Hello, Universe
Why are Pluto's moons disappearing?
Something is taking them apart. One by one. In no hurry at all.
The only ship that can get there carries no weapons. It carries ten movies.
A forgotten probe photographs it for thirty hours and sends the images home as calmly as it has sent everything else. By the time they reach Earth, the moon is gone. Then the second one goes. Then the third.
The Discovery was bound for Triton: a hundred and seventy meters of steel, a spinning ring that fakes half a gravity, two fusion engines, and a crew of five. In her memory she carries Hello, Universe, the message eight hundred million people voted on to introduce humanity to whoever is out there: greetings in two hundred languages, whale song, Bach, children laughing... and ten movies.
No one on board can open the file. No one can stop it from being transmitted.
Five people. One decision there's no coming back from.
Jack Cole, the commander, decides before the data is in and has never been wrong. This time, the thing coming toward them gives off nothing.Emma Hale follows every rule because she knows who pays when they break. And she holds a key no one else knows exists.Max Keller fought for eleven tons of reserve fuel "for what no one has calculated." It's already gone.Claire Gagnon waited fifteen years to touch a world she has just lost.Sam Porter makes everyone laugh and hides, behind every joke, the night he never talks about.Six light-hours away, in South Texas, a heart surgeon reads the ship's telemetry every morning the way other people check the weather. Her daughter sleeps with the window open so she can hear her father. One night she sets her spoon down and asks whether monsters take daddies away.
Whatever is out at Pluto is keeping count too. Of every moon. Of every signal from the third body from the star. It forgets nothing. It checks everything three times. And deep in its memory it keeps a two-part sound that its kind learned to fear a very long time ago.
Hello, Universe is hard science fiction with the math done: the engine, the light-speed delay, the ring, and Pluto's real moons hold up every page. Above all, it is a story about what we say about ourselves when we don't know who's listening.
For readers of The Martian, Project Hail Mary, and fans of Arrival.
"Come back the way you're leaving," she told him on the wet concrete of the launch site.
Twenty-eight days after the engines lit, the plan changed.
Start reading today. Scroll up and click "Buy now."
About the author
Austin M. Phil was born in Europe and has made a life in Texas, between the Gulf and the border, where the nights never cool off and you can see every star. With a background in science and many years in the classroom, he writes at night, when the house is asleep, and checks every number three times before it goes on the page. He gives no interviews and publishes no photographs: what matters is in the book, and the rest is noise. Hello, Universe is his first novel.
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