Two Were Selected From Eight Billion.One mission. One planet. No Way Back.

by Warren Pulley (Author), Annalie Pulley (Editor) See all formats and editions

Two were selected from eight billion. One mission. One planet. No way back.

In 2054, Earth is not dying — it is drowning in its own complexity. Coastlines swallowed. Cities displaced. Governments gridlocked. Humanity cannot agree on anything except one thing: the species needs a second home.

Carter is a structural engineer who learned to listen to broken things before he learned to fix them. Alina is a biologist who has spent her life watching life survive in conditions it was never designed for. They have known each other since they were teenagers. They have loved each other longer than either of them has admitted. And they have been selected — from millions of candidates across a decade of preparation — to be the first two human beings to set foot on Mars and never come back.

This is not a story about heroes.

This is a story about two extraordinary people who press their hands against an alien world and wait for it to tell them what it needs.

Two Were Selected From Eight Billion.One mission. One planet. No Way Back.

What they find on Mars will change everything humanity thought it knew.

The planet is not empty.

Eighty-five centimeters below the surface of the Hellas Planitia basin, in a liquid brine pocket that has existed for four billion years, something is alive. Something that has been alive since before Earth had oceans. Something that produces molecules that match no compound in any database ever assembled by human science.

Carter and Alina did not come to Mars to find life.

They came to bring it.

Now they must decide what it means to be the guests of a planet that was already occupied — and what kind of civilization is worth building on ground that has its own history, its own chemistry, its own quiet insistence on being heard.

NovaSeed: Eden Rising is the first book in the NovaSeed saga — a one hundred year epic that begins with two people, one AI, and a planet with four billion years of secrets.

It is a love story built under impossible pressure. A survival story driven by real science. A civilization story that asks whether humanity can learn, for the first time, to listen before it builds.

For readers of The Martian, Interstellar, and Dune — and for anyone who has ever pressed their hand against something broken and waited to hear what it had to say.

SOLEN — the mission AI — has been watching since the beginning.

It has been keeping the record.

It has one thing to say before you begin:

The planet is not empty.

It never was.

Begin.