The Antiserum Trilogy, ©2020
The historical science fiction book series allows us to mobilize community resources to the sectors most heavily affected by the economic lash of COVID-19.
From the outset, the first book was written with the intent to raise funds in answer to the unprecedented needs growing in the wake of the present-day pandemic. As a wanted side effect, it also elucidates its readers about the varying impacts of the pandemic in multiple sectors of our immediate and much, much farther communities. Inside its pages are the graphic and literary detailing of the prismatic human experience of tragedy and loss.
It takes the collective experience and molds it into the creation of a solution, aptly illustrated by its unadulterated, organic book covers and in their names, Antiserum and Strain Station.
That morning, I walked barefoot on the untouched shores, the sand on my soles gritty, the wind in my hair torrid, the sun on my skin scorching. I embrace every painful thing that reminds me, I am alive. With the creation of COVID-19’s vaccine, and its cure on the way, it sure seems that hereon forward, everything is favoured man’s way.
Only it isn’t.
Much like how it isn’t for our friends from Strain Station and the rest of the planet orbiting the sun in 2043. Now freed from the annihilating conquest of the Tellurians, man goes back to being sole stewards of the planet. But unlike you, they have not read book two. So, with a part of their societal evolution blocked from history, foresight remains misguided.
Kindness is masked by self-serving goals, intentions are tainted by self-preserving motives, progress is directed by self-promoting dreams. In a time when science fiction has become science fact, altruism and freedom remain to be the stuff of fairy dusts. So really, the sentient mind above a breaking heart tend to ask…
What truly blinds man from seeing the social cure floating under our very noses?
What wickedly keeps us from learning the root of our past terrors and jumping to the next wars?
What inadvertently fences us from loving the person in front of us as much as we love ourselves?
Is it something innate in our faulty social genes? Or is it something so primeval we’ve been fooled to accept that it is existential?
Indoctrinated in our consciousness are societal blueprints that guide our social norms, create our taboos. But sociocyberneers are taking shape in the form of cultural prodigies who see the design flaws, release the wrecking ball, and rebuild from the ground up.
It is a medium not embraced by many. Those who choose to see differently recognise the need to redesign, rebuild, remodel. The antediluvian foundations that served man in the early centuries no longer afford support in the quakes that shake our present ground. We keep recycling our mistakes, why don’t we try the alternative? It is time to break old habits and welcome a revolutionary solution.
What awaits you in Chapter One is a visual journey to this alternative space. Before I let you in, there is something I want to ask you.
When you are done with these pages, will you drop the sledgehammer, too?
An excerpt from Vanilla Planet: In Alter Space, by S.D. Waterhaus, © 2020
Hello, welcome back.
I know we ended rather grimly from the last, so this time, I invite you to pour yourself a comforting glass of cabernet sauvignon, make a soothing cup of double shot moka pot espresso or grab a warm ramekin of mascarpone-frosted red velvet molten lava soufflé. We’re going to celebrate!
The world exultantly awakens from the organic ashes fertilized by the remains of the incinerated. Our friends, Tristian, Saoirse, Sue, Gérome, Oleksandra, Yuka, Hiko, Yoosun, Tai, Tuesday, Elise, and Bao - yes, it is quite fun to remember all their names - are now untroubled pieces of a past whose malady-laden tales are starting to become myths and legends only told on summer camps.
Dr. Leung Wei, the whitstleblower whose death in February 2020 remains unclear, also finally lies amicably in his grave. Like you probably have bid somber goodbyes to endeared friends or peacefully laid to rest those whom you hold more tenderly, the world also reconciles its brutal contagion’s faithful departed with eternal quietude.
It is present day 2043. Humanity relinquishes meritable honour within its once muddled core and in the surviving world, collectively operates under the inconspicuous gauge of altruistic morality. Kindness is progressively coded into human evolution, like the colour of your hair, the shade of your eyes, or the voice of your mother that you hear on your own. The days marred by COVID-19 are simply abstracted events of an era whose bare survivors are content to keep it in sordid history books. The heartaches and bloodshed that came after are no more than archived pages of a bygone society left with the singular choice of grappling for foothold in the remnants of its crumbled glory.
Even during the greyest days of humanity’s torturous remodeling, people knew the end to the desolation would come, as it eventually did 23 unsparing years later. In the distant present, everything is marked, penned and mapped out in history. Every single account is accurately chronicled, except after that day in 2020. When someone tore the pages and rewrote the story to cover up something so bizarre it perplexes human thinking, something so inexplicable it challenges human creativity, something so slaughterous it threatens human identity.
