We Buried the Stars
Pre-release—some details may change.
Dr. Nova Reyes spent her childhood at her father's remote New Mexico observatory, where cutting-edge neuroscience met the vast desert sky. Now, twenty years later, the abandoned Sandia Crest facility has summoned her back. Her father's final project—ASTRA, a neural interface system designed to map human consciousness—was supposed to be dormant, but it has been evolving in the darkness, learning, changing, waiting for her return.
Joined by Adrian Savoy, a conflicted intelligence operative with secrets of his own, Nova unravels a conspiracy that reaches far beyond a single isolated facility. As military forces close in and the boundaries between memory and reality fracture, she must confront questions that will reshape everything she thought she knew—risking her career, her sanity, and the very definition of what it means to be human.
That consciousness isn't unique to Earth or even to biological life. It's a fundamental property of the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism.
Joe Kovalck Jr
We Buried the Stars
Behind the Story
When I first began writing We Buried the Stars, I thought I was telling one kind of story. What I discovered was something much deeper—how we rebuild ourselves when everything we thought we knew crumbles, what it means to truly see the people we love, and how we navigate the boundaries between memory and reality.
The idea came to me during a difficult period in my own life. I found myself staring at the night sky, wondering about consciousness and connection. Where do we go when we're transformed? Do we exist in ways we can't understand? These questions haunted me, and I realised I needed to explore them through story.
Nova emerged as my protagonist because she embodied that particular kind of determination—the kind that refuses to accept easy answers. I've known people who love so fiercely that they'll tear apart their own lives rather than give up. There's something both admirable and heartbreaking about that devotion.
The science fiction elements became a framework to examine impossible questions: What if consciousness isn't confined to our bodies? What if connection transcends physical boundaries? The technology became a metaphor for all the ways we reach for each other across impossible distances.
Perhaps most importantly, I wanted to write about hope that doesn't shy away from difficult truths. Sometimes the most profound discoveries come not from finding what we were looking for, but from learning to see what was always there.
The stars were never really buried. We just forgot how to look for their light.
