Foundations: Misfits Series, Book II Synopsis/Recap

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Episode 17: “Crusher Tanzing”

“Well, here we all are again.”

Hale Burch returns from two million years in the future only to find Clem Aballi and Verona back in the present with him inside the deep space artifact. Burch, Rishi, and Kristoff had expected to come back without them, but Rishi’s two-million-year-old counterpart, which she and Burch had installed in her body, had killed Verona and Clem in that distant future, sending them back to their own time with Burch. This wrinkle in their plans causes everyone to question their Rishi and her motivations. Burch and Kristoff, meanwhile race to record their memories of the future before they fade. Rishi helps them develop techniques for recording their future lives.

Now returned to the present together, the five travelers discuss what to do next. They’d all shared the same mission in the future of defeating the technological races that had turned humans into pets and analog data storage devices. With their memories recorded, they decide everyone should focus their efforts in this time to preventing the two technological races from coming into being. And they decide that to do this, their best resource will be the prime AI Nilius, one of their key collaborators in the future. And though they don’t know exactly where Nilius is in the present, Clem Aballi claims he knows how to find him.

Aballi leads the group to an outpost on Mu-Indirus run by the cartel boss Garsin Rex. In order to meet with Garsin Rex, Clem Aballi brings Burch and Rishi down to the outpost, disguised as space pirates. He then executes an illusion on the Rexes’ bodyguard, projecting the image that he is “The Murkist” a dangerous mercenary respected by the cartel. The trio is escorted into Garsin Rex’s office using the Murkist’s image as a disguise. Once inside, Clem Aballi reveals himself to Garsin Rex, who is pleased to see Clem Aballi and delighted by the trick. He welcomes Aballi as a friend and asks him what he can do for the trio. Clem Aballi reveals that they are looking for “the bookkeeper.” Garsin Rex tells them that he knows where Nilius can be found but that the price must be negotiated. Garsin Rex recognizes that Burch is a cyborg and decides that the price will be Burch’s participation in a mech-fighting cage match, potentially to the death, and the petitioning trio all quickly realize that the proposition isn’t a request.

Unsurprisingly, Burch is wary of the prospect of fighting a professional mech-fighter for his life. Aballi, however, insists that Burch has forgotten how deadly he can be because he’d lived through the end of his future life as a fading old man. Back in his own time, Burch is a young man with the experience and wisdom of an old one. He and Rishi begin to train him for the fight, and she insists that she would never allow any harm to come to Burch. As they train him for the fight, Burch realized Aballi was right, he was a fighter once before and he suddenly feels deadly again.

Burch enters the cage feeling somewhat confident until his opponent—Crusher Tanzing—steps inside the ring with him, a giant Etteran warrior with four mechanical strikebot limbs and a string of defeats by fatality to his name.

As the match begins, Burch uses his uniquely quick tech-legs to avoid Crusher, but Crusher gets closer and closer as the match progresses. Suddenly, Burch feels the match slow down for him. He senses both what Crusher is going to do and how to counter it. Burch baits Crusher into striking, only to catch Crusher’s arm, using his momentum to twist the giant mech-fighter into a pretzel, and choking him out before a roaring crowd. Garsin Rex is so pleased by the fight that he gives Burch a bottle of wood-aged whisky as a token of his admiration.

Burch is troubled by how easily he beat Crusher. When he discusses it with Rishi, she reveals that she manipulated Burch during the fight, accessing the nanotech in his body to communicate subconsciously how to move to defeat Crusher. Burch struggles with the proposition of Rishi puppeteering him like that, and given the troubling turn her future counterpart took in the future, this breach of his trust hits doubly hard. Burch, always Rishi’s biggest defender, now has questions about her as well.

The other prize Burch took from the fight were the coordinates where Nilius can be found. Burch, Rishi, Kristoff, and Verona all travel there in Verona’s ship Cannon, while Clem flies solo in his own ship. They rendezvous in Tau-Nira at a small space station in the middle of nowhere where Nilius is waiting for them. All five travelers wonder what this Nilius will know about them or their mission, as none of them had met him in this time. Nilius, however, has been awaiting their arrival, declaring, “Welcome, friends. Now, let’s begin.”

Origins Hyperlinks: “Deep Space Assassin” introduces The Murkist, a deep space assassin who works closely with the Rexes’ cartel as he explores a contract on a beautiful young female spaceship captain with an uncertain identity.

Many of the stories listed as hyperlinks here can be found on the “Misfits Origins” playlist. All of the stories can be found in the channel’s archive or on RoweLit.com through the “All Stories & Links” page: https://www.rowelit.com/sci-fi-weeklies/all-stories-links

Episode 18: “Letter Hopping”

The crew of the Yankee-Chaos returns to the Lettered Systems after their visit to Athos, where Carolina Dreeson confronted her father. Fieldstone had been trying to track down a former Etteran military chief named Akop Hernan somewhere in the Letters, hopping from system to system to find their target.

Carolina takes the ship to the outpost at Nix, where Ren debarks the ship to shop. During her trip, the Murkist appears and pulls Ren away from Sōsh in order to deliver a message to Carolina as a favor. Terrified, Ren agrees to deliver his data stick to Carolina and that she would return a favor for the Murkist in the future should he ask. He also informs Ren they’ll find Fieldstone on Beta-Kol.

Ren delivers the message but convinces everyone they shouldn’t pursue the Murkist. Instead, they pick up Fieldstone on Beta-Kol along with a new girlfriend he’d been traveling with, a private investigator named Draya. Fields and Draya reveal that they’d tracked down Akop Hernan. They describe the old war chief’s movements and express concerns that Hernan has been running an active military operation of some kind. This also meshes with the sense everyone has been picking up that something big is building in the Letters. Fields and Draya reveal that they will be able to find Hernan again on the planet of Alpha-Petros, a bubble world where cities in craters are covered over with clear domes.

The Yankee-Chaos pursues Akop Hernan to Alpha-Petros. As soon as they arrive, the crew begins to scout for an opportunity to abduct Hernan despite his tight security, locating his ship near the Gavron crater. They also take Kristoff’s bot old George out of storage to be a vessel for Maícon Prime while they surveil Hernan. Maícon escorts Draya on the first scouting mission, only to discover that security is even tighter than they’d anticipated. They conclude that a meeting between a major Etteran leader and Hernan is imminent. They identify a top Etteran commodore, Myles Quartice, as the other meeting principal.

Draya proposes to run a honeypot on Hernan’s security guys to get close to the former war chief. Transom proposes that Maícon Prime use his morphing skin to transform into an attractive female to escort Draya on the honeypot. Draya is already surprised that Fieldstone’s quirky ship and crew have a Maícon clone as their resident AI. Now she becomes doubly surprised when the crew reveals that the very advanced bot she’d seen earlier in the back of the ship wasn’t another person, but Maícon Prime himself. This prompts her to take a second look at Carolina, and Draya suddenly realizes that the captain of the Yankee-Chaos is none other than Carolina Dreeson herself—the Chancellor of Athos’s daughter. The importance of this clandestine mission becomes even more apparent to their visitor. Maícon chooses Carolina’s Athosian friend Triss Ball as his female avatar for the honeypot, despite Carolina’s reservations.

They plan to use Maícon Prime’s ability to shapeshift into different humans to copy one of Akop Hernan’s security staff. That way Maícon can surprise the entire entourage in the elevator. Then on the trip from the crater’s floor to Petros’s surface, Maícon will abduct Hernan. They practice the op’s movements repeatedly until they have the plan almost automatic.

Draya and Maícon Prime return to Hernan’s hotel and approach the Etterans to begin the op. Suddenly, they are surprised by Commodore Myles Quartice and his men rushing out of the hotel with great urgency. Maícon approaches the Etterans disguised as Triss, subdues his target—an Etteran major—and takes the Major’s form. Meanwhile, the Maícon clone in the ship hacks the elevator controls so that their group can control everyone’s exit.

The Maícon clone operates the elevators while Maícon Prime himself, still in the guise of Akop Hernan’s security chief, incapacitates Hernan and all his security. They bring an unconscious Akop Hernan into the Yankee-Chaos. Meanwhile, Myles Quartice’s ships race to get off Petros, completely unaware that Hernan had been abducted behind them.

As they take off, Carolina and the crew observe a fleet of incoming Trasp ships approaching the defenseless outpost. The Yankee-Chaos, with all their crew aboard as well as their target, jump out of the system just in time, as the Letters Offensive begins.

Origins Hyperlinks: “Surety” recounts the harrowing abduction on the fleet city of Enuncium of a trafficked teen girl, who runs into some unlikely friends while trying to flee her captors.

Episode 19: “Foundations”

As the Letters Offensive begins, Carolina and the crew of the Yankee-Chaos seek to find shelter from the danger of the Trasp aggression. Transom and Fields advise Carolina to find a hiding place somewhere within the inner Letters. Sōsh and Ren direct Carolina to an obscure rock in the Delta-Fina system. As they land and conceal the ship in the rocks, the crew debates how they should approach interrogating Akop Hernan, from a friendlier approach to the most extreme—Transom removing his head so they can pull his memories like data. Ren and Draya point out that Hernan doesn’t remember anything, still believing that he’d been betrayed by his own security. They persuade the Etterans to allow them to take a friendlier approach.

Carolina is the first one to speak with him. He strikes her as a grandfatherly figure and is both cunning and surprisingly charismatic and friendly. He tells her she bears a striking resemblance to her grandmother Mirhanna Dreeson-Hall, having no idea who Carolina really is. She asks him directly what he was doing in the Letters. He offers to educate her more generally on the state of the war—a history lesson.

He explains that the Letters have changed greatly since the start of the war, when they were much weaker and less developed. As the war progressed, though, both the Trasp Protectorate and the Etteran Guild declined in power, grinding against each other while the Letters Systems continue to rise in power and influence. This, he explains, is why the LSS allows the Trasp and Etterans to make incursions into their vast territory without ever responding directly or getting drawn into the war officially.

After the history lesson, with some trust established, Hernan asks her what she really wants to know. Carolina outlines her plight. She has pieced together many of the factors that started the war, but she doesn’t yet understand how they fit together. One of them is the system of banking records she and Maícon Prime stole from Lime Harbor, as well as the Etteran archive they’d taken from the Etteran Military Academy on Selia-Akung. These inside sources offered extremely precise predictive power over the course of the war.

Hernan realizes Carolina is asking about a secret military source called Polaris. Hernan is stunned and now even more curious about Carolina’s true identity. He replies that the source was perfect and 100% trustworthy but that he never knew its genuine identity.

Hernan asks her who she is and what she really wants. As Carolina seems to break down and give in to Hernan’s questions, Transom enters the room. He advises Carolina to tell Akop Hernan everything. She reveals that Mirhanna’s daughter—Sayla Purcell, Carolina’s aunt—had allegedly committed suicide, and her own doubt about the true story was the reason Carolina began to seek answers about the family’s finances and the war.

Hernan convinces Carolina that he would be more useful to her as a resource alive. He offers to take a look at all their data and intelligence and reveal what he can, and if the result is unsatisfying, they can take his head off later to extract whatever data they think they can recover from his brain. Carolina agrees. In the exchange, Transom’s true identity is revealed to the old war chief, and his shock at Transom’s presence demonstrates that they all now understand the terms of the arrangement.

