Book Title: SUBATOMIC LOVE
Character Name: Dr. Vienna Sevelier (known as Dr. Cecilia Ribold in former life)
How would you describe your family or your childhood?
In my current life (it being 2022 for me), my family has been, and thus my childhood was, marked by exceptional generational wealth. My grandfather, a copper magnate and also my best friend, has always been larger than life, which is partly why I chose this family when reincarnating after my last death in 1971. That larger-than-life aura has pervaded our entire family, my upbringing, our family today, with excessive connection and love, in lavish settings, either in my Victorian on the sea, his eight-chimney mansion on the sea, my parents’ (mother and stepfather) colonial on the sea, my sister’s cottage – on the sea. There is no struggle, no conflict, within my current-life family, which is, again, why I chose this family, and not my birth father, who came as an unfortunately necessary biological donor (which is the nicest way I can characterize him, without devolving myself into violent emotions and expletives). For the most part, the struggles and conflicts of my life come from sources outside our lavish family homes, sources that have chased me from my last life to this life. As such, this current life family is a backdrop, an unshakeable framework within which I live so as to find and be with my true love, as well as expose bad actors from my past life. I view my family as the pillar that keeps me upright in such extreme challenges, without which all would be lost – much like the binding of a book. Without the binding, or with weakness to that binding, the pages would scatter to the wind. And I have no room to lose even a particle of my being, much less a full page.
What was your greatest talent?
In my last and this life, I find complex physics, particle, quantum, and theoretical, to be rather, well, easy. I have never struggled with appreciating all the laws of physics. This talent allowed me to sort out how to direct my own reincarnation.
Significant other?
My significant other, you ask? I would laugh at such a notion, but I do not wish to be rude. Most everyone, well everyone except for us, believe love is for another, an “other” separate from themselves. Whereas, in truth, my love and I do not have significant others in each other: we are the same being. He is the entire point of, the entire reason for, my existence. We are subatomically bound, and I do mean that quite literally. It is difficult to explain unless you’re in it, but we have proven, on the most fundamental, elemental level, that we were once an ancient atom of an ancient element. It is this life in which we must rebind – recondense, if you will – into our original construct of protons and neutrons and electrons. Frankly, it is difficult to discuss “him” in romantic terms, as I have no choice but to be attracted to my “significant other” on all levels: we are the same atom. Simple as that. I apologize for destroying your understanding of love, but it is the barest of truths.
Biggest challenge in relationships?
Ha! See my above answer. Imagine knowing you are an ancient love, a singular ancient atom of an ancient element that has been split apart, disbanded and disbursed over eons, and to know you have this one shot in all of eternity to rebind? Imagine that challenge, but worse, and I stress, knowing that you actually have that challenge? The tension, the stress, the urgency in a singular, ephemeral life would be, and is for me, all consuming. It also means, I have little to no bandwidth to forge deep and meaningful relationships with anyone else. My life has a singular purpose: to rebind with my essential complement, my “true love” in common terms. There is one exception: I am quite close to my grandfather. But he is the life age of my current mind age: we’re both in our 90s, in that sense. He has had 90-ish years in one continuous life; I have had 90-ish years divided between two lives. I believe I’m able to connect most with him because we see the world through the same-age lens. Also, he doesn’t take any shit from anyone, and I have no time for anyone’s nonsense, either. I’m as much a “grumpy old man” as he is, to be honest.
Where do you live?
In a Victorian, on the sea, in a seaside village, on Cape Ann – the North Shore of Massachusetts. A place far superior to anything anyone thinks of as “wealth” in The Hamptons. Here, the wealth comes from excessive natural beauty of wild variations, and the homes are entrenched, as if old-world European estates. But let’s keep that truth between us. I’d rather the billionaires cram themselves on that little, homogenous stretch of crowded sand on Long Island and not come here to clog it all up with their many cars and their grotesque yachts. I’ll take the Gloucester fishermen’s boats any day to all that noise.
Do you have any enemies?
• Too many to count. Afterall, I redirected my own reincarnation, so I’d have to tally my enemies over two lifetimes. I’ll make a list:
• My birth father, in this life;
• The NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission), who I’ve lied to, in this life;
• Heinrich Dualle, from my last life (an engineer at the Pointe Reason nuclear facility);
• Ren Iaello, from my last life (Henrich Dualle’s lieutenant engineer);
• Dr. Emil Falzon, from my last life (an interloping physicist at the Pointe Reason Nuclear Facility);
• Lou Whitestone, from my last life, Board Chairman of the Pointe Reason Nuclear Facility
• I believe, but have not yet proven, a woman with a gray streak in her hair, who I believe has been following me around of late – in my current life;
• Many critics, or those jealous, of my success as a bestselling author – in this life.
Do you have children, pets, both, or neither?
None of either. I have spent this current life with a singular purpose: to rebind with my true love. He, on the other hand, married a disaster of a woman and had a daughter. They are no longer married, and for good reason, but he is the most loving father in the world. As he loves her, I love her, although I am, or I thought I was, a secret to her.
What do you do for a living?
