Lives of Tao, The

When out-of-shape IT technician Roen wakes up and starts hearing voices in his head, he naturally assumes he’s losing it.

He isn’t.

As of last night, he has a passenger in his brain—an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Over the millennia his people have trained human heroes to be great leaders, to advance our species at a rate far beyond what it would have achieved on its own. Split into two opposing factions—the peace-loving, but under-represented Prophus, and the savage, powerful Genjix—the aliens have been in a state of civil war for centuries. Both sides are searching for a way off-planet…and the Genjix will sacrifice the entire human race, if that’s what it takes.

So now Roen must train to be a hero worthy of his unwanted companion. Like that’s going to end up well.…

“Wesley Chu is my hero.… He has to be the coolest science fiction writer in the world.” —Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama