This is a synopsis for a science fiction story of 103k words. Is it bad? What can I do to improve it? Any kind of suggestions are welcome.
I've been working on this synopsis for weeks, months, and it's driving me crazy. It was originally 3600 words and I chopped it down to 2000. To me, it feels like I chopped it to death.
Please, Mighty Sages and experienced writers, give me some input. I can take harsh criticism.
Thank you all in advance.
Anya
Cora Delacort is an ambitious woman who wants to have it all. But one body is not enough to deal with her demanding job at the Alien Research Center, motherhood, and her passion for senso dancing. She decides to have Fragments cloned, bodies of herself endowed with parts of her personalities that take over the majority of parenting and her senso dancing. By neural interfacing, she can access her Fragments' daily activities and experience them in minutes.
Soon after she brings her Fragments home, problems begin to develop. Cora expects them to function perfectly, and like other commodities, she treats them as chattels. When she discovers that they’re developing the feared Split Personality Syndrome, she's angry. Her Dancer Fragment hates her, but the visions of aliens that appear in her dances alarm Cora more than the hatred. Her Mother Fragment dreams about Lisa, a woman who’s obsessed with her lost babies.
Zac Solerno, a Belter with a space ship to his name, encounters a hostile alien ship on his way to Earth from the asteroid belt. By the intervention of a golden light sphere, he barely escapes.
When Zac, Cora's lover and the father of her son, drops by for a visit, they disagree about the necessity of Fragments. Zac worries about the tendency of Fragments developing Split Personality Syndrome, and despite their love for each other, tension settles around them. Citing his job of hauling chunks of rocks from the asteroid belt, Cora manages to convince him that she's in a lot less danger than he is.
After several sensory interfaces, Cora suspects that the visions of Dancer and the dreams of her Mother Fragment are something more sinister than Split Personality Syndrome. Despite the penalty of personality adjustment to own Fragments with SPS, Cora decides not to report it to the Panel of Bioregulation.
Unknown to the Moon Colony and to the citizens of the Coalition, (Earth, Mars, and the Belter Society) there is an alien base on the dark side of the Moon. Defense and Intelligence, based on Pluto, tracks the Ynevon's activities. DI evolved from the United Powers after the Ret invasion attempt in 2044, and its sole function is to defend the Solar system. When the Coalition revokes its authority, weapons codes and all, Admiral Frann knows there's a conspiracy.
The Moon Colony's attempt to secede from Earth provides the political confusion that the Ynevon use to cover their stealth attacks on Human ships. Space Force and Belter ships disappear, and Earth and the Moon Colony blame each other.
Leo Cromwell, director of the Alien Research Center, tries to shift the blame of the disappeared ships to the Moonies. Cora becomes suspicious when Leo orders her to design bioprobes that are clearly not for detecting the golden light spheres that also flit around in the Solar system.
Wit today's nanotechnology to eradicate unwanted genetic flaws, Cora doesn't understand how Fragments could become insane. Alas, her mother died when Cora was nine years old, she would know about insanity in her family. A nagging doubt about her unknown father prompts her to look up the old census records. When she finds out that Lisa with the lost babies was one of her ancestors who disappeared from an insane asylum in 1995, Cora is determined to find out the truth.
She can't imagine how, but the fact that Lisa was real might explain the dreams of her Mother Fragments if not the visions of Dancer. Cora decides to look into the closed files on the lowest level of the Institute. Because she's uncertain whether her security clearance would trip some alarms, she goes in secret. When she almost stumbles into Leo, whom she overhears coercing a scientist to synthesize some alien substance, Cora's suspicion grows. After the voices recede, she tries several doors until one opens. The lab contains Ret specimens in stasis.
By neural interfacing with her Fragments, pieces of the puzzle begin to fall in place. The aliens, called Ynevon, have been watching the Earth for centuries. They have abducted people, conducted atrocious experiments on them, and created hybrids of Human-Ynevon babies. The dreams and visions also reveal that the Rets and the Ynevon are the same.
The Ynevon discover that Cora’s Fragments are telepathic and able to tap into the Morphic Resonance Field, which exacerbates their hatred and fear of Mankind. But the mission must continue because the third planet may hold the secret to their Great Search. Septar orders Akta to eliminate Cora and her clones.
During their trials of dreams and alien visions, Cora’s Fragments begin to change. The love of the Mother Fragment grows towards Dex, Cora's son. When the Ynevon attack their home, she sacrifices herself so Dex could escape.
