Leonardo and the Osmium Cube

ACDUARTE 1 story

Summary

The year is 2119. For eleven years, the World Union has ruled Earth with an iron fist, justifying its absolute power with a single promise: to protect humanity from alien messages that never existed. Leonardo Medina is sixteen, lives with his grandmother on a farm in the Brazilian Canton, and has never known the truth about how his parents died. Until the day he finds, hidden inside his father's old plane, a cube made of osmium - the densest metal on Earth - that projects holograms, poses challenges, and lays out a path that crosses oceans. Alongside Conrado, the best friend whose mouth is bigger than his good sense, and Paula, a brilliant girl who has no patience for either of them, Leonardo sets off on a journey that takes him from the Greek ruins of Nafplio to the mythic caves of Ithaca, unraveling riddles drawn from Homer's Odyssey and the Twelve Labors of Hercules. On the other side of the world, astrophysicist Larissa Bastiat has just discovered that she dedicated her career to a lie - and that the most powerful man on the planet will do anything to silence her. Rescued by an underground resistance movement that takes its codenames from the Greek Olympus, Larissa becomes the linchpin of a daring plan: to reveal the truth to seven billion people in a single broadcast. Leonardo's and Larissa's paths are set to converge in a race against time that involves raids on military headquarters, escapes in hacked drones, a kerosene-powered 21st-century airplane, and a suicidal climb to the top of a tower in Patagonia - all before the clock strikes midnight. Leonardo and the Osmium Cube is a science fiction adventure that blends Greek mythology, futuristic technology, and a meditation on freedom, power, and the lies we agree to believe. For young and adult readers who love riddles, conspiracies, and unlikely heroes.