Let’s Circle Back
Adult Light Sci-Fi
Status: Drafting
Query Letter
LET’S CIRCLE BACK is a speculative science thriller blending the emotional stakes of UNWORLD by Jayson Greene with the high-concept technological speculation of MACHINEHOOD by S. B. Divya and the consciousness-bending narrative scope of THE ARCHIVE UNDYING by Emma Mieko Candon.
When brilliant physicist Zanna Sharpe invents Snapshot, a revolutionary scanner capable of mapping every particle in a human body, she believes she is solving humanity’s oldest mystery: how to separate the mind from the body. By isolating the Psyche — the informational pattern of consciousness — from the Soma, Zanna hopes to conquer death and disease entirely. If Zanna can perfect the technology, she might be able to bring her sister Margot — who died slowly from ALS — back to life in an able body.
But when her employer, CEO of Pendulum Inc., Elijah Pierson, builds three massive data centers to run Snapshot at a planetary scale, the system begins producing impossible results. Human scans fracture into multiple divergent versions, and the technology reveals a terrifying truth: consciousness does not exist in a single timeline.
Each scan creates branching realities.
As realities begin to converge, Zanna discovers that Snapshot is pushing humanity toward a catastrophic technological singularity, one where infinite copies of human consciousness will proliferate across collapsing timelines. To stop it, she must team up with Marcus McDiarmad, the leader of the technoterrorist group BLACKOUT, and destroy the system’s three core facilities. But Elijah has an ultimate goal: to converge all timelines into one perfect reality that he controls, called Project EDEN, and he will not let Zanna and Marcus get in the way.
Zanna must decide whether humanity deserves immortality after all, because to stop Project EDEN, she may have to erase every scan ever created, including the last remaining traces of her sister’s mind.
The First Page
Zanna Sharpe has seven minutes before she changes history, but first, she has to save a rat.
Save, of course, being a relative word, and one whose nuances are lost on the rat as it tries to wriggle free from her grasp. Zanna picks up a high-heeled trot through the chrome-plated elevator lobby and slams her bent elbow into the button to call the cabin, hissing through her teeth at the jolt of pain that spasms up her arm at the impact. The little white rat hisses, too.
“I’m sorry, god!” Zanna whispers, tapping her heel beneath her floor-length green dress. The elevators are empty now, all the press and shareholders having already filtered into the 30th floor ballroom for the tech demo, but it still takes time for the cabin to shoot up from the basement. “It’s your fault for hitching a ride. You know you’re not supposed to be up here.”
The rat, offended, nips at her cuticles.
“Motherfu—”
The elevator dings, its shiny doors opening wide, and Zanna darts inside. With her still-smarting elbow, she presses the button for LL — Lower Laboratories — before leaning back against the smooth glass interior with a heavy sigh, holding the rat at arm’s length. Its beady red eyes boggle back at her, as if this is an adventure, not a barbed-wire hurdle on the path to the most important night of Zanna’s life.
“I’m sure this is fun for you,” Zanna muses breathlessly, nudging the rat’s tiny cheek with the pad of her finger. “Free from your cage, out in the big, wide world…”
The rat wiggles its pink paws, fleshy tail lashing and curling, as if to say, I’m not free anymore, thanks to you.
“I know. But it’ll happen soon. Maybe not for you, but for your brothers and sisters… or their children, or their children’s children…”
The elevator chimes its way down the floors — 23, 22, 21 — and Zanna tucks her arms close, nestling the poor rat against her chest.
“Little sacrifices. But we’ll get there.”