on a loose pile of straw. "Youll need to sit down to handle what Im going to tell you." "Is it bad?" he asked. "Part of it." She took a deep breath. "Brig died." It wasnt a shock; theyd known it had to happen. Still, Corgan had hoped that somehow Brig might grow strong again. Brig, the whiny, brilliant, deformed, demanding, great-hearted mutant whod been the third member of their Virtual War team. Brig the strategist whod helped win the War for the Western Hemisphere Federation. The War had taken such a toll on Brigs already weak body that it was only a matter of time before his meager strength gave out. "The only thing that kept him going toward the end was his battle to keep the mutants alive," Sharla said. "He won that battle. At least no mutants were terminated while Brig still lived." "And now?" Turning to face Corgan, Sharla shifted on the straw. "Its such a long story. Really complicated." "Start with why youre here," he prompted. "Do you want the official reason or the real reason?" "Both, I guess." "Well, as you already know," she began, "I am the most incredible code breaker the world has ever known." "And so humble, too," he muttered wryly, even though what shed said was true. Just as Corgan had been genetically engineered to have fast reflexes and time-splitting ability, just as Brig had been artificially created as a superstrategist, Sharla had been bred to break codes. All three of them had come out of the same laboratory, genetically engineered in the same domed city. "DNA coding is no mystery to me," Sharla continued. "I can anticipate every step, cellular and chemical, in the creation of humans -- or animals. And a few months ago I figured out a way to hurry up gestation. So now your calves can develop and get born in just three months, instead of forty-plus weeks." "Thats incredible," Corgan breathed. "Yeah, like I said, Im incredible. Naturally, the Supreme Council ordered me to come here to show your scientists how its done." The two scientists on Nuku Hiva, a woman named Delphine and a man named Grimber, shared a badly underequipped laboratory during the day and shared a bed at night. Every day and well into the evening they bent over their lab tables, probing with thin pipettes to laboriously suck the nucleus out of cows eggs, then replacing them with a human nucleus that contained a gene for whatever trait they were trying to replicate. In the evening Corgan would help them. He could tell to the tenth of a second when a zygote had reached eight cells, the point at which the cells had to be separated so that each could be genetically altered, one at a time. When it was time for a blastocyst to be implanted, Corgan would select a cow from the free-ranging herd and lead it down to the laboratory. After implantation the cow would be penned in the enclosure outside the barn where Corgan stayed. Eighty percent of the implanted blastocysts failed to take. Of the ones that "took," at least half were lost to miscarriage. Of the calves born, only four of them so far had carried the desired traits, and two of those had died soon after birth. The work was tedious, the equipment meager, and the success rate low. Still, Delphine and Details ISBN1416955607 Author Gloria Skurzynski Short Title CLONES Series Virtual War Chronologs (Paperback) Language English ISBN-10 1416955607 ISBN-13 9781416955603 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY FIC Series Number 02 Year 2007 Residence Salt Lake City, UT, US Imprint Simon Pulse DOI 10.1604/9781416955603 Subtitle The Virtual War Chronologs--Book 2 Place of Publication New York, NY Country of Publication United States Illustrations black & white illustrations AU Release Date 2007-06-13 NZ Release Date 2007-06-13 UK Release Date 2007-05-03 Pages 192 Audience Age 12-15 Publisher Simon & Schuster Audience General Publication Date 2007-06-13 US Release Date 2007-06-13 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:10333476;

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