About This Series
Twelve years ago, aliens showed up offering friendship and free fusion power. We fucked it up so badly they left without even saying goodbye.
Ravi Sharma was fifteen when it happened. Watched their parent lose everything in the aftermath. Grew up knowing humanity had one job (don't be assholes to the visiting aliens) and completely botched it.
Now Ravi's a nobody sensor analyst at a reconstruction facility in Sydney. Boring job. Low pay. Zero respect. Just another face in humanity's ongoing scramble to develop faster-than-light travel so we can track down the Visitors and apologize before they tell the rest of the galaxy we're embarrassing.
Then Ravi finds something in twelve-year-old data. A signal. A test the aliens left behind that we were supposed to discover. A second chance we didn't even know we had.
Problem is, knowing about humanity's do-over and actually pulling it off are very different things.
The test requires cooperation. Real cooperation. The exact thing we catastrophically failed at the first time. And now everyone wants a piece of it. Corporations want to monetize it. Governments want to weaponize it. Terrorists want to destroy it. And Ravi's stuck in the middle trying to solve an alien puzzle designed to prove we've learned something while the whole world demonstrates we absolutely have not.
It turns out saving humanity's reputation is a lot harder when humans are involved.
A story about second chances, reluctant heroes, and whether it's possible to fix a problem when the problem is literally everyone including yourself.
