The Somatic Bridge

Dr. Isak Corell is a curator of dead things and an archivist of Earth’s lost ecosystems who is exiled to the Pavonis Mons colony on Mars. He arrives to find the terraforming failed, the colony’s nitrogen stores nearly exhausted, and Earth’s paralyzed bureaucracy has cut supply lines, leaving only five hundred days of breathable air. Concluding the machines cannot be fixed, Isak partners with a rogue physicist and a disgraced engineer to launch The Somatic Bridge, a radical retroviral therapy that rewrites the human genome. Colonists adopt altered physiology and a hive mind called the Syntony to survive, and when Earth returns the Martians resist evacuation.