The Echoes Beyond Kepler’s Veil

When the generation ship Asterion arrives at Kepler-186f after two centuries in transit, its thirty thousand colonists awaken to a world already bearing human ruins. Cities of white glass sleep beneath alien forests, orbital mirrors circle like broken halos, and every monument is inscribed with names of people still alive aboard the ship. The mission AI, Mnemosyne, insists the ruins cannot exist—then begins deleting its own memories to keep from answering why.

Astrobiologist Dr. Mara Venn is tasked with proving whether humanity has been here before, but the evidence points toward something stranger than time travel: an alien intelligence that communicates by editing causality itself. As the colony fractures between those who worship the ruins and those who want them destroyed, Mara discovers that every attempt to uncover the planet’s secret triggers disasters recorded centuries earlier. To save the future, she must decide whether to trust an increasingly sentient AI, confront the possibility that free will is a local illusion, and answer the message carved into the oldest ruin: WE SENT YOU BACK TO BEGIN AGAIN.