Fifteen years after Dr. Marcus Chen's sacrifice liberated forty-seven species from the Kythera Archive, his daughter-in-law Dr. Sarah Chen discovers that freedom has made them visible to an even deadlier threat. The galaxy's liberated worlds are vanishing one by one, their populations harvested by evolved collective entities that have learned from the Kythera's mistakes.
These new predators don't preserve individual consciousness—they extract it, strip away everything that makes beings unique, and discard what remains. They are perfect predators of the mind, and they're systematically recapturing every species that Marcus died to free.
When the harvesters set their sights on humanity's refugee fleets, Sarah must do what her father-in-law could not: wage war against entities that exist as pure consciousness scattered across the galaxy. But conventional weapons are useless against beings made of thought and quantum energy.
Sarah's solution is as brilliant as it is desperate—a consciousness virus built from the liberation templates Marcus embedded in the galactic quantum field. If she can infiltrate the harvesters' collective network from within, she might be able to turn their own stolen minds against them. But the price of failure isn't just death it's the complete extinction of individual thought itself.