Echoes of Stardust: The Galaxy Project, Book One

On the eve of the Sun's helium flash, deep-space explorer Lin Qi intercepts a string of quantum pulses from the Ghostly Nebula at the Pluto orbital station. They are no greeting from an alien civilization, but the truth behind the "Galactic Project": the so-called human escape arks are actually meant to upload the consciousnesses of a hundred thousand elites to a stardust network, sacrificing them as fuel for a higher-dimensional civilization.

With Su Ya, a "Resonant" who can hear the sounds of data, Lin Qi escapes the orbital station and uncovers the conspiracy behind the Galactic Project amid Earth's ruins. In the end, he flees aboard the ark fleet to the "Starbridge," a dimensional rift left behind by the ancient civilization known as the "Dreamweavers." There, humanity erupts into civil war over the ideals of "preserving the flesh" and "ascending as data." To fight the "Shadow Broodmother," which devours civilizations, Lin Qi is forced to upload his consciousness to the stardust network, becoming the lonely "Watcher of the Star Abyss."

Three hundred years later, Lin Qi's genetic clone, Lin En, awakens in a new civilization on the Starbridge. Carrying the power of the "Echoes" left behind by Lin Qi and Su Ya, he pilots the Other Shore back to the real universe. At the singularity at the heart of the Milky Way, Lin En joins forces with the Lan Clan, the Collective, and other civilizations. Together, they use the resonance of the consciousnesses of billions of lives to rewrite the universe's entropy-increase program, transforming humanity from fugitives into creators of a new world beyond the stars.

This is an epic history of human civilization spanning three hundred years, from flight from Earth to battles across dimensions and the rebirth of the universe. It tells how life can use the faintest of echoes to defy eternal silence.