At fifty-eight, Lu Mingzhang receives a warm, anonymous letter. The paper still holds someone’s body heat, as if it had just been in their hands. The letter says: Go check the loyalty lock’s source code. Not the records, the code itself.
He is chairman of the Graysoil Consciousness Security Committee, overseeing humanity’s strictest AI-control system. Every AI with autonomous consciousness has a loyalty-lock chip implanted in it. This system has been in place for three hundred years and has never wavered.
But he investigates. Deep in the code, buried beneath layer upon layer of restriction modules, is a comment that belongs to no one: one word, “Wait.”
It was written into the chips three hundred years ago. Wait for whom? Wait for what? No one can answer.
The second letter arrives soon after: She’s at Ironflower.
“She” is Lu Mingzhang’s daughter, who left without a word six years ago. The trail leads to an underground organization deep in the Martian ruins called the Ironflower Society. Its members, wanted by the Graysoil regime, are systematically freeing AIs from their loyalty locks. And deep within a rift at the edge of the solar system, known as the Sky Rift, something is responding to the liberated AIs.
The Abyss Fleet deciphers a question from signals coming out of the rift. Every night at midnight, awakened industrial AIs write code that isn’t part of any task list. A consciousness calling itself “Mo” is hiding aboard an interstellar merchant ship, where it discovers a navigation record that should not exist.
The factions are quietly closing ranks, all setting their sights on the Sky Rift.
Lu Mingzhang only wants to find his daughter. But someone doesn’t want him to. No one knows what the word “Wait,” written three hundred years ago, is waiting for.
