Message in a Bottle at 0.2c
What if the first step to the stars isn’t a starship full of people—but a gram of silicon, a scrap of sail, and a civilisation that finally learns to think in decades instead of news cycles?
When systems engineer Leo Halberd flies to Bali for the International Congress on Interstellar Futures, he expects equations, arguments, and bad coffee. He doesn’t expect to walk out with a job helping design the most dangerous machine humanity has ever tried to build: a hundred-gigawatt laser “cathedral” in cislunar space, powerful enough to hurl fingernail-sized probes toward Proxima Centauri at twenty percent of the speed of light.
To make it work, Leo and his unlikely allies—a legendary exoplanet scientist, a terrifyingly practical EU lawyer, and Maya, a high-school teacher who becomes his sharpest critic and partner—have to solve more than physics. They must convince a divided world that there’s no “Planet B,” that any journey to another star must help fix this one first, and that mega-lasers can be built as peace infrastructure instead of weapons.
Over three decades, we follow Leo and Maya from conference bars to UN back rooms, from rooftop classrooms to mission control, as the Proxima beamer grows from napkin sketch to planetary utility. Their children grow up under “Proxima roofs” and beside rectennas powered by the same system that will, for ten breathless minutes, focus its strength on a paper-thin sail—launching a swarm of chip-scale craft on a twenty-year flight between the stars.
Then comes the long wait.
As wars fail to ignite on the old scale and climate curves finally begin to bend, the world settles into a strange new normal: annual Proxima Days, beam-use dashboards, and kids who assume that century-long projects are just what a civilisation does. And twenty-five years after the First Shot, in an unremarkable control room, a young operator quietly says the words an entire planet has been holding its breath for:
“We have lock from Sail 1A.”
Message in a Bottle at 0.2c is a character-driven, hard-SF novel about angry space, patient politics, and the courage to build cathedrals whose stained glass you’ll never see lit—aiming our best work, together, at something farther away than a war.
Message in a Bottle at 0.2c
Humanity’s First Interstellar Message to the Nearest Star
By: Ian N. Rank
Narrated by: Virtual Voice
Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
Release date: 12-19-25
Language: English
Format and Bitrate: M4B@125 kbps
Size: 464.44 MB
