STARVATION

A Hard Science Extinction Thriller

Dr. Dorian Veyne wakes in a frozen pod aboard a ship that should be empty. Two of his crewmates lie dead on the deck, fingers hooked into their own hair, nails broken. The captain and the engineer are gone. And Dorian cannot remember his own name.

He remembers everything else: physics, medicine, the half life of tritium. What he cannot remember is what he did, or why his ship sits inside a quarantine cordon that was built to be seen from the inside.

Then a voice speaks in his head and tells him not to answer aloud.

Humanity has beaten death. The Echo copies a mind into a new body, and the person lives on. Nobody asks where the original goes. Dorian starts doing the arithmetic, and the answer is written in starlight. Every transfer is paid for with the light of a star. In six days the Consortium will hold Continuity Day, nine billion minds copied at once, and the debt will come due all at the same moment.

The woman who runs the Consortium is not a monster. She sincerely believes the schedule will save fifty billion people from dying in habitats that are failing around them. She also knows about the voice in his head, and she wants it.

Hunted by the people he used to work for, haunted by a womans face he cannot place, and guided by an ally he has no reason to trust, Dorian has six days to rebuild what he lost, prove a theory nobody wants to hear, and find a way to hold the universes books shut.

For readers who love amnesia thrillers, ticking clocks and science that costs something.