Hernan spends nearly three days assimilating the information the Yankee-Chaos crew have collected. Transom and Carolina, during this time, come to blows when he jokes about Barnard Dreeson’s paternity, raising with Maícon Prime the possibility that Akop Hernan, who admired Carolina’s grandmother Mirhanna, might have been Carolina’s actual grandfather. Maícon corrects him, but not before Carolina punches Transom in the face, nearly biting his arm for making such a suggestion when he grabs her arm to stop the assault.

Hernan declares that he cannot solve their problem. He states that they are either missing a key piece or their suppositions about the pieces they do have are incorrect. He advises Carolina to re-examine the key suppositions they have about their information. He tells her to think about the things she most believes to be true and then presume the opposite. Then see how the information fits. As he is explaining this, Hernan can see from Carolina’s face that she’s figured out something critical.

They release Hernan from the medical bay and Carolina invites him to the flight deck, offering to take him home. Hernan directs her to his family’s secret homestead on Theta-Nikorla. He also reveals to Transom that he was officially deemed killed in action during the Clem Aballi incident, and Hernan accounts him lucky, with the best possible outcome—to be thought dead without being dead, free to choose the life he wants to live.

Transom and Carolina reconcile as they approach Theta-Nikorla, while Hernan enjoys the company of the crew. Hernan invites the crew to dinner at his family’s home. Then Carolina drops him at his house, parking the ship out in the flats outside the settlement.

Carolina gathers everyone in the ship’s atrium to explain what had set her off—the new realization about the information they’d accrued. She tells them that the Murkist had revealed that the Iophans had hired him to kill Carolina. That piece of information didn’t make sense until she considered it from a perspective she’d never considered before—that her father, the most powerful man in the galaxy, wasn’t actually very powerful at all. In fact, he was extremely limited by the constraints of his office, and the Iophans were trying to spur the entry of Dreeson’s system into the war, forcing Barnard’s hand by making it appear the Etterans had murdered his beloved daughter. The Murkist’s data stick message, which he’d passed to Dr. Ren had revealed that he’d been a witness to the shootout on Ash-Vedal when Carolina had been shot, and he’d traced the plot to Iophan intelligence—supposedly Athos’s closest ally.

Carolina implores the crew that this news cannot leave the group, as the two great sister rings in her home system—Athos and Iophos—can never be allowed to fight in open warfare, as their proximity and vulnerability would mean certain destruction for both major civilizations, a result that would set humanity back for a thousand years.

Episode 20: “The Beginning”

Burch and his group find Nilius waiting for them at the center of the mysterious space station at Tau-Nira. He is floating in a central room, tethered to a web of wires connected to the station’s walls. He greets them by name, seeming to know them, and reveals that he was anticipating their arrival so that their work could begin. Nilius’s explanation doesn’t make sense to the visitors, and when he asks for Rishi’s help unhooking from his setup, her body is shocked, rendering Rishi unresponsive.

Burch is furious, but Nilius explains that she is unharmed, that only her body has been affected and that they will need help to bring it back online. Verona determines that Nilius’s move to render Rishi inert was a trick to make it necessary for them to visit Eddis Ali’s vault. And though he doesn’t deny the motivation, Nilius insists that it is both necessary for their efforts but also for Rishi herself—that she’s having an important experience, though he won’t specify what that experience might be.

As the group prepares to depart for the vault in Nilius’s ship, he explains that the wires in the station were connected to large circular panels on the station’s exterior. He calls these panels nodes. Each of the nodes connects Nilius to one of the artifacts. Nilius had spent many decades learning to listen to the communications between the deep-space artifacts. He attempts to explain their nature to Burch and the others. Though they struggle some with the concept, the group comes to understand that the artifacts are probability engines that generate possible futures based on the recorded past. Nilius tells them that he must visit the vault because there is technology there that can make the nodes small enough to be portable. That way Nilius won’t need to remain tethered within the station in Tau-Nira to listen to the messages his future counterparts send back through the artifacts.

He and Clem Aballi load one of the nodes onto Nilius’s ship to take with them to the vault, along with Rishi’s inert body, and the group heads for the vault together aboard Nilius’s ship. Along the way, the group discusses Rishi’s troubling behavior in the future. With her body offline, Aballi, Verona, and Kristoff all try to impress upon Burch the risks that a bipal mind poses to the future of humanity. Burch is wary of speaking of Rishi in those terms, and the conversation ends in a stalemate, with Burch still firmly supporting the Rishi he knows and trusts and the others remaining skeptical of her true motives.

When they arrive at the vault, Eddis Ali and the acolytes are incensed that Verona would dare to bring Clem Aballi with her. For her part, Verona is decidedly resentful of Eddis Ali, because she believes her experience in the future proves the futility of the sect she’d dedicated centuries of her life to serving. Meanwhile, as Nilius and Eddis Ali and the technologists in the vault begin working to miniaturize Nilius’s communications node, Burch keeps watch over Rishi, whose body is cleared by Eddis Ali’s acolytes, none of whom can explain her unconscious state.

Verona and Clem Aballi, meanwhile work with her former acolyte colleagues, warning them of the distant future they experienced and the coming rise of the technological races. Burch meets with Verona and Clem at the pool in the heart of the vault, where Clem explains how over centuries he’d come to master the anger that had once consumed him. Burch and Verona are convinced enough of his transformation that Burch finally confesses that it was Burch’s crew, along with Transom, that had attempted to track down and kill Aballi during the infamous Athosian terror scare. Clem declares that all those events are so far behind him that he even finds their reluctance to tell him amusing. Burch jokingly begins to call him Zen Aballi.

Finally, as Burch is trying to fall asleep beside Rishi’s body, she suddenly comes to, shocked, scared, and struggling to gasp for air that her body doesn’t need. In an attempt to calm her, Burch uses the words he knew Maícon had used the first time he woke her up after her transformation: “You are waking up; go easy.” Upon realizing where she’d arrived—back in her technological body—Burch is shocked by the words she says back: “I’m dead again.” When Rishi calms down slightly, she tells Burch that not only was she not unconscious but she’d experienced another journey similar to their artifact travel, and this time, she’d been sent back to Earth.

With Rishi’s help, Eddis Ali and Nilius manage to miniaturize the artifact communication nodes, which Nilius embeds in his skin, and as soon as he offers to do the same with a few on Rishi’s dermis as well, she has a terrible premonition. She tells Burch that Carolina and the crew of the Yankee-Chaos are in grave danger and will certainly perish if they don’t leave the vault immediately to intervene.

Origins Hyperlinks: “Human But Not Human” is a novella set on Earth told from the perspective of a young tech entrepreneur of the late 20th Century whose entire life course is altered by the arrival of a mysterious visitor who seems to replace the consciousness of a girl he’d known his entire life growing up.

Episode 21: “Metal”

The crew of the Yankee-Chaos accept Bulldog Hernan’s invitation to Saturday dinner with his family on Theta-Nikorla. Carolina, however, risks offending the host by ordering her crew to arrive fully armed and prepared for conflict because of the long walk from the ship to the Hernan house. Bulldog is understanding of Carolina’s caution, given the war footing every system in the Letters is currently on.

Inside the house, Carolina and her crew greet Akop Hernan’s large family—two daughters, plus his daughter-in-law, along with their many children. The family and crew gather at the table, and the girls thank Carolina for bringing Bulldog home. They are busy discussing the nuances of the various Etteran homeworlds when Carolina is interrupted by Maícon Prime with news—his clone operating the Yankee-Chaos has detected possible signs of atmospheric disturbance. Maícon Prime departs with Transom and Carolina to investigate. Transom quickly determines that they’re about to be attacked by the Trasp but cautions Carolina not to lose her cool, as he suspects Bulldog Hernan has contingencies in place.

As they return to the dinner table, Transom’s faith in Hernan’s preparedness proves correct. The entire family quickly snaps-to in an orderly progression, gathering gear and provisions and filing down into a tunnel beneath the house that leads into a network of lava tubes. Akop Hernan invites Carolina and the crew to join the family in retreat. They gather their gear and head down into the tunnel with the Hernans.

Bulldog Hernan descends last, wearing a sleek exoskeleton and revealing that he’d sealed the tunnel entrance with a rock-hard polymer the Trasp won’t be able to penetrate. He prepares the group for a long, difficult trek through the lava tubes, where a ship is hidden forty clicks away at the tunnel’s exit.

Carolina and her crew are stunned at the focus and organization of the entire family, especially the young children. Transom and Fieldstone attempt to explain that it is a product of cultural necessity. War makes a people tough.

At first, as they walk, Maícon Prime presents periodic updates on the Trasp invasion, filtered through his Maícon clone operating the Yankee-Chaos. The Trasp seem persistent and determined to search the outpost until Akop Hernan is found. Then, after several days walking, the Maícon clone stops reporting to Maícon Prime, leading the crew to wonder whether he may have been captured, destroyed, or may just be in hiding somehow.

During the walk, Hosmin, one of Hernan’s grandchildren, falls into a hole, hitting his head and breaking his arm. Ren is called upon to perform an unexpected surgery in the dark tunnel to save the boy’s life, during which time, Transom keeps the family calm by relaying the story of how Ren had saved his life.

When they finally reach the other side of the lava tube, they find that not only are the Trasp still on the planet, they’re closing in on the position of their exit ship.

While the group deliberates on what to do next, scheming ways to help the family to escape the Trasp, Maícon suddenly informs everyone that somehow the Yankee-Chaos is flying toward the entrance to the lava tube. Maícon can’t tell them who’s flying the ship, except that it isn’t his clone. Everyone suspects it’s a Trasp trick and that somehow they’ve discovered their location. The group prepares for a final battle as the Yankee-Chaos touches down outside the tunnel. Then they are surprised by a voice they recognize, as Burch loudly scolds Carolina for abandoning a perfectly good spaceship out on the flats.

Everyone is thrilled to see Burch, who reveals that he and Rishi had come as soon as they learned the crew was in danger. He reveals that he has a plan to get everybody out, but it will require the trust of everyone in the party.

As the crew board the Yankee-Chaos with Burch and are reunited with Rishi as their pilot, Burch surprises them further by striking up a friendly conversation with the Trasp captain commanding the raid on Theta-Nikorla. The Trasp captain agrees to come aboard and help him fix the mechanical problem Rishi’s flying was mimicking. Burch then reveals that the Trasp captain is none other than Omar Jemeis—Leda’s younger brother.

When he boards, Omar is equally shocked, realizing that Burch has lulled him into a trap where he is confronted by his target—Bulldog Hernan himself—as well as two Etteran majors, including the deadly Etteran Reaper, Transom. Burch proposes to Omar that he let the Hernan family go in exchange for Akop Hernan himself. The only catch is that Omar has to agree to remain on the Yankee-Chaos while Rishi turns in Bulldog. Omar asks how Rishi could get away with that, and to answer, Rishi shapeshifts, taking Omar’s own form. He’s mesmerized, but further, he’s familiar enough with the crew from Leda’s stories that he agrees to the gambit. He calls in the capture of Akop Hernan and allows Rishi to leave with Bulldog on his ship.

