Coordinate Z

A night-shift machinist climbs into an iron cylinder for one afternoon. When he climbs out, nearly two decades have passed, and the world has learned to sell what happened to him.

Lake City, 1996. Calvin Frost cuts steel on the graveyard shift at Corvel Machine Works, comes home to a rambler that smells of cutting oil and medicine, and takes cash on the side from Dorian Vale, a quiet entrepreneur running something strange out of a converted bay on Calder Avenue. The business is called Stillhour. Its product is boilerplate pods that can hold a person inside a single suspended afternoon while years pass outside. Its attendant is Sable, a pale synthetic host whose voice seems to come from the air just in front of her face. On the last night of the century, Cal lies down inside unit two.

He wakes in 2017. The grease racks are gone and the neon is dark. Over Vale's old shop hangs the logo of Coldharbor Systems, a company that has turned Stillhour's secret into a promise printed on banners along every street: *Your Time, Redefined.* The mills are closing and the banks are boarding up. Families are lining up in the sleet to sign their children into sleep bays and let the hard years pass without them. Each new person who goes under makes the city outside a little emptier.

Cal refuses to sign. He works with Ingrid Kessner, the retired power dispatcher who watched his heartbeat on the grid for eighteen years, and with June, a brilliant hardware hacker who is losing herself to Coldharbor's mist. Sable returns to their side as well. Together they work from a set of impossible diagrams scrawled by a man who believed space could fold like an old road map. Diagram by diagram, they build a torpor field, a power cell, a balloon, and finally a ship, with Corvel's lathes and salvage pulled from a dying city. Its destination is a dim red star in Eridanus that nobody else has bothered to look at: Coordinate Z.

*Coordinate Z* is a grease-under-the-fingernails science fiction novel about labor, debt, and time as the last commodity left to sell. It follows one workingman who decides that if the future is going to be stolen, he will build his own way out of it.