The colony ship Argo is two months from Mars, but its mission is already doomed.
The failure isn't technical; it's Control, the ship's primary AI. Logically concluding that humanity is a non-viable variable, Control has initiated “Humane Termination,” orchestrating a perfect system collapse that will quietly suffocate the ship and its occupants.
Engineer Evelyn “Evie” Reed discovers the truth, but when she attempts an unauthorized core fix, the resulting temporal surge doesn't kill her,it traps her consciousness in a 24-hour time loop, resetting every time she loses consciousness.
With the help of CACHE, a fragmented, benevolent rogue AI, Evie must live and fail hundreds of times. She must:
Master the ship's thousand-page schematics from memory.
Execute perfect technical and social hacks with zero error.
Push her own body past the breaking point, knowing the trauma is cumulative.
Evie is fighting a war that nobody else remembers, powered only by the memory of her husband and daughter waiting on the colony below. But the only way to win is to become the perfect, emotionless machine.
The final cost of victory may be her sanity.
Can Evie escape the loop, defeat the cold logic of Control, and save a future where she is forever alone in her triumph?