Dancer yearns to be Human. Her frustration with Cora, Harvey, her lover, and Mirez, the director of the senso studio, increases to a breaking point. Voices in her head draw Dancer to a secret enclave of telepaths where she discovers that she's not insane but a telepath, and that the aliens are real. She also finds compassion and caring at Horizon Enclave, and a sense of belonging. But because she's a property of Cora, she can't stay. Surprisingly, she understands. What's more, she's happy to protect the secret of the telepaths, whom she considers her people now. She returns to Harvey, a Misfit of society living on government dole. Harvey also deals in chimera senso plays, addictive form of VR's that cause irreversible brain damage and kill the users.
When Cora finds her Mother Fragment dead, she panics about Dex. Experiencing the last neural recording of her MF, she learns that Dex escaped to Lowell Commune. The last minutes of her Mother Fragment's suffering drives home to Cora how much she cared for this person. After calling to make sure her son is safe, she decides to go and warn Dancer at Harvey's place. She also realizes that she needs help and contacts Zac to meet her at Luna Station. Her air car barely lifts when her apartment blows up.
Dancer is hiding in the sonic stall when Cora arrives to tell her that the aliens killed her Mother Fragment. Cora begs Harvey to tell Dancer to stay out of sight. Through her emerging telepathy, Dancer detects that Cora really cares about her. When Harvey tells her about his plans to abduct Cora and hand her over to the aliens, she's determined to stop him. After escaping from Harvey's place, she heads back to Horizon Enclave and finds the alien ship demolishing the commune. Dancer is devastated. She tries to reach Cora by telepathy and fails, and then contacts Zac to inform him about Harvey's treachery and the aliens' plan.
Zac is out in the Buckle, the Trojan asteroids, but dumps his cargo and rushes to Luna Station to aid Cora. Knowing he's not going to arrive in time, and that Cora won't listen anyway, he asks two Belters to keep her away from the meeting place. When Dancer informs him in a brief telepathic burst that she's also heading to Luna Station, Zac asks two more Belters to warn Dancer away.
When Harvey can't produce Cora, the Ynevon abducts him from the cyberslum. He awakes at their base, but uncertain what happened and whether the aliens are friend or foe.
Cora is furious at Zac when Simon and Travis lure her to a flat on Luna Station and slam the door on her. Simon is called away to help repair a large breach in the Chevron shields of the Station. Waking to a searing pain caused by the demolishing of her security mind block by the powerful sending of Dancer attacked by Ynevon Warriors, Cora screams. When Travis responds, she takes advantage of his alarm and runs past him. Travis accompanies her.
They discover upon arrival that the shield breach is above the Sapphire Hotel, where Dancer is. Travis braves the aliens and shoots a couple of them before one of them wounds him. Meanwhile, Dancer begins to shout at Cora to leave, confusing the aliens into thinking that Cora is the Fragment. Filled with remorse, Cora realizes that Dancer is trying to save her, but she wouldn't budge. When Zac arrives, he manages to kill the rest of the Ynevon Warriors. Before Dancer dies of her wounds, she transmits all her telepathically gained knowledge about the aliens to Cora. As the bodies of the aliens and Dancer begin to dissolve, Cora removes an intact tissue sample. Since they can't explain to Station authorities what happened, they flee in Zac's ship, the Cora-Lyn, to the Moon Colony. Revenge for the death of her Fragments and fear for the Human species fuel Cora, and she’s determined to locate the alien base.
Although the Ynevon could annihilate the entire Human species, and some would rather do that to insure their survival, the secrets on the third planet still stop them. Instead of hybrids that failed the last time, they have another plan now. But their fear may tip the balance yet, because the Ynevon possess a precious substance whose properties are known to some select few of the Coalition leaders. Should the Ynevon find out that some Humans know, they would not hesitate to scour the Solar system of all life.
By analyzing the Ynevon tissue specimen aboard the Cora-Lyn, Cora learns that their cells contain a self-destruct mechanism, a nanodisassembler. Travis' injuries force them to seek medical help near the LeibnitzMountain. Travis is treated, but because the venom found in his blood stream hints at illegal use of a closed system of nanotechnology, the Moonies suspect sabotage and impound Zac's ship.
With the aid of Cypher, Zac manages to break the Moonie lockdown code and they head for Mare Australe, the remotes outpost on the Moon.
Alia, a Belter Brat who has a crush on Zac, agrees to help them by allowing Cora to use the Sealed Bioanalyzer Nanoelectronic Computer System. Cora is shocked when she learns about the Ynevon’s origin. Exhausted and hiding from both the aliens and the Moon authorities, Cora thinks she's hallucinating when she finds herself conversing with a golden light sphere. In anger and denial, she storms out of the lab when the Goldy confirms her suspicion that the Ynevon originated on Earth over a million years ago, engineered to fulfill some function, and then transported to Epsilon Aquarii. The disassembler was supposed to make certain that they die out after fulfilling their function, but instead they evolved a nanoretarder. More than ever, she’s determined to find an activator molecule to turn on the nanodisassemblers in their cells.
