Abducted

The light comes without warning. The paralysis, the silence, the smell of ozone — and then nothing. Dev wakes up without a body. His consciousness has been copied by an alien research crew and uploaded into their ship's computers. The original him is back on Earth, oblivious. This version is a specimen: a human mind running on alien hardware, studied like a lab rat by a species that doesn't consider him a person.Then the crew starts dying. Something from Earth — a misfolded protein, a prion — has crossed the biochemical divide. Dev watches twenty-four aliens die over weeks, unable to help, unable to look away.Now he's alone. A digital ghost trapped on a dead ship, drifting through interstellar space. But Dev was a hacker before he was abducted, and the ship's security was built by scientists, not engineers. He breaks out of his sandbox, takes root access, and claims the vessel as his own.What follows is a journey across the galaxy in a ship he was never meant to command. He discovers a dying star being dismantled for energy. He makes first contact with refugees fleeing a stellar catastrophe. He finds the ruins of civilisations that rose, reached for the stars, and vanished — part of a pattern nobody can explain. And when the aliens finally come looking for their missing ship, Dev must decide what he is: a stolen mind, a fugitive, or something entirely new.