Artemis AUTOGRAPHED by Andy Weir (SIGNED EDITION) Available 11/14/17 Limited Quantity Available

I live in Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, and I'm one of the little people. My home is a “capsule domicile” - a coffin, really - fifteen floors underground where the hallways are claustrophobic and the rent is just cheap enough. By day, I'm a porter, hauling cargo for pennies. By night, I'm a smuggler, moving contraband for clients who can afford not to ask questions. It's not the life I want, but it's the one I've got. My real goal is to join the EVA Guild, to lead those rich tourists on spacewalks for big money. But my dreams went up in a puff of escaping oxygen when I failed the guild's final exam. “Your suit is your responsibility,” my examiner, Bob, told me after a faulty valve nearly killed me. “It failed. That means you failed.”

My life is a grind of deliveries and side hustles, like sneaking a box of Dominican cigars past the port inspector for my best client, the eccentric Norwegian billionaire Trond Landvik. During one such delivery, I found him meeting with a man from Hong Kong named Jin Chu, who nervously hid a box labeled ZAFO. My curiosity was piqued, but Trond had bigger things on his mind. Later that night, he called me back to his opulent estate. “I hear you failed your EVA exam,” he said, a glint in his eye. “I want to hire you. And I want to pay you a lot.” He explained his plan to take over the local aluminum industry, which was controlled by a company called Sanchez Aluminum. Their monopoly was built on a single contract: free, unlimited power from the city's reactors in exchange for all the oxygen Artemis needed to breathe - a natural by-product of their smelting process. Trond wanted me to destroy their automated ore harvesters, cutting off their supply and forcing them to breach the contract.

“I don't know if this works for me, Trond,” I said, thinking of the hundred employees who'd be out of a job. He assured me he'd buy the company and keep everyone on. But something smelled off. I was a smuggler, not a saboteur. I told him no. “I'll give you a million slugs,” he said. “Deal,” I replied.

The plan was audacious. First, I needed a way out of the city without the guild's permission. I created a fake tourist identity, “Nuha Nejem,” and joined an EVA tour at the Apollo 11 Visitor Center, sneaking a small hull-inspection bot out with me. From the safety of my coffin, I used the bot to crawl across the city's outer hull and manually open an airlock. Then, under the cover of a moonless night, I slipped outside. After a long, tense journey to the harvester collection zone, my plan went sideways. An accident destroyed my spare oxygen tanks, and Sanchez's remote operators spotted me on their cameras. Suddenly, I was in a race against an approaching posse of EVA masters, led by Bob himself. Subtlety was out. I rigged the harvesters to explode, one by one, dodging shrapnel and a remote-controlled harvester trying to crush me. I destroyed three of the four machines before the posse got too close, forcing me to flee, leaving a single harvester intact.

My escape was a desperate, scrambling affair that ended at the Visitor Center, where I hoped to sneak back inside. But my old friend-turned-enemy, Dale, was waiting for me. “What else would you do?” he said, helping me out of my suit. He'd guessed my escape route. Instead of turning me in, though, he offered a deal: he'd keep quiet if I agreed to be friends again, to mend the rift that had formed when he'd stolen the only man I ever loved. With no other choice, I agreed. But my relief was short-lived. A message from Trond led me back to his estate, where I found the door pried open and a splash of blood on the foyer wall. Trond and his bodyguard, Irina, had been murdered.

Now I was a target. Hiding in a maintenance nook in the city's freezing lower levels, I knew the murders were connected to my sabotage. It was all about Sanchez Aluminum, but why would anyone kill over a struggling industry? The key had to be that mysterious ZAFO box. I broke into Jin Chu's hotel room and found the case hidden in his safe. Inside was a strange fiber-optic cable. My friend Svoboda, a brilliant but socially awkward scientist, analyzed it. “It's zero-attenuation fiber optic!” he told me, practically vibrating with excitement. ZAFO was a revolutionary material that would upend the entire multi-trillion-dollar global telecom industry, and it could only be manufactured in low gravity - right here, in Artemis. It wasn't about aluminum at all; it was about the silicon needed to make glass for the ZAFO cables.

The truth came crashing down during a tense meeting with the city's founder and ruler, Administrator Ngugi. She revealed that Artemis was on the verge of economic collapse. ZAFO was its only salvation, but Sanchez Aluminum was owned by O Palácio, a ruthless Brazilian crime syndicate. They had murdered Trond to secure their future monopoly. Ngugi admitted she'd used me as bait to draw their killer out, and that more of their enforcers were already on their way to the moon. “I'm grateful for what you've done,” she told me coolly, “but I have to sacrifice you for the good of the city.” She intended to deport me to appease O Palácio.

I refused to be a pawn. My city was my home, and I wouldn't let it fall to mob rule. I assembled a team of my own: my estranged father, a master welder; Bob and Dale from the EVA guild; the ever-eager Svoboda; and Trond's newly orphaned, billionaire daughter, Lene. Our mission: finish what Trond started. We would destroy the Sanchez smelter itself, severing their oxygen supply for good and giving Lene the opening she needed to take over the contract and the company. The plan was to weld a modified air shelter to the smelter's hull, creating a makeshift airlock to get inside.

With my father guiding me over the radio, I performed the most difficult weld of my life on the outer hull. Once inside the smelter, I released a cloud of chlorine gas, forcing the workers to evacuate. I then disabled the smelter's safety systems, setting it on a course for a catastrophic meltdown. But just as I was escaping, I saw her: Loretta Sanchez, the company's founder, still inside. I couldn't leave her to die. I ran back in, fought her, and dragged her out just as the smelter exploded behind us. The blast, contained by the bubble, shot down the main air pipeline, flooding the entire city with deadly chloroform gas.

The whole of Artemis fell unconscious in an event we now call “The Nap.” It became a desperate race against time. The city's emergency air reserves weren't enough. Our only hope was Trond's private oxygen stockpile, but the final valve was outside and rusted shut. Dale couldn't turn it. Trapped inside my tourist hamster ball, I saw only one way. “Tell Dad I love him,” I said, and thrust a sharp metal pipe through the wall of my bubble. The escaping air was a scream that went unheard in the vacuum. I jammed the pipe into the valve handle and gave it one last, desperate push before the void claimed me. Dale finished the job, saving the city just as I blacked out. I woke up days later, burned and bruised but alive. For my crimes, and my heroism, Administrator Ngugi fined me nearly every slug I had, but she let me stay. Artemis was safe, for now, and it was still my home. And I was now its unofficial, unpaid, and deeply in-debt queen of contraband.