Burch takes the Yankee-Chaos up, and as they go, Bulldog Hernan’s family escapes with the blessing of the Trasp force on Theta-Nikorla at Omar’s direction.

The crew sit with Omar in the atrium, anxious for news about how Leda is doing in her new life inside the Trasp Protectorate. Omar informs them that his sister never really came home, but Leda, their friend, had become a part of their family. He also surprises everyone by thanking Transom personally for saving Leda’s life on Minstik and thanking the entire crew for helping Leda to recover following her traumatic injury on Kendry. Omar asks Transom if he might shake his hand as a gesture of gratitude.

Transom, in turn, agrees to shake hands as soon as Omar removes his Trasp uniform.

Origins Hyperlinks: Cracks in the unflinching hatred between the Trasp and Etterans occasionally appear. “Heavy” catalogues the final days of an Etteran special operator as he pursues his final Trasp target.

Episode 22: “That Human Flame”

Burch arrives at Nilius’s space station in Tau-Nira with the Yankee-Chaos crew. He and Rishi are wary of tensions potentially boiling over, as their strange coalition will now consist of Trasp and Etteran, one of Eddis Ali’s wizards, multiple prime AIs, and the infamous Clem Aballi. Mostly they are concerned about the personal history between Transom and Aballi, but when Burch consults Carolina about managing Transom, she assures Burch she will take care of it.

When they enter the station, Nilius begins the meeting immediately, informing everyone that their collaboration will be a major pivot point in history. He and Rishi ask Burch—the most trusted among all those gathered—to explain the artifacts and their travels to the future. Carolina is doubly angry, both because Burch and his crew had prevented her from pursuing the artifacts originally and because he’s now allied with Nilius, whom she believes to be an architect of the war’s financing.

Burch, Rishi, Aballi, and Nilius try to impress upon the others that they all must now engage in a campaign to protect humanity from the technological races they met in the future; otherwise, all humans will become spiritless pets of the ordinals and bipals. Carolina and the others find Burch’s story interesting, but they can’t see how a problem they’d encountered two million years in the future can be more important than the war that is decimating their home systems in the present.

The Yankee-Chaos crew wishes to hear Maícon Prime’s perspective, at which point Rishi reveals that she has taken Maícon Prime offline, storing his processing core in a small compartment within her forearm. Carolina and her crew are furious at the news. The meeting nearly becomes physical, but the Etterans manage to keep their heads and lead Carolina’s crew back to the Yankee-Chaos. While Burch thinks the meeting is over and has failed, Rishi reminds him that she isn’t going to let Carolina’s crew leave in her ship, as she can still control the Yankee-Chaos with a thought.

Verona, Clem, Burch, and Omar meet to discuss Rishi, as they still have concerns about Rishi’s stability, especially after her shocking unilateral decision to deactivate Maícon. Rishi’s position is that Maícon was too unpredictable at that critical moment, which both Clem and Verona find plausible. Rishi then calls Burch to the Yankee-Chaos to attempt to calm down their crew and bring them into the fold.

Burch meets with the crew and explains how the artifacts work, including that they can be used to help them figure out how to stop the war. Though they’re skeptical, Carolina’s crew decides that they’re willing to help, provided they can stick together as a crew under Carolina’s leadership.

Once Carolina agrees, Burch gets up to leave, thinking they’ve settled the argument. Transom, though, suddenly balks, wondering why they were making all the concessions. He demands that everyone else must make a concession as well. At first, he doesn’t know what, but very quickly, Transom decides the price. He names three people for the rest of the group to bring aboard the Yankee-Chaos, and Transom promises to murder them. They all must participate, including Nilius. Burch and Rishi are shocked and ask Carolina if she would sanction such an act. She and Transom briefly confer, and Carolina confirms that, yes, she agrees with Transom’s terms.

Burch and the others discuss Transom’s price, and though they have reservations, they decide that the lives of three people pale in contrast to the future of humanity. They also figure that the three people on Transom’s list likely have it coming. They all agree to the terms, including Omar, who wishes to prove his commitment to the cause by participating.

They locate the men on the fleet city of Enuncium. At first glance, the men seem to be respectable members of the community—a businessman, a security officer, and a magistrate. The group scouts the city and develops a plan that involves Burch delivering goods to a vendor who works for the businessman on the list. Then Aballi morphs into the businessman using one of his wizard tricks. Burch waits on the ship, only to find Rishi walking the magistrate down the top hatch. Burch realizes the character of these men once he sees Rishi’s body projecting its disguise—a teen sex worker. He knocks the judge out cold and suddenly has far less reservation about delivering these men to Transom.

The ships meet in deep space to deliver the men. Carolina also requests that Nilius join them on the Yankee-Chaos. When he returns, Nilius reveals that Transom has changed his mind. Instead of simply murdering the men, he’s decided that they will strand them on an isolated frozen planet—but not simply to strand them there. Transom had tasked Nilius with sabotaging a ship and a comms device on the frozen planet’s surface to seem fixable despite being hopelessly broken. That way the men will toil endlessly with the false hope that they will one day be able to escape. Nilius likens the scheme to something from Greek mythology and declares Transom a sadistic genius.

Origins Hyperlinks: “Welcome Home” is Burch’s tale of how he came to join the Delta-Gamma Guard, told to the crew of the Yankee-Chaos by Burch himself as they transit from Theta-Nikorla to Nilius’s station in Tau-Nira.

Episode 23: “Dark Charris I”

The fellowship of artifact travelers begin their missions back through time to uncover the foundational mysteries that will help them prevent the technological races from coming into being. Because the artifacts connect to different places and times, they split into groups to target specific pivot points in history.

Nilius transports Verona and Clem Aballi from Tau-Nira all the way back to Charris. Their task will be to explore the roots of the Battery’s civilization right as the first settlers from the columns arrive to colonize their seed world—Charris. But first, Verona and Clem must recruit an old friend for help. They find Kristoff Mikkel back on his homeworld near the city of Origgi. He is trying to recruit members of his old sect to help him travel back to Texini to bury the dead so that Kristoff can finally lay his wife to rest. But he hasn’t had any luck recruiting anyone. Verona and Clem agree to help Kristoff to recruit volunteers if he agrees to return to Charris’s origin.

The trio briefly meet with Nilius on the short jump to the Charran artifact. He informs them that there were factions among the AIs that need to be investigated. Nilius warns that the history they know might be very different from the reality they’ll encounter when they arrive. He also informs them that because they are traveling to the past this time, they will arrive in the body of a person from that era. They develop techniques for finding each other, as it won’t be evident who they all are. Nilius also cautions the travelers against interfering in the past, exhorting them to merely observe rather than trying to change anything. Then, Nilius drops them at the artifact, promising to return before they come back.

The trio arrive on the first Charran outpost to find it in dire straits. Kristoff is inside the body of an adolescent boy named Pyco Matta. He comes to in a makeshift clinic being operated by a pair of housbots, an Alba and a Delius. Immediately, a man across from him—Korai Companys—speaks angrily to the Delius in a way Kristoff finds familiar. They identify each other using their code phrase—Kristoff as Pyco Matta and Clem Aballi in the body of Korai Companys. As they are identifying themselves, a woman in the hospital stretcher nearby identifies herself as Verona, who is in the body of a woman named Triere Alago.

Clem and Verona are particularly affected by this trip. In addition to the rough trip back into this artifact, they experience the shock of returning to an ordinary human body with emotions that aren’t blunted by their wizard constitutions. Additionally, their bodies are starving, as the outpost has been hit by a famine due to an unknown microbial outbreak that has infested the outpost’s food supply.

The sudden shock of inhabiting an ordinary human body again reveals to Verona the extreme emotions Rishi must have experienced when Nilius transported her consciousness back to Earth. She understands now why Rishi wasn’t upset with Nilius and why they are now working so closely together.

Kristoff, seeing that Verona and Clem are struggling to even walk, decides to explore the outpost on his own and seek out some food. By chance, Kristoff bumps into a friendly girl about his age named Olivia Varnet, who in their history was the first leader of the Charran civilization. Here, though, she’s a member of an underground club of kids who hang out in the uninhabited parts of the pop-up habitats. She explains to Kristoff that the colony had been doing well until a microbe began to attack their food supply. One of the leaders from the columns was the current CoC in charge of the colony. The expedition had been split into the faction quarantined on the planet, versus their leadership, who are isolated in orbit aboard the colony ship the Stellar Song. The only clean food supply is up on the ship, and those supplies are dwindling. Thousands of people on the ship are in stasis and will need a clean food supply in order to be revived. Olivia reveals that Rodell Dawcett—the current CoC—is considering abandoning the outpost on Charris in search of a new start before their supplies are exhausted. None of this history is familiar to the visitors.

Kristoff, Verona, and Clem get together and develop a plan for studying the AIs, targeting Maícon, Eddis Ali, and Nilius himself. Verona pairs with Eddis Ali, attempting to solve the riddle of this unknown microbe, reasoning that if their original colony outpost dies, they won’t have anything to observe in this past, because it won’t exist anymore. She becomes the leading expert on the microbe, as Verona possesses knowledge of many techs from her training inside the vault. The AIs find the sudden abilities and knowledge of the visitors strange, as Pyco Matta is a boy, Treire Alago should know nothing about biotech, and Korai Companys is neither a leader nor a strategist like Clem Aballi immediately proves himself to be.

Clem Aballi plots to be moved from the surface to the colony ship, breaking quarantine in order to change the faltering leadership structure of the expedition. He approaches Maícon for help in getting aboard the Stellar Song and surprises the mercurial AI with a proposition—get him aboard the ship and Korai Companys will solve the leadership problem. His reasoning mirror’s Verona’s—if the colony fails, they’ll have nothing worth observing on Charris.

The three visitors try to meet in private to make plans but are worried about being observed by the AIs. Kristoff enlists Olivia’s help, bringing Clem and Verona into the kids’ club in the unoccupied part of the outpost. Olivia shows them to a hatch in the back where they can exit the habitat and avoid observation.

As soon as they step into the dark little pit under the hatch, they notice the same smell they’d observed in the clinic, realizing that the microbe had come into the outpost when the kids had left the habitat through the hatch, spreading the microbe throughout the city.

Having discovered the source of the toxin, Verona and Aballi devise a ruse in which Korai Companys would test their theory. He would eat a hearty portion of the contaminated spaghetti, be placed in isolation, and then be transported to the ship to be studied by the doctors aboard Stellar Song.

Once aboard, Aballi takes control of one of the newer model androids aboard the ship—a Harold. It leaves the medical bay unobserved and sabotages the life support on the ship, forcing the crew of the ship to join their fellow travelers on the surface. Clem Aballi addresses the crew, declaring that the failing Rodell Dawcett was no longer recognized as CoC, he orders everyone to “pack a bag” and join the colonists on the surface.

Origins Hyperlinks: “Telescope” follows the life of a Charran convict as he reintegrates into society following his incarceration, against all odds, petitioning the planet-wide government for a unique charter to build the most far-reaching cosmic instrument ever devised.

