The Colony That Never Existed by Jason Thomson (.ePUB)
File Size: 400 KB
The Colony That Never Existed: A Science Fiction Mystery Thriller by Jason Thomson
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 400 KB
Overview: Erin Doyle died in Duluth, Minnesota, in 2225. She was twelve years old. The municipal record carries a photograph of her headstone.
She is also thirty-four, raising two children, and running a hydroponics house on a colony forty-one light years from Earth.
Evan Rourke came out to Kepler-186f-2 to prove a fraud, and he wrote his finding before he arrived. Nineteen days on a cutter with nothing to read but his own assignment order, and by the time he came down the ramp he had already committed to the word forgery. He is a provenance investigator. He has spent nineteen years proving that documents are lies, he is very good at it, and he has never once been wrong about a thing this size.
Then he ran the dental plates.
The dead girl in Duluth and the living woman on the terrace have the same teeth. Both records are complete. Neither is a copy. Nothing has been taken out of either one, no gap, no seam, no forger’s hand anywhere on it. And when he goes looking for another, he doesn’t find one.
He finds four hundred and six.
Rosalind Ellison has been the colony’s registrar for eighteen years and has known something was wrong with her own register for most of them. She is the woman who writes the death certificates, rules the columns, and enters the newborns, and she has spent half her working life looking at entries that should not be there and filing them correctly, because filing them correctly was the only thing she could do. What she has never had is a name for it. Or a witness. Or a reason to say it out loud in front of eleven thousand people who have nowhere on this planet to go.
Now she has all three, and there is an investigator in her archive who wants to publish.
The count was forty-one in March. It was two hundred and eighty in May.
Fifty-one meters under Sector Four there is a settlement nobody built. In a sealed room there are nine thousand documents in a hand that stops mid-page. And out on the apron there is a courteous man in a gray coat named Redding who never asks a question, never raises his voice, and never threatens anybody, because he does not have to. He arrived with a standing authority in his pocket and the power to close the corridor to Earth for good.
An eighty-nine-year-old modeler with a bad chest and twelve borrowed processors has run it ten times and gotten the same date every time.
Genre: Fiction > Sci-Fi/Fantasy
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