When something strikes the Moon hard enough to crack it, humanity doesn't die all at once. It just stops having a future.

Chance Monroe was already done with the world before it started ending. After too much loss and a civilization fraying at every edge, he retreated to a cabin in the northern woods with the last friend he had left. Then three impacts tore through the Moon in a single instant — in one side and out the other — and what they left behind wasn't just damage.

It was a countdown.

Years later, Chance wakes alone aboard the vessel Gaia, sealed inside a synthetic body built to outlast flesh, carrying the ARC across four light-years of empty dark toward a world that may or may not be what humanity was promised.

The ARC is everything: every genome, every seed, every blueprint of every living thing that ever drew breath on Earth, compressed into something small enough to survive the crossing. It is not a backup. It is the last original copy.

The mission was designed for one. The silence was expected. The hundred-year journey was planned for.

What wasn't planned for is harder to name. Not a malfunction. Not a monster. Something quieter than that — a wrongness buried between systems, memories, and the spaces where certainty should be.

The closer Gaia gets to Proxima Centauri b, the more Chance understands that the hardest part of carrying humanity's future isn't the cold, or the distance, or the odds.

It's not knowing whether what wakes up on the other side is still him.

Shattered Star is a science fiction novel about grief, identity, survival, and what it means to be human when the body is gone, the people are gone, and the only thing left is the memory of who you used to be.