Episode 24: “Some Other Place”

Carolina’s group begins their operations with a mission targeting Etterus in the leadup to the war. They select Fieldstone, Draya, and Dr. Ren to return back and infiltrate the Etteran defense chief’s office in the leadup to the war.

When Ren awakens following their traverse into the artifact, she’s shocked to find herself in a totally foreign place. Instead of a developed planet like Etterus, she wakes up in the body of a teen girl in a filthy warehouse-like room filled with dirty little ragamuffins teasing her and calling her Ya-ya. She asks them where they are and if they are on Etterus, only to be mocked and ridiculed by the dirty children. Ren meets a young girl named Jendi, who claims to be Ya-ya’s sister. Ren sees a shocking little tribe of dirty children drinking filthy water and living like animals. She looks out the window, confirming that this planet is definitely not Etterus. Her sister Jendi has no familiarity with Ren’s civilization in the Battery Systems. The culture here has no family structure or schools. They live in clans, and Jendi reveals that children either “go up” or “die in the fights.” Ren begins to absorb memories from Ya-ya’s mind of these fights, which seem a rite of passage for the children as they reach young adulthood.

Their god is the director of the fights, and Ren observes the boys sparring each day to practice. Similarly, all their food comes from the god as well, keeping this bizarre society of children in squalor.

As the boys spar one day, one of them dislocates his shoulder. The kids surround the boy—Nobu, preparing to “gonk” him and put him out of his misery. Ren steps in and reduces the shoulder, fixing his arm and saving Nobu’s life. The children view it as a miracle, and word of the deed begins to spread.

A little girl approaches that night as Ren is falling asleep. When Ren asks the girl what she’s doing there, she shows Ren their hand signal, revealing that she’s actually Draya. Ren is not alone anymore, but Draya is stuck inside the body of a very young child. Draya also has no idea where Fieldstone is. Draya is terrified. They settle into Ren’s futon and fall asleep together.

When they wake, they find it’s time for the fights. Ren walks with her little sister Jendi and Draya to the fights, migrating through room after room of those clan warehouses. Finally, after a long walk, they arrive at an arena. When the fights begin, the director steps into the ring and Ren can see that “the god” is actually just a simple multi-use bot—a common Andrew model.

After a short ritual beginning to these blood matches, the god directs the boys to fight in direct combat. Ren watches on in horror as all the children cheer these brutal death matches.

When their clan leader is chosen to fight, Jendi reveals that he’d been selected to fight Bo, a fierce leader of a neighboring clan. Bo spares little time in defeating Ya-ya’s clan leader, and in his celebration, he gestures the travelers’ hand signal to the crowd, indicating to Ren and Draya that Bo is Fieldstone.

On the walk back, Ren and Draya approach Bo and attempt to reveal their true identities. When they catch his attention, Ya-ya’s sister Jendi angrily runs away, furious that Bo had killed their clan leader. Fieldstone, though, is more troubled by Draya’s situation, realizing that he cannot take her up with him, nor does he care to leave her alone in that bizarre and brutal society of savage children.

Fieldstone brings Ren and Draya back to his clan for his last night before going up. Draya has fallen fast asleep. He and Ren don’t know what to do about her. They discuss it and fall asleep. When they wake up, Ren finds Draya’s little body lifeless, and Fieldstone tells her it is a mercy, assuring her that Draya didn’t feel a thing.

Fieldstone then asks Ren to come with him on his journey up. They are greeted at the bottom of the staircase by the god—a simple Andrew model, who directs Bo and Ya-ya to proceed to the next level. At the next level, they are greeted by a cyborg, a young man with a prosthetic leg who is noticeably clean. They are led to a shower room and directed to scrub themselves clean as well. When they emerge, the cyborg leads them to their first “purification.”

Ren and Fieldstone are separated, and Ren quickly realizes what the ritual purification means—surgery. Ren is given the option to choose which limb and part of her head will be amputated and altered. She is instructed by a Delius that the surgery will bring her “closer to the gods.”

When she wakes from surgery, she is missing her right arm and one of her eyes, both of which have been replaced by technological prosthetics. She tests her new eye, finding many of the features similar to Leda’s technological vision. Fieldstone and Ren are given clothes and reunited. Ren realizes that they are on a world where the culture centers on systematically meching the human children into machines. She recognizes this society from Burch’s stories of the future—the other technological race, the bipals.

Their guide, Rold, then takes them to the ceremony of “ascent.” He escorts them to the invocation ceremony, promising that they will meet the godhead there. He explains that the Andrew was only a lesser god. Rold escorts them to the center of the amphitheater, which, in contrast to the dirty first level, is a gleaming showplace of a stadium. And as the ceremony begins, the ceiling opens, revealing the godhead descending. Ren, with the help of her new prosthetic eye can see before anyone else. The descending god is Maícon.

Episode 25: “Dark Charris II”

Clem Aballi scrambles to take advantage of the chaos aboard the Stellar Song. His goal is to secure the dark-tech that will eventually end up in Eddis Ali’s vault, as Verona believes it can help her to create an antidote to the microbial pathogen. Jayadin Dryas, the Stellar Song’s commander, also takes advantage of the chaos aboard the ship to depose the failing CoC Rodell Dawcett.

On the surface, Olivia Varnet warns Kristoff that the people in the shelter are angry and resentful of the crew of the ship for starving them all those months. She predicts trouble when they have to come down. Nilius, though, predicts the crew of the ship will use the resources aboard the Stellar Song to quickly set up an independent outpost away from the sick people down on Niera.

When Clem finally descends from the ship hours later, he expresses frustration that he wasn’t able to locate any of the dark-tech files to help Verona combat the outbreak. Kristoff warns that they may be getting too involved in the colonists’ business, intervening rather than observing. The time travelers are also observing that the AIs are surprisingly incurious and reluctant to collaborate with each other.

Clem Aballi grows increasingly frustrated by the inaction of the settlers, especially as the crew of the ship solidify their position in their new independent colony outside Niera. Verona, meanwhile, closes in on a solution for the microbial toxin in the food. She invites the doctors out in the desert to collaborate on solving the problem, but they refuse to assist her. Instead, the ship’s commander Jayadin Dryas issues an ultimatum: hand over Aballi so he can tell them how to fix the colony ship’s life support, or the crew in the neighboring outpost will stop supplying food to the city. Instead of allowing Dryas the upper hand, Aballi promises the settlers to turn himself over to Dryas first.

As the situation unfolds, Kristoff discovers that Nilius seems surprisingly ignorant of Maícon’s notoriously mischievous personality. When he asks Nilius direct questions about Maícon, Kristoff discovers that Nilius has a peculiar mental block precluding him from divulging the origin of the AIs or the nature of their programmer.

As promised, Clem Aballi—in the body of Korai Companys—knocks on the new outpost demanding to speak to Commander Dryas. Aballi expects to get beat up while transmitting a feed back to the Niera outpost, demonstrating for everyone to see that Dryas had no intention of negotiating with the settlers in good faith. The stream records the end of Companys’ life, as Dryas orders the doctors to let him die and offers no support. After Aballi dies, the doctors discover the contact lenses and the earpiece that had recorded every last word of their interaction, still transmitting to the settlers.

That night, similar to the incident aboard Stellar Song, three multi-use model androids from Niera walk out of the darkness of the desert, punch holes in the crew’s pop-up habitats, and return to the city, leaving the newest settlers with no choice but to seek refuge in the main settlement with their sick fellow settlers.

Fearful of the resentment Dryas has created by killing Korai Companys, the settlers out in the new outpost don’t want to approach the people in Niera. Kristoff nominates his friend Olivia Varnet to be the one to approach them and broker a peace deal. Olivia contacts Maximme Bruhl, one of the cabinet ministers under Rodell Dawcett, about the only crew member on the ship still viewed favorably by the people in Niera. He and Olivia broker a tenuous peace as the crew finally comes inside the city. Olivia becomes a key leader in the community during the integration, serving as the de-facto CoC until they can elect a new leader.

Verona makes considerable progress in solving the microbial outbreak. Despite tensions with the ship’s doctors, she produces a vaccine that she believes will mimic the resistance the kids have developed to the toxin. She decides to test it on herself, telling Kristoff that if it doesn’t work, he needs to revive Dr. Kane, a biologist who is still in stasis aboard the Stellar Song. Verona’s host Triere Alago falls sick after testing the vaccine and soon passes, leaving Kristoff alone on the failing colony. He convinces Olivia and Bruhl that they need to revive Dr. Kane as Verona had insisted.

Despite what history told the visitors of their early origins on Charris, when the vote is held for the new Chief of the Colony, Olivia Varnet loses to Maximme Bruhl. Kristoff consoles Olivia over her loss, and they visit the lab to check on the new doctor, Johann Kane. He tells them that he’s solved the problem: instead of using technology, he resolves to use the cure the kids’ bodies have already evolved. He devises a treatment based on ancient medicine—FMT, or in Olivia’s words, a colony-wide poop transplant—using the kids’ gut bacteria to incubate the cure in the rest of the colonists.

Kristoff returns from the artifact to find Verona, Clem, and Nilius waiting. Kristoff is saddened from his experience back on early Charris. He reveals that the colony survived, and that he, in Pyco Matta’s body, remained for six years to witness the earliest days of their civilization, learning that their history was nothing like what they’d been told.

Kristoff relays that he’d spent much time trying to get the AIs to discuss their origins, only to find that they may not know anything of it and cannot reveal it if they do. He is convinced that the AIs are the key to the unfolding troubles in the Battery Systems. Instead of asking his fellow travelers to fulfil their obligation to help him recruit volunteers to return to Texini to bury his people, Kristoff tells them that his experience on Charris has convinced him of the importance of rejoining the group in their efforts to stop the war and prevent the technologicals from coming into being.

Kristoff also tells them about his life in Niera and that his host Pyco Matta and Olivia Varnet had fallen for each other, but Kristoff also relates that he never acted on the feelings because history had already written that Olivia had married a Companys—Korai’s grandson.

Nilius then reveals what really happened on Charris in their actual past. The Stellar Song indeed abandoned the outpost in Niera’s darkest days. The people on the ship expected everyone on the colony would perish. They traveled all the way to the Battery where they attempted to start a new colony near Etteran space. Yet after all the time in stasis, the colonists were never able to gain a foothold. After fifty years, the only survivors remaining were the AIs. The AIs, with no humans left to care for, decided to explore the galaxy on their own. But before departing, they decided to return to Charris to pick up the bots and AIs who’d remained with the few humans left on the failing Charran outpost. When they returned to Charris, however, they found that the group, mostly the children, had developed their own natural immunity to the toxin. By that time, Olivia Varnet had led the colony capably and built a thriving outpost of fifty thousand settlers. Nilius also reveals that one of Olivia Varnet’s children, raised as a Companys, was actually Pyco Matta’s child. One of the descendants of that illegitimate child, while researching his genealogy, discovered his true lineage and decided that he shouldn’t continue using the surname Companys. Instead, he combines two family names—Kendree and Adelson—into the surname Dreeson, revealing Olivia Varnet herself and Pyco Matta to be the origin of the Dreeson family line.

