The First Visitor

The signal came from Earth. The answer is coming from somewhere beyond it. Mara Venn has survived the impossible: a reconstructed humanity, the hidden Earth beneath the Earth, the Memory Sea, and intelligences that nearly turned human history into a permanent prison. Now she has followed the oldest mystery beyond the edge of every known map. There she discovers evidence of a visitor who reached Earth long before humanity understood what it had found—and left behind a question that may determine the future of the species. Can humanity remember without becoming the memory? As Mara and the crew of the Daedalus investigate the mysterious Cartographers, they uncover a hidden history stretching from the first recorded contact in 1961 to the dead signal that began their journey. But someone has been altering humanity's records. Someone wants every human memory connected. And somewhere beyond known space, a civilization is waiting to see whether humanity chooses freedom or certainty. The Archivist must decide whether preservation without control is possible. Mara must decide how much of humanity's past deserves to survive. And the first visitor may finally reveal why Earth was chosen in the first place. The answer could change everything humanity believes about its origins. THE FIRST VISITOR is Book Five of The Dead Signal, a science-fiction mystery thriller series about artificial intelligence, memory, identity, lost civilizations, and humanity's encounter with something older than its own history. The dead signal was only the beginning.