The Sleep of Immortality / Robert Sweifach (ePub)

In 410 AD the Great Library of Alexandria was under siege for the last time. Political and religious mobs were out to destroy the library and kill it's charismatic and beautiful leader, the world-famous mathematician, Hypatia.

In order to save her life, Hypatia agreed to create a coded message engraved on a block of black granite, for the Hetairoi, the descendants of the personal guards of Alexander the Great. This message leaves clues to the location of a death-bed manuscript, dictated by Aristotle in which he tells the story of how he and Alexander have been put into a coma-like Sleep of Immortality, to be awakened in the future. In return for her help the Hetairoi grant Hypatia the same Sleep of Immortality.

The message on the stone not only leads to Aristotle's manuscript but possibly to the location of the lost tomb of Alexander the Great, Aristotle and Hypatia.

In 2019 the granite is found and sold to Dr. Tom Peters, a brilliant scientist who is assembling a team to utilize a supercomputer he has built designed to push the limits of genetic engineering to the very fundamentals of life itself. Peters is determined to alter his daughter Julie's Braca 1 gene mutation to prevent her from developing the same cancer that killed her mother.

How better to test the genetic engineering techniques than attempting to wake the 2300-year-old mummies.

How farfetched is this story? Everyday headlines warn of the dangers posed by the manipulation of DNA in medicine and crop science as well as the development of artificially intelligent computers. The rise of the machines and the creation of artificial life may not be far off.

Finally, check out the story of the discovery of the Lady Dai, a 2100-year-old mummy unearthed in China in the early 1970's. Forensic pathologists concluded that the body was in the same condition as one that had recently died.

Perhaps they knew about The Sleep of Immortality.