by Mark A. Jones
SYNOPSIS: THE DRY CIRCLE Word Count: 38,966 Genre: Science Fiction In the prehistoric past, a dying Martian civilization seeds its genetic legacy into Earth's emerging humanity to escape extinction at the hands of the predatory Quinca. This experiment, the "Lumina," carries cobalt-enriched blood—a biological beacon of engineered evolution. Thousands of years later, Lord Atum, an entity of the Eighth Density, observes a "seed within a seed" hidden in the sub-quantum architecture of matter, waiting for a moment when humanity is most vulnerable. The story shifts to 1998 in County Kerry, Ireland. Pádraig O’Shea, a farmer grieving the loss of his wife and son, discovers a naked infant at the centre of a "dry circle"—a patch of ground untouched by a torrential Atlantic storm. The child, possessing burnished copper skin and silver-glowing eyes, radiates a "phantom warmth" that defies the winter cold. Broken by debt and grief, Pádraig surrenders the child to the authorities, and his memories of the event are later surgically excised by a mysterious operative. Fifteen years later, the child, now known as Cronan O’Reilly, begins to manifest terrifying latent powers. Guided by Thadius Slaine—an artificial intelligence from the future—Cronan discovers he is a "living battery" for ancient Martian technology. Cronan is propelled into a temporal conflict involving the 1943 Philadelphia Experiment, where he must use his own marrow to ground a catastrophic energy surge. To save the timeline and his true father, Pádraig, Cronan must master the "Dry Circle" technology before his own molecular structure is torn apart by the weight of two worlds.