In my last life, I was the Chief Physicist at the Pointe Reason Nuclear Facility in Pointe Reason, Maine. In this life, I have been many things, sometimes overlapping: a physics professor, a bestselling author of thrillers, and a researcher on the topic of “unexplainable coincidences.”
Greatest disappointment?
My unforgiveable lack of vigilance and thus the part I played in the 1971 Pointe Reason nuclear meltdown, which ended my life, my lover’s life, my best friend’s life, whole groups of engineers and other plant workers, and the entire death of the facility – forever.
Greatest source of joy?
Whenever I am with my essential complement, my M, who was named Mitch London in our last life.
What do you do to entertain yourself or have fun?
In my last life, I would take great joy in eating lunch from a metal pail, while sitting on the Pointe Reason cliff’s edge, overlooking the wild magnificent sea. In this life, I entertain myself for only brief moments of permitted joy, by writing thrillers or sitting with my grandfather in the study of his seaside mansion.
What is your greatest personal failing, in your view?
Falling in-love with Mitch in my last life and allowing that to blind me to dangers at the plant I was meant to protect. In all of eternity, although I cannot bear to be separated from M for even one minute, and thus am relieved to know we connected in our last life – after literal eons – I also, and I do hold multitudes of contradictions inside my own mind, regret allowing the overpowering joy of being with M to distract my otherwise clinical precision of running that dangerous plant.
What keeps you awake at night?
Fretting over how M, in this life, knows we are an ancient atom and works so hard, away from me, on how to cure our separation and to rebind us, for eternity. Does he not know he may never succeed? In the most disastrous of ironies, his forced separation to cure our separation forever, squanders what miniscule time we have left. How does he not appreciate this conflict of time? We have already wasted so many years. I will never have his child, in this life. I am already well into menopause. At best, if we could just agree to be together until death do us both part, we have only a couple of decades left. I do hope for him to find our cure, but I must be realistic. Hacking eternity means hacking physics, and that must be impossible to do in back-to-back lives. Our living timescale doesn’t even register as a nanosecond against the timescale of eternity. In short, statistics and “time” and physics are stacked heavily against him, against me, against us.
What is the most pressing problem you have at the moment?
Currently, M’s daughter in this life is knocking on my Victorian’s front door, and so, somehow, she does know about me, about me being her father’s lover. I am no secret. And what a terrible time: it is Christmas Eve, and my family is at the dining table. She is emotional at the door. Is she upset with me? About M, her father, my love? And where is he? Why is he not with her? She bangs and bangs on my door.
Is there something that you need or want that you don’t have? For yourself or for someone important to you?
I need to be with M and to warn off the perpetrators of the Pointe Reason blast from any further harm.
Other than your true love, is there someone else you miss?
I miss terribly my best friend, Dr. Dawn T. Holcomb, Chief Safety Officer of the Pointe Reason Nuclear Facility. Although I have not been able to prove it yet, in this life, I believe she, too, perished in the blast. I also miss myself. I miss who I was back then as Dr. Cecilia Ribold. I was so hopeful and freer of mind. Sure, I was an intense physicist, and of only a handful of women in the 1960s and early 1970s working as PhDs in physics. But I enjoyed, truly enjoyed, my moments of solitude on the cliff’s edge, reading and watching the waves. Nothing truly insurmountable haunted me, or so I thought, or as I suffer in this present mind. In analogies to poetry, back then, I was full of sonnets. And now, I am full of ruminations.
You mentioned that you are, in this life, a bestselling thriller writer. What is the book you had the most fun writing?
That’s easy: Chain Link Mantis. It’s a feminist revenge thriller. And if you know anything about the praying mantis, perhaps you can sort out her mode of revenge on terrible men.
SUBATOMIC LOVE by Shannon Kirk
In the final seconds before the Pointe Reason nuclear reactor explodes around them in October 1971, Dr. Cecilia Ribold makes a conscious choice: to defy death itself. She, her true love Mitch, and her best friend and fellow physicist Dawn-her platonic soulmate-have a theory about harnessing the laws of physics to direct their own reincarnations. Energy cannot be destroyed, so they devise a method to ensure their bond won’t be either. They vow to find each other across lifetimes.
Now, half a century later, they are each fully entrenched in their subsequent lives. Ceclia, now known as Vienna, finds Mitch, now Marcello, in a fateful encounter. Hoping to express her agonizing love for him, while also sending a warning to a culprit she partly blames for the Pointe Reason disaster, she publishes a novel containing details no one could possibly know about the meltdown-unless they’d been there. The novel attracts her old friend Dawn, now Darcey, but also the dangerous attention of the perpetrators of the original disaster and the government who sees directed reincarnation as a valuable weapon. Their lives converge once more in an international chase across continents to defend their love, so deep and unbreakable, it’s subatomic.
Thriller Techno | Science Fiction [ Koehler Books, On Sale: February 10, 2026, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9798888249567 / eISBN: 9798888249574 ]
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About Shannon Kirk
Shannon Kirk is a practicing attorney and a law professor. She attended West Virginia Wesleyan and St. John’s Universities, is a graduate of Suffolk Law School, and was a trial lawyer in Chicago prior to moving to Massachusetts. She has been honored three times by the Faulkner Society in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, a physicist, and their son.
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