What We Carried to the Dark
About this audiobook
What We Carried to the Dark
In seventy years, a gamma-ray burst will sterilize Earth. The math is certain. The survival of eight billion people is not.
Six people are sent to stop it.
Kenji, the captain who has spent his life building the framework that might save everyone, and who carries a folded piece of paper in his breast pocket that he will not put down.
Miguel, who cooks like he is feeding the whole world and whose hands never shake, even when they should.
Wei, the commander who keeps everyone alive by keeping everything five degrees outside the circle.
Dmitri, who built the engine they are flying in, alone in a warehouse, because he believed in it before anyone else did.
Jack, a high school physics teacher from Cleveland who made a forum post at two in the morning and somehow ended up here.
Giang, a pharmacist who watches everything and says little and understands, always, exactly what is happening.
And then there is Zeebo.
Zeebo is MIRU — four arms, eighty pounds, a purr that fills whatever room he is in, and a gift for inserting himself into every situation at every hour with the complete confidence of a creature who knows he belongs exactly where he is. He should not be the emotional center of an epic about the survival of all sentient life in four star systems.
He is anyway.
What We Carried to the Dark is a literary science fiction novel about what it costs to go when someone has to go — and what gets carried across the distance that no mission briefing ever thinks to mention.
Literary science fiction.
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About the author
I’m Keith Page, and for over thirty years, my finest contribution to modern science was driving my wife to a physics lab at the University of New Mexico in the middle of the night, waiting in the dark with cold coffee, and completely failing to get my name on the final published paper.
While my brilliant wife, Giang, spent her career as a pharmacist meticulously watching over charts and saving lives, I spent decades expanding that parking lot story into increasingly heroic terms for anyone who would listen. It became our favorite life-long joke.
But after thirty years of being the unpublished driver, I finally decided to put it in print.
I write character-driven, literary science fiction born from a simple mission: to build stories large enough for the real, remarkable people who inspire them. My debut novel, What We Carried to the Dark, is the first step in that journey—an epic space opera about the immense cost of deep-space travel, the quiet heroes who keep the room steady, and the deep bonds (and occasional four-armed alien chaos) we carry across the stars.
Thank you for stopping by the club. I write these stories down before they can get any bigger in my head, and I’m incredibly grateful to share them with you.
Grab a book, dive into the journey, and welcome to the club!
