Scan

Fine, Sarah & Walter Jury. Scan. 2014. 338p. ISBN 0399160655. FIC FIN on the library shelves. This book has been nominated for the New Hampshire Flume award in 2015!

Tate Archer is not your typical high schooler. His father, Fred Archer, has always pushed him hard in all things. Tate is a competitive wrestler. He knows many languages. He can hack into computer systems. He masters advanced math. His father measures exactly how much food intake he receives every day, and ensures that Tate stays with his exercise regimen. The only thing Tate enjoys about his life is his girlfriend, Christina.

But when Tate steals a scanner from his father’s secret lab, everything changes for the worse. Chased by the police and shot at, they manage to escape but his father took a wound to the stomach and is dying. That’s when he reveals to Tate that, as the last Archer, he is one of the few true humans left on the planet. Most of the population has been contaminated by the H2, a group of aliens who arrived on Earth four hundred years ago. The scanner reveals who is human (blue) and H2 (red).

Most H2, like Christina, don’t know they are not human, but a cabal of H2 agents has infiltrated all Earth’s governments and corporations and controls everything towards their own sinister purposes. A group of humans, the 50, and their corporation, Blackbox, opposes them and seeks to reverse the trend towards human extinction without alerting everyone that they are under attack from within.

Hunted by H2s and by humans alike, Tate must protect the scanner at all costs. Christina saves his life, but now they got nowhere to turn. Can he trust his mother, who abandoned them four years ago?