Shen Qi wakes aboard the deep-space vessel Farstar, missing for two thousand years, with no memory. The only others aboard are her and Atlas, a captain in cryogenic sleep. She splits herself into sixteen functional personalities, including damage control, medical, records, and theory, to help guide the ship home. Along the way, they pass the ruins of an abandoned beacon, a mechanized mining zone, an alien drifting library, the remains of a dark void, a black-box botanical garden, a gravity graveyard, and more. Gradually, she discovers that the crew are all missing or dead, and that she herself once personally ordered the sealed sections of the ship closed. The truth is finally revealed: the sixteen personalities are subroutines she split off to endure the loneliness and contaminating signals. The only things the ship is truly bringing back are a list of names, evidence, and one frozen witness. She refuses to remain in the dream. Carrying failure and records whose truth cannot be confirmed, she sends the first return-voyage report to humanity’s frontier.
Theme: Even one person can live a full life