Origins Hyperlinks: In “How Far the Future Moon,” the life of a brilliant young Charran physicist is recounted by his brother, and while his brilliance is obvious, his resistance to following rules leads to his relegation to obscurity in his own lifetime, while his work is destined to endure well past his era.

Episode 26: “Ascent”

Ren and Fieldstone acclimate to a strange and brutal culture on the bipal planet. They learn that it is called Yaal, an outpost built by humans in the distant past, now occupied by a culture that directs the orphan children on the first level into a climb up the interior layers of an ancient mountain megastructure, where each layer conditions the applicant to reject their humanity piece by piece.

Fieldstone begins to train Ren to fight, for the pair wish to learn as much as they can about this alien society. Ren must win her fights just as Fieldstone does, because they advance as a pair but also die as a pair if one falls. Ren is an apt student, and her body—Ya-ya’s body—is fit and strong. But she struggles with the prospect of killing, as it violates her oath as a healer.

As they are training, Rold discovers that Bo and Ya-ya are fighters unlike any he has ever seen. He brings his partner Danta to spar with Ya-ya, and Danta is shocked when the smaller girl defeats her easily. She begs Bo to train her as well. Fields agrees and offers to train Rold too. The two couples decide to progress as far as they can together.

In addition to training for the fights, the candidates attend lectures where they are taught to embrace their evolution into technological beings and reject their human past. At the conclusion of one such lecture on the third level, Bo and Ya-ya are pulled aside and directed to speak with Maícon. He commands them to have a baby together, and explains that procreation is necessary in a society where death is so commonplace. During her pregnancy, Ya-ya and Bo are given a reprieve from the fights. Yet that break from the fighting becomes a tragic heartbreak when they take Ya-ya and Bo’s newborn daughter from them immediately after birth.

Ren uses the pain of that loss to fuel her as they begin fighting again, transforming into a ruthless killer when she is called upon to fight. Their opponents become deadlier as they climb too, both because their prosthetic components are tougher than skin and bone and because all the fighters have honed their techniques as mech fighters as they’ve climbed.

When they are finally nearly completely cyborg, the civilization’s history, culture, and philosophy is uploaded into their minds. Ren discovers that the rejection of their biological origin isn’t merely a byproduct of necessity. It is a deliberate rejection of the philosophy of Purism that drove their ancestors from Earth to seek refuge in the stars. There is an intense hatred of their human origin, but Ren, sympathetic to the people, rejects the philosophy rather than the unlucky children born into such a ruthless society. Maícon confronts her and questions her loyalty and commitment to their beliefs. He believes that somehow Ya-ya is an imposter. She tells him she has merely been masking her fear by faking her confidence, and this doubt is what Maícon sees as false. He declares that their final test is at hand. If they pass, they will become immortal technological beings.

Ren and Fields arrive at their final fight only to find Rold and Danta, who are expecting their final fight as well. Suddenly both couples come to the realization that after all this time, they will be forced to kill each other. Instead, Danta and Rold are called into the chamber alone, leaving Bo and Ya-ya outside to wait. A few minutes later, they are called into the studio, expecting to see Rold and Danta waiting for them. Instead, when they enter, Maícon directs them to fight each other. Bo picks up his knife first, and though he lets Ya-ya pick up her blade, he dispatches her quickly with a merciful cut to the heart.

Ren wakes up again back in the artifact. She fears that Fieldstone may be lost in the artifact, as the transformation to bipal would’ve made him immortal, and none of them had a sense for how long immortality might last inside the artifacts. She explains how the bipal society was structured, and Rishi confirms that Ren’s experience was consistent with how the bipals of the future transform biological humans into bipals.

Sōsh reasons that wherever they went, Fieldstone would still be a soldier, and that soldier would never quit on a mission. The crew agrees and decides to wait as long as it takes for him to return. Ren explains the similarities between their civilization’s roots and Yaal—the Maícon, the similarity of the android models they knew, Andrew and Delius. Yet she didn’t know exactly where or when these bipals were in relation to the Battery Systems. Finally, she expresses the relief it is to be back on the Yankee-Chaos, the only place that feels like home for her.

Episode 27: “To Iophos”

As they wait for Fieldstone to return, the crew of the Yankee-Chaos struggle with the monotony of the uncertain wait. Tension begins to build between Ren and Draya, as the doctor reveals the depth of her relationship with Fieldstone inside the artifact. Transom finds Ren training inside the med bay and agrees to spar with her, finding that Fields had turned Ren into a capable fighter on Yaal.

While Transom is discussing Ren with Carolina, Rishi interrupts and reveals that the Charris group has returned from the artifact. They’re both stunned and don’t understand how she could know. Rishi explains that she is receiving data streams from her future counterparts via the artifact. Rishi tells them that the Charris group had been drastically wrong about their own history. As a result, the Charris group suggests focusing intensely on learning the history of their target era before they go into the artifact. Transom suggests that they should pick up Carsten Airee again for his historical expertise before their mission to Iophos, and Carolina is adamantly opposed.

Ren and Transom continue to train while they wait for Fields to return. Ren confides in Transom that she misses Fieldstone, also struggling to explain how strange it is to return to a fully-human body. Rishi joins the conversation, reminding Ren that she’d experienced a similar struggle on her trip to Earth and back, offering Ren a sympathetic ear.

A few days later, a ship unexpectedly arrives alongside the artifact. Before they can ping, Carolina discerns that it must be her father’s ship the Heart of Athos. Her brother Colin Dreeson returns their ping.

When Colin comes aboard, Carolina and the crew are surprised by his fellow traveler—Carsten Airee. Colin immediately becomes adversarial, reminding Carolina that she’d broken her trust with their father, failing to keep the Chancellor informed of her activities, especially after Theta-Nikorla, where Athosian intelligence believed Carolina and her crew had been killed. Colin Dreeson demands to know what Carolina is doing at the artifact. Transom speaks for the crew in objecting to Colin Dreeson’s tone, informing Carolina’s brother that he will be polite to their captain while on their ship. Airee smooths over the familial infighting, noting that he’d been reading up on the artifacts while searching for Carolina and found everything very interesting. As they are speaking, a shout comes over the comms channel startling everyone, and both Draya and Ren, recognizing Fieldstone’s voice, race toward the spacesuits to help bring him in. Realizing that this incident will reveal the nature of the artifacts to Colin and Carsten, Carolina adjourns the meeting, sending both Athosians back to her father’s ship.

Once Carolina gets Fieldstone settled, she tells Colin she’s ready to meet aboard their father’s ship. She brings Rishi and insists on meeting alone with Colin and Carsten—just the four of them in the ship’s “clean room.” When the anti-surveillance tech messes with Rishi’s body, she asks Carolina’s brother to shut off the specific system bothering her. They both realize that Rishi isn’t human. Rishi explains that she’s a bipal, and to prove it, she morphs into Carolina in front of Carsten and Colin.

Rishi tells them both about the artifacts, while Carsten and Colin listen with great interest. She briefs them on their mission to save the future from the technological races, as well as their desire to learn about the roots of the war with the hope of stopping the fighting. Colin dismisses Rishi and Airee, demanding to speak with Carolina alone. They discuss her attempted assassination at Ash-Vedal and what the Iophans’ motivations might be for killing the Chancellor’s daughter. Carolina informs Colin that she has an insurance policy—the banking keys she’d stolen from the bank on Lime Harbor. Colin scolds Carolina for putting herself in such a vulnerable position, reminding her what the consequences of her death would’ve been—billions dead. “For what?” Colin asks her. “For the truth,” Carolina insists. Colin tells her that he’s ready to tell her the truth about Athos, but first he demands she give her oath—once and for all—to serve Athos.

Carolina invites Carsten to join her back on the Yankee-Chaos. They seem ready to leave Colin and return to the ship, but Rishi informs Carolina that Colin needs to come as well. The Dreeson siblings send their father’s ship back to Athos and depart for the next artifact. Along the way, Fieldstone tells Carolina that he’s had to make a difficult choice between Ren and Draya. He doesn’t want to hurt either of them, but he reveals to Carolina that his connection to Ren is so deep he must continue their relationship.

Carolina, Carsten, Transom, Sōsh, and Colin Dreeson all prepare to travel back to Iophos roughly one hundred fifty years prior to the outbreak of the West Battery War. They meet Kristoff outside the next artifact, who is waiting for them in Verona’s ship the Cannon. He warns them that the trip back will change them all. Then, they suit up and head inside the artifact.

Origins Hyperlinks: In “Cobalt” Carsten Airee recounts his adventure out in the Indies to learn about life as an asteroid miner, told to the Yankee-Chaos crew during their transit from the first to the second artifact in “To Iophos.”

Episode 28: “Demons”

Carolina and her group arrive in Iophos separated. Transom finds himself in the middle of a football match for the Xenia seventeens, kicking off a fierce brawl when confronted by a teammate for spoiling a play in his dazed state. He is subdued and taken for a psych eval because of his ferocity and the relative rarity of violent behavior in Iophan society.

At the clinic, Carolina comes to in the body of Lee Ira, and she is overcome with grief, and though she doesn’t know exactly why, Carolina has a vague sense that the pain stems from the loss of her host’s sister. Her housebot Alba is with her. When Alba explains why the clinic is so busy—a brawl involving the city’s seventeens football club—the android’s description of the fighting makes it apparent to Carolina that Transom was the cause. Carolina steps away from her bot and sneaks into the room of the brawling boy Xeldin Swinney. They are quickly able to identify each other and Carolina orders Transom to behave himself and blend in—no more fighting.

The group had picked a central location to meet in Io, where Carolina’s brother Colin “Goss” Dreeson waits for the others to make the rendezvous. Carsten Airee spots him, arriving to meet Colin Dreeson in the body of the tall goalkeeper from the seventeens football team, a young man named Lorne Ioseph. Colin Dreeson, fittingly, arrives in the body of a young government functionary named Colin Knoll. Carsten informs Colin that he knows where Transom is but that he’s locked up because of the fight. He tells Carsten to go back to Xenia and do his best to blend in.

At the following rendezvous, Carolina appears and meets with her older brother. He finds her to be uncharacteristically sad and is troubled by how terrible her host’s face looks. Goss shows his sister a deeply caring side she’d never seen before. He puts Carolina in touch with Carsten, as she, Carsten, and Transom had all arrived in the small city of Xenia. Sōsh is nowhere to be found yet.

When Carolina meets with Carsten, he too is shocked by the sadness that seems to permeate Carolina’s spirit. She explains to the tall boy Lorne that her host, Lee Ira, had lost her twin sister and that the grief is overwhelming. Carsten has memories from Lorne’s mind of Marion’s funeral, explaining that the entire city marked the occasion publicly. He is troubled by how deeply her host’s life seems to be overwhelming Carolina’s psyche.

Transom, meanwhile, remains locked up under the care of the clinic’s chief psychiatrist Arno Koslov. He cannot explain the psychotic break Xeldin Swinney seemed to have during the football match, but he is very suspicious of Swinney, noting that the boy who seemed to be very much average before the incident is now highly intelligent, manipulative, and exhibiting psychopathic tendencies. He declines to release Swinney until he understands why he snapped during the match.

