Dernière sortie
The Second Life of Scottie Sanders
Scottie Sanders is seventy-five years old when pancreatic cancer ends his life. Five years later, he awakens inside a crude mechanical body carrying the memories, personality, humor, and fears of the man who died. Even Scottie cannot prove he is that man, and his first second life lasts only nineteen days before a catastrophic failure returns him to darkness. When Scottie awakens again five years later, the technology has improved.
His new synthetic body looks thirty-five, can eat ordinary food, experience touch, and survive conditions that would kill a biological human. But the world has moved forward without him. His children are now older than he appears. His home belongs to someone else. The law considers him dead, leaving him without citizenship, property, or any certain right to control the body keeping him alive. Then billionaire technologist Dave Daniels offers Scottie a place aboard Pioneer Dawn, humanity's first interstellar colony ship.
The mission will carry forty specialists across forty light-years to the TRAPPIST-1 system. For Scottie, it offers meaningful work, legal protection, and a future beyond the laboratory. It also makes him part of another dangerous experiment: no reconstructed human mind has ever survived decades of interstellar travel. As Pioneer Dawn crosses the darkness, Scottie must earn the crew's trust, confront corruption within his own memories, and receive family messages sent by people aging far faster than he is.
Along the way, he begins to suspect that he may not be the only person aboard who has returned from death. When the ship finally reaches its destination, a vast artificial structure awakens near the planet below. It does not respond to the biological crew, or even to the ship's powerful artificial intelligence. It responds to Scottie.
His new synthetic body looks thirty-five, can eat ordinary food, experience touch, and survive conditions that would kill a biological human. But the world has moved forward without him. His children are now older than he appears. His home belongs to someone else. The law considers him dead, leaving him without citizenship, property, or any certain right to control the body keeping him alive. Then billionaire technologist Dave Daniels offers Scottie a place aboard Pioneer Dawn, humanity's first interstellar colony ship.
The mission will carry forty specialists across forty light-years to the TRAPPIST-1 system. For Scottie, it offers meaningful work, legal protection, and a future beyond the laboratory. It also makes him part of another dangerous experiment: no reconstructed human mind has ever survived decades of interstellar travel. As Pioneer Dawn crosses the darkness, Scottie must earn the crew's trust, confront corruption within his own memories, and receive family messages sent by people aging far faster than he is.
Along the way, he begins to suspect that he may not be the only person aboard who has returned from death. When the ship finally reaches its destination, a vast artificial structure awakens near the planet below. It does not respond to the biological crew, or even to the ship's powerful artificial intelligence. It responds to Scottie.
