The Orion Plan
About this ebook
An asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, larger than an apartment building and hurtling at a velocity of more than eighty thousand miles per hour. Its impact will be catastrophic, destroying much of the Eastern United States, and leaving millions dead. Then suddenly, the asteroid vanishes. Science and military personnel scramble to understand the mysterious phenomenon.
But something else fell to Earth. A basketball-sized reflective black sphere has landed in New York City's Inwood neighborhood, embedding itself into the ground and feeding off the energy grid. Within it is an artificial intelligence representing the last of an alien race. Its malleable alloy is growing, absorbing everything in its path, tapping into communication systems, and altering the bodies of every human it touches, telepathically persuading them to serve.
Dr. Sarah Pooley was the first person to discover the asteroid, and she may be the last person to save humanity from an alien consciousness supposedly on a peaceful mission, and the military war machine willing to detonate a nuclear bomb on New York to stop them.
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About the author
Mark Alpert is an author and journalist. A lifelong science geek, Alpert majored in astrophysics at Princeton University and earned an MFA in poetry at Columbia University in 1984. He started his journalism career as a small-town reporter for the Claremont Eagle Times, then moved on to the Montgomery Advertiser. He sold his first short story, "My Life with Joanne Christianse" to Playboy in 1991. His first novel, Final Theory, was hailed as one of the best thrillers of the year by Booklist, Borders, and the American Booksellers Association. Alpert lives in Manhattan with his wife and two non-robotic teenagers. He is a proud member of Scientific American's softball team, the Big Bangers.
