The Vessel Era: A Journey into Deep Space

Once the human brain was decoded, immortality became a business.

Everyone born with a First-Generation Fetal Core has a chip implanted at birth, their entire life backed up and ready to be transferred into a machine body at any time. Those without chips have no rights. Jiang Ci is forty-eight, with only 31 percent of his data intact and late-stage Gray Decline Syndrome. He has just eighty-seven days left.

He had accepted his fate, until someone told him that the memories of his wife Ning Pei, who died ten years ago during a failed transfer, had not been destroyed. They had been cut into pieces, labeled with serial numbers, and stored in the Chengsheng Group's vault: 176,000 fragments, scattered across the black market.

To piece her back together, he must use his own memories as an anchor. Every attempt makes him forget a little more of himself.

On one side are the recycling chain, the Star Harbor Project, and the Medical and Food Alliance's machines. On the other is a man with only eighty-seven days left. Jiang Ci enters the hearing, heads for Pod Three, and sets out for the Star Harbor ship nine light-years away. He doesn't know that what he's betting is more than just his life.

This novel and its characters are entirely fictional. Any resemblance is purely coincidental. Do not imitate.