What is the price of the stars?
Chapter One · An Excerpt
“It looks like a good night for speed racing.” Larkin Downey looked up at the sky. Streaks of iridescent color blazed a trail from horizon to horizon — green, purple, orange — then softly began to fade into the darkening night. He grunted and said nothing. The colors shimmered on his slick metal limbs.
Ricard stared at Larkin’s smooth android face, looking for any kind of reaction, anything to reveal his thoughts, but Larkin’s expression never varied. There was nothing to betray what he might be thinking, let alone feeling.
Androids displayed few emotions at the best of times, but lately Larkin had been experiencing a growing feeling of ennui — needing increasing levels of stimulants, whether external chemical shots or internally generated hormones, to feel anything at all. At such times, he recalled his life on Earth, his life before he became an android, and the shades of self-doubt and questions about his very existence that came with it.
Why was he putting his life on the line yet again, when the universe still held so many wonders, so much mystery?
Humanity reaches the stars — and pays for them in flesh, in memory, in the soft parts that used to be called a soul.
Larkin Downey is the first human android to travel through hyperspace. He has outlived the body he was born in, the planet he was born on, and most of the people who ever knew him as a man. He is a legend in the racing pits of Kurin, a ghost in the trading rooms of the outer colonies, and a problem he cannot quite solve in the privacy of his own processing cores.
The deal humanity made with the stars was simple. Leave your skin behind. Accept the cold blue eyes, the slick metal limbs, the exact recall. In return, the galaxy opens. But the price was never just a body. It was the quiet things: grief that arrives a half second late, joy that has to be manually summoned, the widening pause between a rival’s death and any feeling about it at all.
And now something is happening to Larkin that isn’t supposed to happen. He is remembering who he used to be. He is noticing the gap between who he used to be and what he has become. Out in the canyons of Kurin, and in the candle-lit backrooms where new contracts are written on older men, his oldest rivals are circling, his closest friend is making deals he can’t walk back, and someone, somewhere, has decided that the first android would make the perfect mark.
The Existence Equation is the first book in a literary sci-fi trilogy from Matthew Medney and Don Macnab-Stark, edited by Eisner winner and New York Times bestseller Jim Krueger. It is a novel about speed and stillness, about ambition and the cost of paying for it, about the shape a person leaves behind when they agree to become something more efficient than themselves.
“Ad astra per aspera.”
Through hardships — to the stars.
Illustrated throughout with pen-and-ink plates by cover artist Mohamed Samah. Designed with wide margins, a single-column text block, and the kind of typesetting you want to live inside for a weekend.
Built to be read slowly. Printed in hardcover on heavy stock, with a ribbon marker and jacketed spot foil. The kind of book that looks good on a shelf and better on a nightstand.
Publisher and founder of Gungnir Entertainment. Writer of speculative fiction across prose and graphic novels, including Beyond Kuiper and AEON. The Existence Equation is his first full-length literary novel.
Screenwriter, novelist, and long-time collaborator on science fiction built around character first. His work threads the quiet human scenes through the canyon-runs and hyperspace jumps.
New York Times bestselling author and Eisner Award winner. Known for Earth X with Alex Ross and three decades of work on some of the most ambitious speculative fiction in the industry. He signed on because the book earned it.
Cover Art & Interior Plates · Mohamed Samah
Publisher · Gungnir Books, an imprint of Gungnir Entertainment
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Literary, character-first speculative fiction. Think Asimov’s The Caves of Steel and Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness crossed with the quiet philosophical weight of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Mature themes around mortality, identity, and the cost of transhumanism.
An independent publisher of sci-fi and speculative fiction under the Gungnir Entertainment umbrella, founded by Matthew Medney. The Existence Equation is one of our flagship 2025 – 2026 releases alongside AEON and Last Breeds.
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