Ira

Ira was the only son of a poor farming family, born to a divided society with little to stand on. He was destined to grow up to join his father in the Martian mines, and his ambitions to explore the stars were a distant, lofty dream.

As a child he watched humanity undertake their greatest endeavor, the Holocene project, as it departed from the Solar System to a new star; a place completely unfamiliar and impossibly distant. The feat left him in awe, but the harsh realities of life took priority as he grew up through a space age depression.

But Ira does travel to this star. Years later he wakes from stasis aboard the Holocene II, only to find himself the sole survivor of a catastrophic incident and left alone on a ghost ship floating on the outskirts of the Lithic System. Now in the place of his boyhood fantasies, his dreams quickly spiral out of control.

The system is flooded with a signal, interfering with electronics, playing tricks on the senses, and blurring the barriers of reality. The sound of that signal was something Ira knew as a boy, like a voice calling out to him across the void. He is deeply shaken and his memories are blurred, returning in flashes, shedding light on his murky past. Struggling to survive, Ira is cutoff and unable to return home. He travels through the Lithic System aboard the desolate, damaged Holocene II in search of rescue, answers, and above all, hope. Where he expected to find hundreds of souls from the first Holocene mission Ira finds the abandoned remnants of once thriving research colonies. Only their ghostly trail remains, leading him through a labyrinth of mysteries, into the unknown toward truth no one was prepared to find. The Holocene’s mission was not what it seemed, its true purpose revealing itself as Ira uncovers the crew’s fate.

Ira will confront the questions that baffled and astounded the best of Earth’s minds, walking the path they mysteriously vanished from, and he will face his own past that lead him to this strange and alien place. Was it the guiding hand of fate that brought him here, his own will, or some other force in the depths of space?