A CALL FROM ME: The Last Transmission.

A Call From Me: The Last Transmission By The Unwritten One The world ended in 2989. Not slowly. Not with warning. A meteorite fell, scientists opened what they should not have opened, and something alien and patient and indifferent to human survival found its way into the bloodstream of an entire civilization. Twenty three years later the earth itself is dying. The changed roam what is left of the cities. The survivors count their days in rations and gunfire and the particular exhausted arithmetic of people who have been keeping each other alive long enough to stop asking why. Ember Reid is forty five years old and running out of time in every sense that matters. Wounded, barricaded inside the ruins of the Kortex Center with her husband Cole and the ghost of everyone they lost getting there, she has one chance left. Not to survive. She stopped hoping for that somewhere around year fifteen. Just one chance to reach back across twenty three years and warn the girl she used to be before the world the girl is living in stops being worth saving. The Resonance Bridge was never finished. Never tested. A science project abandoned the moment the outbreak made science irrelevant. But it is still standing. And if it works the way the newspaper article said it would, it can do one impossible thing. It can make a phone call to the past. To herself. Only herself. The machine does not negotiate. In 2988 Ember Reid is twenty one years old and having the best week of her life. New job. Good friend. Forty three pages of a novel she has not given up on yet. A quiet ordinary existence she is only beginning to understand is something worth protecting. Then an unknown number calls. And the woman on the other end sounds like her. Worn down to the bone and impossibly, undeniably her. Calling from somewhere that sounds like the end of the world with something urgent and terrible to say. She almost hangs up. She doesn't. What follows is not a rescue. It is not a miracle. It is two versions of the same woman separated by twenty three years of catastrophe, talking to each other across the distance of everything that was lost, trying to find the one thread that if pulled correctly might unravel the whole disaster before it begins. Older Ember is dying and she knows it. Younger Ember is the only hope left and she doesn't know that yet. And somewhere between the first hello and the last transmission, both of them will have to decide what they are willing to become for the world to have a chance at surviving what is coming.