The Trial of the Sleepers

Inside The Trial of the Sleepers

Beneath Iskar’s ice, bodies wait to be awakened. Their debts keep growing. Mara Senn represents Avel Neri, a man denied awakening even as the cost of keeping him alive becomes too high.

There is someone to represent him: Ave, a digital copy with a history, interests, and choices of his own. When a petition appears to express the sleeper’s wishes, Mara must establish who is speaking—and what that voice can truly authorize.

Evidence arrives from Nacre, Veyre, Sylve, and Aeral. It gives the case a reach no one can confine to a single sleeping chamber. The trial could restore a voice to the absent. Or it could grant others the lasting power to decide for them.

The Trial of the Sleepers is a science-fiction legal thriller about digital identity and the right to a future. Book Five of The Year of Five Worlds puts the commitments and consequences carried from four other planets to the test.

How the five stories connect

A shipment held on Veyre is missed on another planet. Relief granted on Aeral commits lives on Iskar. An identity recovered on Nacre changes the meaning of a file elsewhere. The connections grow out of practical decisions, and no character can see all their consequences.

At the heart of these exchanges lies a question that runs through the year: who can consent on behalf of the absent? Behind medical care, wages, and rescues, commitments made for other people become pieces of a shared mystery.

Each novel follows its own characters and local conflict. Reading all five reveals the other sides of the same events. The book order, from Nacre to Iskar, follows the gradual disclosure of their connections.