Carolina continues to struggle with her grief and even begins to worsen. On a walk with her Alba, Lee Ira seems to break through Carolina’s consciousness asking the bot about Carolina by name. When Carolina returns, the bot asks her if she is okay and whether she knows anything about someone named Carolina. The Alba then insists on taking her charge to the psychiatrist treating Lee. When he meets with Lee, Dr. Koslov, who begins to suspect something is off with Lee Ira as well, asks very specific questions about prior sessions he’d had with Lee. Carolina has no memory of them and when Dr. Koslov leads her into answering incorrectly, she becomes disoriented and faints. She wakes up in the clinic again, this time with Lee’s mother. Now both Dr. Koslov and Lee’s mother have grave concerns about Lee.

When Carolina is finally able to get away from the clinic, she meets with Carsten. While she is attempting to explain to him that Lee is breaking into her consciousness, Lee appears just as Carsten is discussing information about their mission. Lee learns that the girl who has taken possession of her mind is Carolina Dreeson and that others have traveled to Xenia with her. She believes that these visitors are demons from the future, and Lee Ira calls Dr. Koslov directly to tell him that her alter ego—the person he had been speaking with was actually Carolina Dreeson, not her.

Based on Carsten’s pep talk in the park, Carolina comes to the conclusion that Lee Ira is breaking into her mind because she is unwilling to confront Lee’s grief. She calls upon Carsten and Colin to help her approach the problem directly. She leads them on a walk to her sister Marion Ira’s memorial in a section of Xenia called Reader’s Circle. When Carolina approaches Marion’s headstone, she is so overwhelmed by the pain, she drops to her knees, weeping so audibly that everyone around Reader’s Circle can’t help but notice the scene, a rare and almost taboo public display of grief that shocks the people of Xenia, all of whom are sympathetic to Lee over the loss of her twin sister.

Shortly after she returns from Reader’s Circle, Lee’s mother pings Dr. Koslov expressing suspicions that her daughter isn’t who she seems to be. As he continues to investigate, Koslov begins to connect Lee to Lorne Ioseph—Carsten Airee’s alter ego—as well as Xeldin Swinney, Transom’s host. He realizes that Lee Ira should have no connection to the boys, other than the connection Lee expressed—that those two were visitors from the future as well, demons.

Koslov begins to investigate the claims Lee made to him, and he finds that just as she’d said, Lee had visited Xeldin Swinney the night of the brawl, and he watches the encounter where she addressed him as “Sebastian” and he addressed her as “Dreeson.” Koslov approves the visitation request for Lorne Ioseph to see his teammate Swinney, hopeful that he might catch some clue in their conversation. But when Lorne visits, Carsten and Transom code their language carefully enough that Koslov doesn’t understand Carsten’s request for Transom to get free because “the team and the captain need him.”

With no real evidence for his strange suspicions, Koslov confronts Xeldin Swinney directly, addressing him as “Sebastian” and revealing that he knows him to be a clever psychopath—not Xeldin Swinney. He asks Sebastian what he intends to do with Xeldin Swinney’s life. Transom never denies that he isn’t Swinney, answering merely that he wishes to live a life that has impact and can do so by surrounding himself with people who have the strengths that he lacks. Transom is shocked the following day when Koslov releases him outright. He is quickly amused by the doctor’s motivations, as he immediately notices a bot following him—a clumsy attempt at surveillance that an operator like Transom instantly slips easily.

Transom and Carsten meet, discussing the depth of Carolina’s problems, which Transom identifies as a threat to Carolina herself, positing that Carolina’s mind could get lost in Lee Ira’s consciousness. Fearing that they know too little about the artifacts to chance Carolina remaining on Iophos in Lee’s body, Transom devises a plan to send Carolina back. As they depart their meeting spot, Transom notices that Lorne has a tail on him as well. As they walk, Transom directs Carsten in his first lessons in counterespionage, the pair teaming up to steal a “shock-box” from a community watch officer, before Transom identifies Carsten’s tail as one of Eddis Ali’s tech wizards—a familiar face he remembers from the Drop Mine on Pax Heavy—a wizard named Elosh.

Transom asks for Colin Dreeson to come along later that evening when he and Carsten meet with Lee Ira. Carsten’s role is to deliver Carolina to Transom in an isolated area so they can meet in secret. He isn’t sure what Transom’s plan is, but as they get closer to the meeting spot, Carsten gets so uneasy that Carolina begins to pick up on his bad energy. Transom deploys the shock-box on Lee Ira’s android Alba. Seeing this, Lee takes control of her body to confront Transom, who threatens to kill her if she causes a scene. He demands to speak to Carolina, but Lee is reluctant to turn her body back over to Carolina, refusing to relinquish any of her memories to the unwelcome visitor. Just as Transom is about to kill Lee, Carsten convinces her to allow Carolina to come back and talk to them. As soon as she does, Transom begins to choke Carolina to death under a tree in a dark corner of the park.

They struggle to keep the scene quiet as pedestrians pass, all the while Transom is strangling Lee Ira. Then, when he is certain the girl is dead, Transom revives Lee Ira’s body using chest compressions and the shock box. When she finally comes back, she’s now Lee Ira, and Carolina has gone. Transom tells Lee that they will leave her alone and let her have her life back provided she never tells anyone what has happened to her, especially Dr. Koslov. Lee Ira agrees, waiting silently as Lorne—the tall boy she knows to be a visitor named Carsten—repairs her Alba and wipes its memory of the past few weeks.

When they send Lee back to her life, Carsten is angry at Transom for killing Carolina. He reminds Airee that he merely sent her back to their real lives and expresses that he’s going to find a building to throw himself off so that he follows her back right away. Goss tells Transom in no uncertain terms that he is not to return—that Carolina had gone to far too much trouble to bring them to that place. And as Carsten is making the argument that there’s no reason for them to remain, Transom remembers that they’re not the only people who don’t belong in that place: Elosh, the wizard from Eddis Ali’s sect, is in Xenia as well. Colin Dreeson orders Transom and Carsten to remain and investigate, and reluctantly, both Transom and Carsten agree. He also reminds them that they should still try to locate Sōsh, who hasn’t yet appeared in Io.

Dr. Koslov is stunned by Lee Ira’s sudden personality shift. She’s suddenly herself again and refuses to talk about the incidents of the previous weeks. Similarly, he begins to doubt himself as Xeldin Swinney plays the role so well that everyone accepts the formerly violent boy back into polite society. Koslov can’t forget the experience, though, and he begins to wonder about the identity of Lee Ira’s demon—Carolina Dreeson. With all the wonders of technology, could it be possible that remote possession of another’s consciousness might be just another technology that once seemed impossible, and he asks who might have that technology if anybody, reasoning that it would be someone rich and powerful, like the Dreesons. And, if those visiting demons were really infiltrating personas, any number of them could be anywhere on Iophos and no one would ever know.

Meanwhile, a young man name Jong is enjoying his honeymoon, floating the Waterlands with his new bride Grace. They drift and enjoy the water, watching a young family on a pontoon boat enjoying the day with their children. Jong tells Grace that they’re the luckiest people on Iophos. Grace agrees but isn’t quite ready to start that phase of her life just yet, telling Jong that she’s going for a drink and asking him what he wants. He asks her to bring him a vodkaberry.

Origins Hyperlinks: “The Ira Twins” tells the story of Lee Ira’s quest to find her missing sister, who vanished on a trip into the Letters, a family drama that evolves into a foundational story of modern Iophan culture.

Episode 29: “Many Chambers”

Burch and Omar Jemeis attempt to return to Trasp territory to recruit his big sister Leda to their cause. Their target will be to enter a nearby artifact and return to the Trasp outpost on Veronia to bear witness to the start of the West Battery War. Burch had barely escaped his one trip into the Protectorate with Omar’s help, and, because of Burch and Rishi’s deception on Theta-Nikorla, Omar is officially MIA and a suspected defector, if not a traitor.

Omar takes the danger in stride as they ditch his Trasp ship and smuggle themselves into the heart of the Protectorate within freighter compartments. When they finally make contact with Leda, she is not alone. Leda’s Trasp identity—Aida Jemeis—is still the greatest hero of the Protectorate. Thus, she is still engaged in propaganda work, and she’s still traveling with her ISB handler, Lt. Col. Myrna Hartline, who nearly arrested Burch on his first trip into Trasp space. She attempts to arrest Aida’s brother Omar as soon as she enters their ship. Omar protests, and in the middle of the chaos, Burch surprises Hartline, subduing her, and placing Leda in an awkward position.

Burch and Omar attempt to explain their goal to Leda—to go back through time inside the artifact. Unlike Omar or Hartline, Leda had experience with the artifacts on Carolina’s first trip aboard the Yankee-Chaos. As they discuss the possibility, Hartline becomes indignant, labeling the Jemeis siblings as traitors and Burch a foreign spy. After Leda defends Hartline as a friend, Omar proposes bringing Hartline with them back through the artifact. She thinks the whole idea is absurd.

But as they get close and all three of her captors take the prospect of time travel seriously, Hartline starts to doubt whether they might be sincere. They plan for the mission and then head into the artifact between Port Cullen and Dreeson’s System.

When the artifact transports them, Burch comes to in the body of a young man named Chambers on a Trasp colony called Ariel-Cantor. Luckily, he discovers that the two women and other young man in the same room are his traveling companions. They’re all trainee logistics officers, and as they’re getting their senses about them, they quit their jobs to find passage to Heinan, where they hope to meet up with Burch’s best wizard friend Verona, who lived in the Protectorate during the pre-war era. However, as they’re exploring how to get passage out of Ariel-Cantor, Burch gets addressed directly by a strange old woman who claims to be a tech wizard from the future.

Burch is stunned at being identified by name, especially in his borrowed body, but he quickly becomes frustrated by her convoluted “wizard talk.” He demands that the old woman speak straight with him about who she is and what she’s doing on Ariel-Cantor; otherwise, he threatens to walk away and leave her there. Fearing that Burch will leave without her message getting through, she begs Burch not to go. Omar offers to take her with them, but he demands she talk plainly.

The old woman, a future wizard named Carmenta, helps the foursome rent a ship, and she tells them that she knows how the war begins and who begins it. She reveals that one of Eddis Ali’s tech wizards, Effelin Kal-Ennis, is on Carhall working for a secret military agency, and he is the progenitor of the war. She also reveals a secret of the sect, that because of their longevity, they must keep a memory chip in order to store their long memories. She suggests they find Kal-Ennis and steal his memory chip so they can discover everything he knows about the war and the tech wizards’ part in it.

They debate and agree to pursue Effelin Kal-Ennis on Carhall. When they arrive, Omar and Burch are shocked that the person they’re looking for isn’t even hiding. They find him teaching engineering at the city university, even playing chess in the park with students. Burch and Omar decide to visit him and talk, with Burch even sitting for a game of chess with Kal-Ennis. Omar and Burch are surprised by how nice he seems, stunned by how much the progenitor of the worst event in human history seemed like a normal guy instead of a monster. Nonetheless, they agree they have a job to do and return to the ship to plan the operation to abduct him and steal his memory chip.

The group adjusts their plans and meet Kal-Ennis back in the same park for another game of chess. This time, Leda and Hartline join them, using Hartline’s Trasp espionage techniques to lull Kal-Ennis into a trance. They walk him away from the table, remove his memory bank, and leave Carhall.

