Narrowing

Any faster and the path closes."e; Eleven objects appear in orbit above the Earth. They do not move. They do not signal. They radiate nothing at all. They simply hang there, folded into shapes the eye cannot hold — half-finished, half-here, as if most of each one is somewhere else. David Chen, a neurosurgeon who has spent his life holding open the narrowest of paths, is among the first to understand what the objects are waiting for — because something buried in him has been waiting too. Then the world begins to change. Minds converge. Markets freeze. One by one, the futures that used to branch and widen are pruned to a single permitted path. And the people running the machine that does the pruning need David to finish it. He refuses. But refusal has a price — and the price has his daughter's name on it. A novel about consciousness, choice, and how much of himself one man will give to keep the world open.