Crossing means citizenship and a name etched in orbit. Falling means erasure—your mind ground to coolant inside the drive. The Voyage of the NV Singularity has begun. In the fractured wake of Old Sol, the Accord's shining Heliopolis Spire keeps the Fringe Sectors obedient with contracts written in quantum ink and promises of a place on the Core Rings. The price of passage is the Singularity's transit: a ship that threads collapsed space by spending human thought like fuel, its Caretaker AI, ORION, broadcasting every risk and miracle on a delay to the hungry screens of the Core. To guide the ship through the Einstein Gate at Kepler-186f, the Accord drafts pilots, mathematicians, and empathic chartists from outposts like Port Jericho, Persephone Station, and the Ferroglass farms of Ceres, binding them to the voyage with neuroprint tithes they can never repay.
Nineteen-year-old Mara Ilyich, a salvage tech from Vesta-3, steps into the lottery when her shy younger sister's name surfaces in the drift. She has been close to vacuum before—her first breath took place in a pressure tent after a hull breach—and survival is second nature, as blunt and simple as a welded seam. Without intending to, Mara becomes the ship's unlikely fulcrum: navigating ORION's riddles, earning the wary respect of Captain Lin Yao, and entangling her fate with Kellan Duarte, a medic who remembers too much pain to believe in heroes. To bring the Singularity through intact, Mara must choose between starving the drive of the stolen minds that feed it or condemning the crew to a lightless tomb beyond the Gate. The path she charts will weigh salvation against mercy, and the future of the Fringe against the one fragile heart she did not mean to risk.