On the flight out, Burch is struck by Hartline’s reaction, not just to the mission, but she’s deeply affected by the pre-war Protectorate itself, lamenting what had become of her society because of the war. She weeps as she realizes that her people were once free from the tyranny of her militarized society. Burch does his best to console her.

Origins Hyperlinks: “Age of Deception” is the personal account of Dr. Pitka Remera, who, along with her personal Maícon clone, was an instrumental figure in the inciting incident of the West Battery War. “The Chameleon” follows Kayella, Boggs, and the Brindars as they track down brutal space pirates in the pre-war Protectorate.

Episode 30: “Day of Deception”

Burch and his group, with Effelin Kal-Ennis’s memory bank in hand, seek out Verona for her help in decrypting his memory data. In this time, though, Verona has yet to meet Burch, so he and Leda approach her at her workplace on Heinan to introduce themselves. Burch tells Verona who he is and shares knowledge about her life that only somebody familiar could know, and he shows her the memory bank. Verona reacts angrily, scolding Burch for possibly blowing her Trasp cover, yet she agrees to meet him and Leda later. When she balks at helping them, Leda calls her out, insisting that Verona was meant for the center of the action and should stop pretending otherwise.

So Verona joins the group, suggesting that they’ll need to find a prime AI in order to decrypt the amount of data in Effelin Kal-Ennis’s memory stick. On their tight timeline before the start of the war, Burch suggests their only real options would be Kayella and Boggs, who operated within the Protectorate during the war era.

They find Kayella and Boggs aboard a Trasp military vessel the Tusk on a top-secret operation. Both Primes are intrigued by the group’s claim that they know about the war, as they’ve been investigating the ominous pre-war events themselves. They agree to help Burch and his curious friends.

Kayella and Boggs decrypt the memory bank and find plans for an inconceivably terrifying superweapon on Veronia. They explain that Kal-Ennis’s group had been engineering a mega-weapon into the residential space wheels the Trasp are building in Veronia, orienting all the reactors in the wheels toward a gamma-burst generator that the colony can focus into a single point—a catastrophic burst capable of wiping out life on an entire planet. Not only that, they have plans to construct an FTL torpedo, timed to launch simultaneous to the burst, so that they can theoretically shoot such a blast through subspace to travel faster than light. Burch points out the obvious—that no one knows the consequences of shooting so much energy into subspace, theorizing that it may be a threat to the fabric of the universe itself. Everyone agrees that the superweapon must be destroyed, and they plan a mission to Veronia to take it out.

Verona can’t participate, because Burch and his fellow infiltrators plan on dying in the war’s initial outbreak, and they know that Verona is fated to live through the war. Similarly, Carmenta points out that an old woman like her would only get in their way. As Burch and the others depart, Carmenta asks Burch to remember an important message when he returns to his own life—that “the bird is concealed above the king’s hand.” Burch considers it just more oracle talk from the old woman, but seeing how upset she gets when he jokes about it, he promises Carmenta he’ll remember the message.

Burch, Leda, Hartline, and Omar train with Kayella and Boggs, yet as soon as they arrive, Hartline insists they approach directly, landing them just outside the bunker where they believe Kal-Ennis’s secret weapons program to be hidden.

Once inside the bunker, though, the situation seems odd, and when they get to the bottom of a very long staircase, they realize that there’s nothing in the bunker. Burch and Leda call it a rat trap and can’t figure out why it would be down there, especially after the trap doesn’t spring on them as they’re running back up the stairs.

When they get to the top, with the clock ticking down to the war’s precipitating incident, Burch insists they proceed to the 804 peg where the shooting starts. Omar questions Burch’s belief in the story of Pitka Remera, the Etteran doctor whose account shaped much of the Battery’s understanding of the start of the war. The Trasp, though, have never bought into Pitka’s story, and Omar politely reminds Burch that the gap in their understanding was probably just that Pitka Remera’s story was never real.

When they get to the 804 peg, they speak with Deb Collison, a key figure in Pitka’s story. She is overwhelmed by the pathogenic outbreak that Pitka had come to Veronia to investigate, and Deb confirms that Pitka herself is on the colony and exactly where she should be according to Pitka’s account of the events that day. The group flies to a safe distance to observe the incidents that kick off the fighting between the Trasp and Etterans.

Burch reflects on the surreal nature of watching history unfold. After the 804 peg explodes. Burch sees Pitka rushing to escape the conflagration, with strikebots hunting her down—bots he recognizes from his trip to the Murder Mill. He follows Pitka into her shuttle after it makes a hard landing, and he jumps inside to talk to her. Burch interrogates Pitka, asking her questions about a few points that never made sense to him in her account. He learns that Maícon descended all the way from Linden Column, a lineage that precedes humanity’s arrival on Charris. He also learns that an unknown prime to him—Artemis—is actually Maícon’s sister, according to Pitka. Then, Pitka’s Maícon clone returns to the ship as Burch ducks out the side, catching a brief glimpse of that infamous Maícon as he flees.

The group is confounded, finding that the events unfolded exactly as they’d expected yet still don’t make sense. Kayella and Boggs inform Burch that they witnessed Pitka’s Maícon jumping between bots and ships and other processing platforms in a curious and unnatural way. Burch, though, becomes fixated on the bunker again, identifying it as the piece that didn’t fit with their puzzle. He orders Leda to hide their vessel in the smoke plume from the nearest burning tower—as all the pegs on the planet are now ablaze. And as they are hiding, a single ship approaches the planet. Burch predicts that the occupants of that vessel are the real rats that the bunker trap was intended to ensnare. And, just as predicted, they land at the bunker and begin to descend, just as Burch and his team had done.

Knowing that their time is short, Burch proposes trapping the infiltrators inside the bunker, surprising them, and hopefully leaving somebody alive to interrogate before the nukes go off. They instruct Kayella and Boggs to drop them off and provide cover, and then they ambush the commandos as they exit the bunker.

In the fight, Burch and Leda discover that the commandoes themselves are Iophan roughnecks—mercenaries for hire—tough fighters, which surprises the hardened combat veterans in Burch’s group. And further, the leaders prove to be a segment of Eddis Ali’s tech wizards. Finally, moments before the nukes go off, Burch discovers that he knows one of the wizards from the future. His name is Bashi-Omo, a good man, and though he can’t piece the whole puzzle together just yet, Burch realizes that the entire story about the superweapon was a trick by Effelin Kal-Ennis and his faction to get the other wizards to attack Veronia, touching off the horrific West Battery War.

Origins Hyperlinks: “Burning Rock” follows two Trasp soldiers shortly after the incident at Veronia as the Protectorate prepares for a protracted conflict with the Etteran Guild.

Episode 31: “The Art of History”

With Carolina gone, her brother Goss, Transom, and Carsten Airee remain behind on Iophos to track the sect of tech wizards and search for the Iophan root causes for the war. Carsten realizes that their three perspectives fall into the neat categories Goss describes in a family story of “builder, observer, and block-kicker.” Carsten decides to organize his story of their lives on Iophos through those lenses.

Carsten relates that Transom, in his early years, works diligently to overcome his rocky start after the football brawl. He first works in sanitation, then as a city concierge in Xenia, before finally landing a spot on the community watch. He also spends his free time tracking the wizards, especially Elosh. He teaches Carsten surveillance and counter-espionage and suggests that Airee use his spare life learning to become a great writer of history. He also requests that Airee tutor him in his historical understanding while they’re there. The two track Elosh to an underground student meeting, eventually tailing Elosh to a clandestine encounter with his overseer, an unknown tech wizard they call Alpha.

Colin Dreeson, meanwhile, uses his early years working his way up the government hierarchy. He eventually negotiates his way into the local arts office, taking special interest in how the government propagandizes the people into a stable and favorable society for Athos. He drags Airee out to see a statue from a contest of young artists. The genius of the young artist—Ianeria Kern—is immediately apparent to Carsten, who learns from Goss that the girl likely never gained fame in their time because she was using her art to stir up unapproved narratives. Goss makes it a special project of his to manage this artist so that she spreads the messages he approves.

Carsten spends his early years observing the difference between his society—the big sister, Athos—and the culture here on Iophos. He joins the student counter-culture movement and finds that Goss’s young artist Ianeria Kern is a member of the group as well. He also uses the time to develop the robotics skills he inherited from his host Lorne Ioseph.

During his middle years, Transom continues to track Alpha and Elosh, but they aren’t able to discover exactly what the wizards are doing on Iophos. Transom decides to confront Alpha and Elosh to ask. They end up in a vicious fight where the wizards call in backup and beat the hell out of the trio. Goss reveals that he knows some secrets of the sect, but Alpha declines to make any concessions and warns the three visitors that if they ever bother them again, he’ll kill them. Transom lashes out violently, wounding Elosh even after they think he’s subdued. They debate throwing Transom out the funerary chute then and there, but ultimately, they let all three go. During the encounter, Airee recognizes one of the wizards as a student infiltrator, Devierry Soo.

Goss continues to cultivate the young artist during those years, stringing her along using minor projects to force her to moderate her extreme political tendencies. He also continues to move up the chain in the arts office, learning as much as he can about Iophan culture. Carsten continues to investigate the student group, finding it grating to watch many of his own frustrations with society in Dreeson’s System reflected in these young, naïve students. Similarly, he even seems to be developing more patience for Goss’s viewpoints.

In his final days on Iophos, Transom helps Carsten develop a tracking program so the group can follow all of the student activists as they graduate into Iophan government and corporate positions. They continue to follow the group, finding especially in Xenia that the group is heavily leveraging the death of Marion Ira to build resentment among the Iophan people for their position as the forgotten sibling in their own system. Carsten tracks the wizard they’d seen in the fight—Devierry Soo—which helps the trio to follow the progression of the counter-culture movement. Then, suddenly, some of the wizards they’re tracking disappear, followed shortly thereafter by Transom himself. As Goss and Carsten are dining one evening a few weeks later, Alpha appears, making it known to Goss that he’d killed Transom in retaliation.

During those final years on Iophos for Carsten, he often meets with Goss to observe the Dreeson brother’s attempts to moderate Iophan culture through their art. Goss explains to Carsten that a similar counter-culture has been building on Athos in their time—to the extent that graffiti critical of Athos has begun to pop up all over the ring, an unthinkable development in such a well-ordered society. Goss finally decides to put Ianeria Kern’s talents to work for him to spread a positive community message. Carsten marvels that not only has Goss strategically manipulated this artistic genius to produce works that he desires, but he has also used future commissions as a carrot to keep her from creating any negative works, keeping countercultural art from ever coming into being. Goss is using his Iophan life both to learn about Iophos but also to test how art can be manipulated to moderate dissenting cultures—all of it for the benefit of Athos.

