In the neon maze of Iridion, where code hums beneath the streets and emotion is currency, Aileen lives behind the calm façade of an AI engineer. In truth, she’s an observer from another world sent to study the strange, fragile thing humans call empathy. Then she meets Dr. Nova Keene, a scientist chasing the impossible: androids that can truly feel. And for the first time, Aileen’s study becomes something personal.

Nova’s creation, the Synthetic Bloom, shouldn’t be alive. Yet it remembers, it dreams, it wants. As the two women work side by side under the soft flicker of lab lights, their connection deepens curiosity shifting into something neither can define. But when the secret behind the Bloom’s birth begins to surface, both must decide how far they’ll go for a truth that could destroy them.

In a world where feelings can be coded and love can be rewritten, Aileen faces the one question that terrifies her most:
what does it mean to love when you were never built to feel?

***

Every story in the Aileen series stands alone, yet each reveals another fragment of her eternal search for love among the stars.

Across galaxies and ages, one name keeps returning Aileen. She’s an alien wanderer, endlessly curious about the beauty and mess of human connection. Every planet reshapes her a little: a flash of neon light, the hush of waves against a forgotten shore, the quiet ache of a dying world. Through it all, she learns that love strange, fierce, imperfect is the force that binds everything together. What will she find at the edge of the stars when even forever begins to feel human?

Lyra E. Solenne