What if there were two of you?

What if there were two of you, separated by stars and circumstance. The first "you" - the original - is taking the slow path on Earth. But the second "you" is a scan of your entire self - a map of your brain, memories, choices, and traumas. The second "you" is thrust across the sky as a data stream to a different world, a different society, and different civilization.

In a future where faster-than-light travel remains impossible, humanity and sentient AI have solved the distance problem another way: scan yourself, transmit, and arrive as a copy housed in a new synthetic body.

Both are you.

Both are alive.

The original keeps living, and the copy starts over.

What if there were two of you and you could give yourself the chance to start over?

When a woman chooses to transmit to a distant colony, before making the journey herself in a torpor ship, she arrives years later to find her copy has already built a life, changed her politics, and become a symbol in a societal conflict over what humanity is allowed to become. The man who traveled with her faces the same split - except his second self didn't adapt.

It radicalized.

Others aboard the ship find their own copies in their new home, while some expect to find a familiar face when it's actually long gone.

Showing up with the face of a dead loved one to a new home you aren't familiar with, where everyone remembers you - when you were never there...

Project Zero is a science fiction novel set in a future where the hardest questions aren't about the stars, but about what you owe to yourself when there are two of you. Does humanity's next chapter belong to the people who remember where they came from or the ones who got there first?