Even though the Cloned Human Brain Cell system has a built-in alarm to alert the Nano Patrol, killer clones that guard against dangerous replicators and disassemblers, Cora manages to convince the system to design an activator molecule. It has a twelve-hour viability.
Zac's ploy to leave Cora behind fails as he finds her aboard the ship. As they approach the base, the Ynevon attacks and cripples the Cora-Lyn. Zac manages to crash-land. They barely exit the ship and hide in a crater, waiting anxiously for the alien ship to depart.
Filled with guilt caused by the crimes of its species, Thinker Mataw of the Ynevon contemplates wilting. It considers their mission a failure when it senses the Humans' entry into the base. The abhorrent truth of their origin and the callous fate that the Progenitors dealt the Ynevon plunges Mataw into despair. It pulls its toe roots out of the skin of the Habitat to hasten its wilting process.
Cora, Zac, and Travis race against time and battle Ynevon Warriors to release the nanoweapon into the alien base. Before they reach the hangar bay, they burn through to a large chamber and find thousands of Human clones. Cora is terrified that they might have been too late and the Ynevon already replaced key leaders and scientists with their clones.
When Defense and Intelligence arrive at the disassembled alien base, Admiral Frann informs them that they either join DI or get a memory block. Bitter about the loss of his ship, Zac accuses DI of dereliction of duty. Cora learns that her mother was also a DI agent before she mysteriously died.
On Pluto, they finally learn the reason behind the Ynevon’s fear of Mankind. Their cells contain age retarding molecules, the nanoretarder the Ynevon evolved to counter the nanodisassembler that have been engineered into to their genes over a million years ago.
Zac agrees to join DI because he wants to search for the clones the Ynevon might have released into the populations. Cora joins because she wants to know the truth behind her mother's death. Admiral Frann also confirms her suspicion that it's a deception that Fragments get SPS. Minds that resonate on nearly identical waves tend to develop telepathy easier. The World Government doesn't want too many people learning about its secrets.
Book Two will be about the agenda of the clones the aliens left behind.
I've been working on this synopsis for weeks, months, and it's driving me crazy. It was originally 3600 words and I chopped it down to 2000. To me, it feels like I chopped it to death.
Please, Mighty Sages and experienced writers, give me some input. I can take harsh criticism.
Thank you all in advance.
Anya
Cora Delacort is an ambitious woman who wants to have it all. But one body is not enough to deal with her demanding job at the Alien Research Center, motherhood, and her passion for senso dancing. She decides to have Fragments cloned, bodies of herself endowed with parts of her personalities that take over the majority of parenting and her senso dancing. By neural interfacing, she can access her Fragments' daily activities and experience them in minutes.
Soon after she brings her Fragments home, problems begin to develop. Cora expects them to function perfectly, and like other commodities, she treats them as chattels. When she discovers that they’re developing the feared Split Personality Syndrome, she's angry. Her Dancer Fragment hates her, but the visions of aliens that appear in her dances alarm Cora more than the hatred. Her Mother Fragment dreams about Lisa, a woman who’s obsessed with her lost babies.
Zac Solerno, a Belter with a space ship to his name, encounters a hostile alien ship on his way to Earth from the asteroid belt. By the intervention of a golden light sphere, he barely escapes.
When Zac, Cora's lover and the father of her son, drops by for a visit, they disagree about the necessity of Fragments. Zac worries about the tendency of Fragments developing Split Personality Syndrome, and despite their love for each other, tension settles around them. Citing his job of hauling chunks of rocks from the asteroid belt, Cora manages to convince him that she's in a lot less danger than he is.
After several sensory interfaces, Cora suspects that the visions of Dancer and the dreams of her Mother Fragment are something more sinister than Split Personality Syndrome. Despite the penalty of personality adjustment to own Fragments with SPS, Cora decides not to report it to the Panel of Bioregulation.
Unknown to the Moon Colony and to the citizens of the Coalition, (Earth, Mars, and the Belter Society) there is an alien base on the dark side of the Moon. Defense and Intelligence, based on Pluto, tracks the Ynevon's activities. DI evolved from the United Powers after the Ret invasion attempt in 2044, and its sole function is to defend the Solar system. When the Coalition revokes its authority, weapons codes and all, Admiral Frann knows there's a conspiracy.
