ES Eter­nal Sab­bath (Del Rey 2006) writ­ten by Fuyumi Soryo (Mars), paper­back, 240 pgs, list price $10.95. Rated OT for older teens +16. Story com­pleted at 8 vol­umes and are cur­rently avail­able. This author also wrote Mars.

Wow, this is a fas­ci­nat­ing story about human exper­i­men­ta­tion gone awry. Ryousuke Akiba, the main pro­tag­o­nist, is a hacker. He’s a genet­i­cally engi­neered human who’s able to hack into the minds of other peo­ple. He manip­u­lates or shuf­fles the data that makes up people’s mem­o­ries and thoughts so that he can con­trol them. His code­name is ES00 but he goes by Shuro, after the palm leaf in the Bible.

The sci­en­tists who cre­ated Shuro were look­ing for a gene that would enable humans to live longer. This was a secre­tive exper­i­ment. The gene that they are look­ing for would resist pathogens thereby cre­at­ing a robust immune sys­tem. What they found was the ES gene which was used to cre­ate Shuro. It turns out that Shuro was a mir­a­cle birth because so many of the other eggs wouldn’t divide or would rot. Because of that, the sci­en­tists decided to clone Shuro, to fur­ther their stud­ies and to ascer­tain why he survived.


In doing so, they cre­ated “Isaac” who was again, ref­er­enced from the Bible, named after the son of Abra­ham, who sac­ri­fices his son to God. The researchers planned to cre­ate Isaac, dis­sect him and study him. How­ever, what the sci­en­tists didn’t know was that Shuro and Isaac could read minds. When Issac was born, he knew all along what the sci­en­tists were going to do to him. So he destroyed the lab and killed most of the sci­en­tists there that con­spired to kill him. Isaac then dis­ap­pears. With his power, he is con­sid­ered dangerous.

Now, the only remain­ing sci­en­tist is look­ing for Isaac and is ask­ing for Shuro’s help. The sci­en­tist plans to kill Isaac but Shuro isn’t moved to help. He feels that Isaac’s not his prob­lem. Accord­ing to Shuro, the sci­en­tists only see him as a “guinea pig” and not as a real per­son. But Shuro is an ambiva­lent char­ac­ter. His actions seem to con­vey that he is one of the good guys but he manip­u­lates people’s minds in order to steal people’s iden­ti­ties. He resides with the Akiba fam­ily and pre­tends to be their son.

The power that Shuro and Isaac have is quite dan­ger­ous. They can eas­ily con­trol people’s minds but not all of them. Seems that some peo­ple are eas­ier to manip­u­late than oth­ers. Mine Kujo, who’s a neu­ro­log­i­cal spe­cial­ist who befriends Shuro, is one them. She knows about Shuro’s pow­ers and is also help­ing to track down Isaac.

While Shuro doesn’t har­bor any need to to strike out against human­ity, Isaac is of a dif­fer­ent mind­set. He har­bors a hatred against mankind. Sup­pos­edly he was born never learn­ing the value of human life. Like Shuro, he steals people’s iden­ti­ties and can manip­u­late people’s minds and caus­ing real and life like hal­lu­ci­na­tions. So they hunt for Isaac, look­ing for any strange or unusual event that will give away his location.

The images in here that the author uses to dis­play one’s feel­ings of hate, jeal­ousy, anger and people’s fears is nicely done. I was reminded of the movie with Jen­nifer Lopez, when she went into the mind of that psy­cho to help the local police search for that miss­ing girl. Quite a few peo­ple had thoughts that por­trayed them in some sort of grandiose man­ner. The sto­ry­line in here could make for a good movie. Will order the rest in this series. This is a promis­ing sto­ry­line. My grade, B+. I inhaled both of these titles in one sit­ting. A good series.