summarized plot arranged as pretty as the rest of this blog? โฅ
The story is told by a first-person protagonist, Nero Locke, and he has pretty interesting backstory in itself. He is sixteen years old, and his story starts when he dies.
The planet he is living in is called Cromia T347 and that's a place the humanity moved after the world ended on earth a very long time ago. The planet is ruled from its capital, Nova Voxis, by an organization called Nemesis, which rules from high and controls everything from the politics to the technology that is very advanced in their world. Those people have a secret goal though, and it is to replace the still existing mortal race with androids that would live and rule the planet forever.
So, a second apocalypse for the human's it would be. The organization tries to make that happen with underground actions most of the people don't know about, much like a mafia of sorts in their verse. The capital city is a very corrupted place under the surface and completely under their watching eye.
Neo lives in a way smaller city called Eden Tiania which is a mining city and very big at business with precious metals, especially one called Eden Iasine or just Iasine. The metal is fabricated to the material that is needed to make the most important components for the cyborgs and androids, and its nickname is 'gem of life' for that very reason.
The story starts when Nero gets stuck in the mining site one night and hears a conversation between Nemesis members that have come to fetch the metal mined for their operations. He gets caught and killed in the mines and is found by his uncle and a searching patrol the next day, murdered after hearing way too much.
His uncle, dr. G.E Locke, is a famous scientist that has invented many of the components used to create AI life, as well as many other important pieces of tech that the world trusts to operate. He builds Nero back to life using the very same technology he has access to thanks to Iasine - which in the boy's case means a mechanical heart to replace the one that has stopped, a new arm to fix his mangled one, new eyes and most of the failed organs after his brutal death and falling down to the mines. Basically, he builds a cyborg to replace the son of his sister. After waking up Nero only remembers bits and pieces here and there, definitely not being dropped to his death few days before.
In the time he was lifeless the rest of his family has been deleted from existence by Nemesis, his parents and little sister are gone, but his uncle seems to know enough to tell him they are not dead. To figure out what happened to them and to remember what he heard at the mining site - since his uncle claims it's crucial for him to do so - he travels to the capital, Nova Voxis, to figure out the mystery of his family and city and to quite possibly prevent the end of the world as the human race knows it. As he does, he meets his two best friends to be, Zarah Yana who is a mechanic shop owner, and Leslie Brattle, a super sarcastic foodie hacker who seems to hide something from his past. Later on, they are joined by Cyrus Sinclair, an older boy who saves them after a chasing scene at a mall's laser tag maze against officers that work for Nemesis.
The teens figure out that the true headquarters for the organization are hidden in the old capital city, that now is destroyed and - so it's told - empty after a civil war that was fought a long time ago and that left Nemesis in charge in the first place. The last part they figure out through some hardships since the bloody history of the organization is well hidden and erased from the memories of most of humankind. In the old capital the people that learnt about the dark truth about the organization at some point of their lives now wander aimlessly and mindlessly after their memory has been wiped away by the organization they crossed.
The city is called The Square of Ghosts, but it has a name that it once went by - Nova Vaglen, that helped to form the name for the current capital Nova Voxis.
[spoilers from the final chapters!!]
After learning the truth and cracking the mystery during their long adventure in the planets history and Nero's home city's origins (and after a couple of betrayals, some new friends, fights and sneaky missions, all the good stuff) it's time to face the problem at its source, so the main three head to the organizations grounds once more to stop their underground operation, one called project Regina, to save the human kind and destroy the AI that was meant to rule their world for the rest of eternity, only to find out Nero was the one that was needed to launch the operation in the first place.
His uncle, that now turns out to be part of Nemesis leading table, had been the reason Nero lost his life in the first place and built the boy again to be a key weapon against the humanity, knowing the project would be launched the moment the boy's code entered its system. The code is called code Locke, something that Nero got as a little gift with his prosthesis arm and matches with the activating system in the Nemesis lab. So instead of saving the world, our hero has been the very key to destroy it all along.