The Moon Colony's attempt to secede from Earth provides the political confusion that the Ynevon use to cover their stealth attacks on Human ships. Space Force and Belter ships disappear, and Earth and the Moon Colony blame each other.
Leo Cromwell, director of the Alien Research Center, tries to shift the blame of the disappeared ships to the Moonies. Cora becomes suspicious when Leo orders her to design bioprobes that are clearly not for detecting the golden light spheres that also flit around in the Solar system.
Wit today's nanotechnology to eradicate unwanted genetic flaws, Cora doesn't understand how Fragments could become insane. Alas, her mother died when Cora was nine years old, she would know about insanity in her family. A nagging doubt about her unknown father prompts her to look up the old census records. When she finds out that Lisa with the lost babies was one of her ancestors who disappeared from an insane asylum in 1995, Cora is determined to find out the truth.
She can't imagine how, but the fact that Lisa was real might explain the dreams of her Mother Fragments if not the visions of Dancer. Cora decides to look into the closed files on the lowest level of the Institute. Because she's uncertain whether her security clearance would trip some alarms, she goes in secret. When she almost stumbles into Leo, whom she overhears coercing a scientist to synthesize some alien substance, Cora's suspicion grows. After the voices recede, she tries several doors until one opens. The lab contains Ret specimens in stasis.
By neural interfacing with her Fragments, pieces of the puzzle begin to fall in place. The aliens, called Ynevon, have been watching the Earth for centuries. They have abducted people, conducted atrocious experiments on them, and created hybrids of Human-Ynevon babies. The dreams and visions also reveal that the Rets and the Ynevon are the same.
The Ynevon discover that Cora’s Fragments are telepathic and able to tap into the Morphic Resonance Field, which exacerbates their hatred and fear of Mankind. But the mission must continue because the third planet may hold the secret to their Great Search. Septar orders Akta to eliminate Cora and her clones.
During their trials of dreams and alien visions, Cora’s Fragments begin to change. The love of the Mother Fragment grows towards Dex, Cora's son. When the Ynevon attack their home, she sacrifices herself so Dex could escape.
Dancer yearns to be Human. Her frustration with Cora, Harvey, her lover, and Mirez, the director of the senso studio, increases to a breaking point. Voices in her head draw Dancer to a secret enclave of telepaths where she discovers that she's not insane but a telepath, and that the aliens are real. She also finds compassion and caring at Horizon Enclave, and a sense of belonging. But because she's a property of Cora, she can't stay. Surprisingly, she understands. What's more, she's happy to protect the secret of the telepaths, whom she considers her people now. She returns to Harvey, a Misfit of society living on government dole. Harvey also deals in chimera senso plays, addictive form of VR's that cause irreversible brain damage and kill the users.
When Cora finds her Mother Fragment dead, she panics about Dex. Experiencing the last neural recording of her MF, she learns that Dex escaped to Lowell Commune. The last minutes of her Mother Fragment's suffering drives home to Cora how much she cared for this person. After calling to make sure her son is safe, she decides to go and warn Dancer at Harvey's place. She also realizes that she needs help and contacts Zac to meet her at Luna Station. Her air car barely lifts when her apartment blows up.
Dancer is hiding in the sonic stall when Cora arrives to tell her that the aliens killed her Mother Fragment. Cora begs Harvey to tell Dancer to stay out of sight. Through her emerging telepathy, Dancer detects that Cora really cares about her. When Harvey tells her about his plans to abduct Cora and hand her over to the aliens, she's determined to stop him. After escaping from Harvey's place, she heads back to Horizon Enclave and finds the alien ship demolishing the commune. Dancer is devastated. She tries to reach Cora by telepathy and fails, and then contacts Zac to inform him about Harvey's treachery and the aliens' plan.
Zac is out in the Buckle, the Trojan asteroids, but dumps his cargo and rushes to Luna Station to aid Cora. Knowing he's not going to arrive in time, and that Cora won't listen anyway, he asks two Belters to keep her away from the meeting place. When Dancer informs him in a brief telepathic burst that she's also heading to Luna Station, Zac asks two more Belters to warn Dancer away.
When Harvey can't produce Cora, the Ynevon abducts him from the cyberslum. He awakes at their base, but uncertain what happened and whether the aliens are friend or foe.
Cora is furious at Zac when Simon and Travis lure her to a flat on Luna Station and slam the door on her. Simon is called away to help repair a large breach in the Chevron shields of the Station. Waking to a searing pain caused by the demolishing of her security mind block by the powerful sending of Dancer attacked by Ynevon Warriors, Cora screams. When Travis responds, she takes advantage of his alarm and runs past him. Travis accompanies her.
