PROLOGUE

      This is the third book I’ve written. I wrote the first one for the norms, because I wanted to tell them what it’s like to be born Handicapped. How it feels to be among the despised one in a thousand with an immune system that keeps you trapped on Earth, while everyone else can portal casually between the twelve hundred worlds of humanity.

      I wrote about what happened at the start of 2789. How I lied my way into a class of off-world pre-history students, who were on Earth for their compulsory year working in the ruins of the ancient cities. I convinced them I was a norm, fell in love, got caught up in the rescue of a crashed Military spacecraft during a solar super storm, and was awarded the Artemis medal.

      I thought that was the end of my story, but then an alien probe was detected approaching Earth, and the Alien Contact programme was activated. Its commanding officer needed someone like me, someone who knew Earth and was Handicapped, and I was the only one he’d ever met. He called in me and my boyfriend to help, and we ended up being the ones who sent a signal to the probe to trigger its communication sequence. The Military kept a lot of the details about that secret, so I wrote a second book about it in the hope that one day some future historians would read it and learn the full truth.

      Those first two books are locked away in a highly restricted section of Military records, and now I only have one day to write my third book. This is about what happened after we sent the signal to the alien probe, and it isn’t for the norms, or the historians, it’s for me.

      If I’m reading this, then I’ve already read the first two books, so I know Fian is a totally zan person. He’ll tell me all about the things