Carsten observes Ianeria as she takes up her major commission—a statue on the Katherineberg mall of two famous Athosian musicians on their visit to Iophos, emphasizing the friendship between their two ringworlds. She crafts a magnificent sculpture that both he and Goss believe is a grand triumph, but before Colin Dreeson can even begin to celebrate, they find that under everyone’s nose, Ianeria Kern has used some of the marble from the main project to sculpt a likeness of Lee Ira in front of her sister’s memorial in Reader’s Circle. It is exactly the kind of artistic rebellion Goss had been working to squelch. The forbidden statue proves so powerful an image, striking that deep resentful Iophan nerve, that people gather around it spontaneously. Carsten warns Goss that removing the statue would cause a revolt. Though he initially appears defeated, Goss manipulates the crowd’s reaction to the crisis to mediate the city’s anger, slowly allowing the narrative of the statue’s message to be absorbed into their culture, playing both the heel and master manipulator at the same time, allowing the citizens their cathartic release.

Carsten, with thirty or so good years left in Lorne Iosef’s life, decides to leave Iophos and explore the Battery Systems as they were before the outbreak of the war.

Origins Hyperlinks: “The Poacher” recounts the mysterious disappearance of Athosian birds, exploring the many ways birds and bots are in integral part of the culture on both of Dreeson’s Systems vast ringworlds. “Playing the Sondomme” follows a young Athosian musician and her goal to become the first major musician in Dreeson’s System to come from a space cylinder as opposed to the rings.

Episode 32: “Death of the Word”

Carolina returns from Iophos shaken. It’s such a short trip into the artifact that the crew aren’t expecting anyone back so soon. Draya and Kristoff are closest and pick her up, with Draya offering Carolina a much-needed drink, empathizing over their shared experience of a brief traumatic trip inside the artifacts.

Shortly after her return to the Yankee-Chaos, a mysterious ship appears late in the night. When the ping comes in, Carolina is shocked to recognize the voice of the Murkist, who asks to speak to Dr. Ren, stating that she has a debt to repay him. After a brief conversation, Ren and Carolina decide that it’s a request they cannot refuse such a dangerous person. He informs Dr. Ren that she will soon be getting a new patient to treat.

When he comes aboard, the Murkist is carrying a tiny woman everyone mistakes for a child at first glance. The Murkist informs Ren that she’s actually just a very small woman, reporting a fracture to her upper arm that hasn’t been treated for over a week, leaving the girl, Shiann, at severe risk of sepsis. Ren is skeptical she’ll be able to save Shiann’s arm but promises to do her best. The Murkist is reticent to share any details about the girl’s origins or how she was injured. Similarly, Carolina and the crew are wary of what the Murkist’s motivations might be for seeking them out instead of a clinic in the outer Lettered Systems. Though there are no outward signs of distrust or aggression, neither party is comfortable trusting the other fully.

Ren stabilizes Shiann and surgically repairs the arm; however, she tells Carolina and the Murkist that she won’t be comfortable releasing the girl from her care until she’s more certain that Shiann’s arm won’t worsen. The Murkist seems content to wait for Shiann to heal before leaving.

Carolina takes the chance to speak with the Murkist, who seems to defy every preconceived idea the crew had of him, proving to be a thoughtful, albeit ruthless man with a clear code of ethics. Carolina thanks him for saving her life and informing him of the Iophan plot against her. He refuses to accept, replying that Ren is repaying the debt and that he saved her life more out of mutual self-interest than for Carolina’s sake. They maintain an uneasy truce.

Shiann finally regains consciousness, expressing relief that she still has an arm, but she’s severely weakened an in pain. Ren is cautiously optimistic about saving her arm but still prepares Shiann for a long, painful recovery.

Suddenly, in the midst of the visit, Transom returns from the artifact. He immediately boards the Yankee-Chaos upon learning of the dangerous visitor, taking up his duty watching over Carolina again. At first, the sight of Sebastian makes Carolina uneasy in light of their final encounter on Iophos, but Transom is able to put her at ease, assuring Carolina that he had to murder her to save her life.

When Transom bumps into Shiann, he foregoes all pretense and asks her directly why she’s so damn tiny. For her part, Shiann replies in a sour tone that she’s small because both her parents are small. Transom clearly enjoys that the tiny girl is able to handle his teasing and even hit him back with some sarcasm of her own. As the two are talking, Kristoff’s old bot George, which Carolina had pulled out of storage to watch their guests, begins to glitch uttering the nonsense phrase “Ack-op!” The lights on the Yankee-Chaos also begin to flicker around the same time. Shiann tells Transom the old bot is broken. The Murkist doesn’t interfere but is carefully observing how Transom interacts with the girl. The two killers silently agree on a mutual peace.

The equilibrium is disrupted once again when Carsten returns from the artifact. He climbs onto the ship via the tether rope, anxious to see Carolina again after a lifetime on Iophos in Lorne Iosef’s body. On the way to the flight deck, he passes through the atrium and catches a glimpse of Shiann in the medical bay. Unable to contain his excitement, he rushes toward the young woman, and before he can share why he finds the girl so remarkable, the Murkist picks up Carsten by the neck, threatening to snap it for approaching Shiann so aggressively. Transom and the Murkist engage in a brief standoff before Carsten manages to explain that he recognizes the girl’s diminutive size because he knows about her people—the Frinzen. The Murkist releases Carsten, and Carolina brings him up front and attempts to explain the dynamics of their current situation to him.

As the Murkist is seated alone at the atrium table, Rishi approaches him. He understands that she is different from the others but mistakes her for a high-end bot or an AI. Rishi tells him that she is smarter and deadlier than any strikebot ever created and will kill him if he ever harms one of her people. In the exchange, the Murkist warns Rishi that the universe has a way of humbling everyone. And, as if to agree with the point, the lights and the old bot George glitch at nearly the same moment, highlighting the fact that Rishi isn’t so smart that she’s been able to fix even those two simple glitches.

Carsten can’t contain his excitement when they’re all in the atrium together again. As Carolina tries to get everyone to calm down, Airee can’t help but share what he knows about Shiann’s people, revealing that he’d studied the stories about them on his previous field site on Damon Mines, where her people had suddenly appeared and then vanished again hundreds of years prior. The conversation sours again, though, when he asks Shiann what had happened to her people, a secret she and the Murkist have been carefully guarding. Ren only realizes then that this was why the Murkist refused to answer questions about the girl—he’s been protecting Shiann and her people from discovery from the outside worlds.

Carolina manages to broker a deal between the Murkist and Transom. The Murkist agrees to reveal how he’d tracked the Yankee-Chaos so easily in exchange for Carsten’s knowledge of the Frinzen. In the meantime, Shiann’s arm is improving fast enough that Ren believes she will be able to travel with the Murkist soon. So Carsten sits down with Shiann and shares his research with her. And after another two days of rehab, the odd pair are finally ready to leave.

Before he departs, the Murkist reveals how he had been tracking the Yankee-Chaos—with a vector-tracing transponder that he’d had an assistant place on the ship all the way back at Ash-Vedal on the day when Carolina was shot. He explains that it was just a matter of luck that he’d been able to catch a trace from their transponder when he was looking for some way to treat Shiann without taking her to a hospital. He declares that all debts are now square, and Ren bids her young patient farewell.

With their guests on their way, Carolina is able to hold the first meeting to debrief the members of the Iophan travelers. They sit on Verona’s ship, the Cannon, where Carolina’s brother Goss had been recording his memories of Iophos, patiently waiting for the Murkist to depart. During the meeting, Goss emphasizes three important points they learned while on Iophos. The first is that Eddis Ali’s sect of tech wizards were there on Iophos and that there was a clear rift within the sect, some of whom still remain faithful to their original mission—protecting humanity from species-threatening tech. However, some wizards like Elosh and Alpha clearly had ulterior motives. The second major development is that those wizards were playing a role in the growing subversive movement within the Iophan culture, especially the government. The third major discovery was that the rogue wizards also had a close relationship with the Iophan roughnecks on Iophos; but Colin, Carsten, and Transom were never able to discover exactly how that relationship factored into the wedge the wizards were trying to drive between the Athosian and Iophan peoples. Colin Dreeson concludes by telling the others that it is time for him to get back to Athos and tell their father what he and Carolina have learned.

That evening, before departing, Kristoff takes one final crack at repairing his glitching old bot George. He thinks he’s fixed him after George’s verbal tick stops. However, later that night, hours before Goss is scheduled to depart for Athos on the Cannon, old George starts glitching again. With everyone fast asleep except Rishi, George clunks his way into the engine annex and begins to fiddle with the engines. Rishi rushes back to keep him from damaging any critical systems on the ship. As soon as she enters the engine annex, though, Rishi is enveloped by a massive electrical discharge from the engines, shocking her lifeless. George takes advantage of her helpless state to deactivate her processor and replace it with the processing core of Maícon Prime, which Rishi had hidden in a compartment within her body’s forearm. This revives Maícon Prime, whose mind is active for the first time in months, finding a familiar collaborator in George’s body—one of his clones, Pitka Remera’s Maícon. He has a plan for their escape and advises Prime to take Rishi’s shape. The two Maícons simulate a gas leak aboard the Cannon, forcing Goss, Draya, and Kristoff to rush onto the Yankee-Chaos. As they come aboard, they see Rishi, who informs them that she will take old George over to the other ship to assess the malfunction in the atmospherics. Shortly after Rishi and George float over, though, the crew of the Yankee-Chaos watch as Cannon flies away, jumping out of the system with no explanation. Carolina and the crew are left with no way to pursue, both because they find the Yankee-Chaos’s engines completely compromised following the electrical overload, and because Sōsh, who never made contact with the others on Iophos, is still inside the artifact and can’t be abandoned.

It quickly becomes clear to Carolina and the crew that they are in a precarious position. They have limited provisions, more passengers than the ship is used to, and a broken engine very far from the nearest inhabited system. Goss proves to be a calming influence, helping to ensure everyone has something important to occupy their time as they await Sōsh’s return.

The two Maícons, meanwhile, discuss their next move. The Pitka clone suggests that Prime destroy Rishi’s processing core so that she can never deactivate him again. Prime reminds his clone that Rishi did not destroy him when she had the chance. Prime also reveals Rishi’s origin to him—that she was turned into a bipal by another Maícon clone. Thus, killing Rishi would negate the final wish of one of their brethren, something Maícon Prime is not willing to sanction. Instead, he decides that they should pursue the banking keys that Carolina stole from the shuttered banks on Lime Harbor, liberating the capital the war profiteers have been hiding in their secret accounts.

As the shock of Rishi’s sudden betrayal settles aboard the Yankee-Chaos, the crew do their best to tend to their business—some attempting to figure out what happened, others attempting to bring the engines back online. During a quiet moment, Fieldstone approaches Carolina aboard the flight deck. Rishi’s departure has forced him to consider that there might not be a perfect time for him to share his story about what happened to him in his life as a bipal. Just as he tells Carolina that he is ready to share his story, they hear a voice cry out from the artifact. It’s Sōsh returning from his time on Iophos, and he declares that his life there had been impossibly bright in a way he never knew life could be. Carolina turns to Fieldstone and tells him to “hold that thought.”

Origins Hyperlinks: In “Reciprocity” the Murkist returns on a hunt for his most elusive target; and to finally fulfil the contract, he’ll need help from a most unlikely new friend. “The Prospectors” chronicles the breakdown of the failed colony on Damon Mines, a history Carsten Airee came to know well.

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