They discover upon arrival that the shield breach is above the Sapphire Hotel, where Dancer is. Travis braves the aliens and shoots a couple of them before one of them wounds him. Meanwhile, Dancer begins to shout at Cora to leave, confusing the aliens into thinking that Cora is the Fragment. Filled with remorse, Cora realizes that Dancer is trying to save her, but she wouldn't budge. When Zac arrives, he manages to kill the rest of the Ynevon Warriors. Before Dancer dies of her wounds, she transmits all her telepathically gained knowledge about the aliens to Cora. As the bodies of the aliens and Dancer begin to dissolve, Cora removes an intact tissue sample. Since they can't explain to Station authorities what happened, they flee in Zac's ship, the Cora-Lyn, to the Moon Colony. Revenge for the death of her Fragments and fear for the Human species fuel Cora, and she’s determined to locate the alien base.
Although the Ynevon could annihilate the entire Human species, and some would rather do that to insure their survival, the secrets on the third planet still stop them. Instead of hybrids that failed the last time, they have another plan now. But their fear may tip the balance yet, because the Ynevon possess a precious substance whose properties are known to some select few of the Coalition leaders. Should the Ynevon find out that some Humans know, they would not hesitate to scour the Solar system of all life.
By analyzing the Ynevon tissue specimen aboard the Cora-Lyn, Cora learns that their cells contain a self-destruct mechanism, a nanodisassembler. Travis' injuries force them to seek medical help near the LeibnitzMountain. Travis is treated, but because the venom found in his blood stream hints at illegal use of a closed system of nanotechnology, the Moonies suspect sabotage and impound Zac's ship.
With the aid of Cypher, Zac manages to break the Moonie lockdown code and they head for Mare Australe, the remotes outpost on the Moon.
Alia, a Belter Brat who has a crush on Zac, agrees to help them by allowing Cora to use the Sealed Bioanalyzer Nanoelectronic Computer System. Cora is shocked when she learns about the Ynevon’s origin. Exhausted and hiding from both the aliens and the Moon authorities, Cora thinks she's hallucinating when she finds herself conversing with a golden light sphere. In anger and denial, she storms out of the lab when the Goldy confirms her suspicion that the Ynevon originated on Earth over a million years ago, engineered to fulfill some function, and then transported to Epsilon Aquarii. The disassembler was supposed to make certain that they die out after fulfilling their function, but instead they evolved a nanoretarder. More than ever, she’s determined to find an activator molecule to turn on the nanodisassemblers in their cells.
Even though the Cloned Human Brain Cell system has a built-in alarm to alert the Nano Patrol, killer clones that guard against dangerous replicators and disassemblers, Cora manages to convince the system to design an activator molecule. It has a twelve-hour viability.
Zac's ploy to leave Cora behind fails as he finds her aboard the ship. As they approach the base, the Ynevon attacks and cripples the Cora-Lyn. Zac manages to crash-land. They barely exit the ship and hide in a crater, waiting anxiously for the alien ship to depart.
Filled with guilt caused by the crimes of its species, Thinker Mataw of the Ynevon contemplates wilting. It considers their mission a failure when it senses the Humans' entry into the base. The abhorrent truth of their origin and the callous fate that the Progenitors dealt the Ynevon plunges Mataw into despair. It pulls its toe roots out of the skin of the Habitat to hasten its wilting process.
Cora, Zac, and Travis race against time and battle Ynevon Warriors to release the nanoweapon into the alien base. Before they reach the hangar bay, they burn through to a large chamber and find thousands of Human clones. Cora is terrified that they might have been too late and the Ynevon already replaced key leaders and scientists with their clones.
When Defense and Intelligence arrive at the disassembled alien base, Admiral Frann informs them that they either join DI or get a memory block. Bitter about the loss of his ship, Zac accuses DI of dereliction of duty. Cora learns that her mother was also a DI agent before she mysteriously died.
On Pluto, they finally learn the reason behind the Ynevon’s fear of Mankind. Their cells contain age retarding molecules, the nanoretarder the Ynevon evolved to counter the nanodisassembler that have been engineered into to their genes over a million years ago.
Zac agrees to join DI because he wants to search for the clones the Ynevon might have released into the populations. Cora joins because she wants to know the truth behind her mother's death. Admiral Frann also confirms her suspicion that it's a deception that Fragments get SPS. Minds that resonate on nearly identical waves tend to develop telepathy easier. The World Government doesn't want too many people learning about its secrets.
Book Two will be about the agenda of the clones the aliens left behind.
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