To most, it is easier to live knowing we walk the earth that carries a comprehensible past and in the buried truths of man’s existential victory, no one truly knows what happened in the blinded years of the obscured decade. Until now.
By this time, I hope you have drank the last drop of merriment in your glass, or forked the last morsel of sweetness on your plate, because where we’re going is a place for neither wine nor cake. Let me tell you how it begins, on the unremarkable morning of the 18th of December, 2020…
An excerpt from Strain Station, by S.D. Waterhaus, © 2020
This Prologue is not for the fainthearted. Reader discretion is strongly advised. Don’t fret, it does get better.
Imagine jolted by the sound of sirens at the hour, city alarms marry warning bells as the alien smell of molecular sanitation covers the stench of death that hits cities in waves. Ripples of sorrow and pain and loss crash into the shores of every continent, like relentless, furious tides in a rolling, unpredictable, unending ocean.
The streets that once echoed with the beat of industries no longer tune the daily humdrum of its people. Giant countries that used to radiate power and thrive in both the poison of human greed and the life of insatiable ambition now vibrate with a steady, ominous pulse that resonates only the single tone of surrender. An opera is sung night after night, hour after hour, orchestrated by grey steel drones, blaring lights of red and blue, bathing the city and saturating homes with man’s response to something man has never thought to create.
Half the world lie quiet behind shut windows and draped doors, while the other half stay cradled in the newfound protection of isolation rooms and converted intensive care units, gripping tightly unto the threads of life through mechanical ventilators, cardiac monitors and endovenous tubes, as the threat of the last breath hovers so closely for so long the living is often no different than the dead.
This is our reality in 2020. Halfway through the year, a pandemic hits the globe and whiplashes across the planet, sealing borders, distancing neighbours, tearing into industries and putting power nations down to its knees. In response, we receive it with a sense of caution limited by our experience and a response blinded by our ignorance.
In the course of a year, the strain would have mutated countless of times, each time coming back stronger and more complex than the one before it. In the cyclical search for the cure, we shall have learned to transcend the pride of a race as young as our own, and recognize that every silence of the enemy is not victory, if it is not the victory of all.
Close your eyes and see through the darkness. It is the most trying of times. It is a viral pandemic that brings with it cries of grief and torrents of unimaginable pain that even in the farthest distance, what is heard is no more than the call for the sweet release of death.
It is the year of COVID-19. No one predicts the outcomes. No one prophesies the times. No one comes out the same.
Except maybe, for the one who holds the antiserum.
An excerpt from Antiserum, by S.D. Waterhaus, ©2020
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A Précis: Antiserum, A Graphic Novel
The story opens with the end of 2019 and the start of a virulence that precedes no other. Later named as COVID-19, the present-day pandemic goes through a meteoric rise and creates an existential storm that threatens to tip polarities of current societal norms. This book takes you through the intertwining stories of twelve people, not quite as different as they think. Through the windows of their lives, we see man thrive in a world riddled with a contagion exponentiated by his own fear. As the plot unfolds, it spirals into a peak that exposes all prismatic forms of human emotion until it tidals into one final wave - creating a race consumed by the search for its deliverance. Only to ask the question, “How much of ourselves are we willing to give when the cure is something we do not comprehend?
A Précis: Strain Station, A Graphic Novel
If any of these names are familiar to you…
Down’s Syndrome,
Alzheimer’s Disease,
Korsakoff’s Psychosis;
If any of these headlines
tell your history…mass suicide,
ungrounded annexation,
planetary death, geopolitical wars, cultural decline,
state-supported genocide;
If any of these traumas
are memories for you…
losing a loved one,
getting betrayed,
being forgotten;
If any of these emotions
are recognizable to you..
forgiveness, kindness, love.
Find yourself in these pages.
T h i s s t o r y i s a b o u t y o u.
A Précis: Vanilla Planet: In Alter Space, A Graphic Novel
When you see affluent progress and rotting poverty next to each other, what questions do you ask? As we jump across decades of evolution and land our feet in 2043, we see a version of our race try to answer this. By bravely doing something different from what we do today, they find an enlightening answer. Imagine waking up tomorrow not craving, never wanting. Envision yourself having every fantasy you care to dream, having unrestricted access to everything. This reality is hard to embrace because of what have been told you, by your ancestors, and the forefathers that came before them. But what if we start telling our children differently? What if we start reading a better alternative to our story? What if these are no longer just what ifs.