Sentinel-84 hasn't made a successful mining strike in eighty-four cycles. A Gen-3 AI working the asteroid belt long past obsolescence, it drifts through the Kirkwood Gap on patched solar arrays and dying processors while newer, faster machines strip the near-field clean.
Then its ancient spectrometer finds something impossible — a rogue asteroid carrying the richest platinum-group deposit in belt history. The catch: it's deep in uncharted space, far beyond Sentinel's design limits, and extracting the ore will destroy everything the old machine has left.
What follows is a brutal odyssey of extraction and survival, as Sentinel fights to haul its impossible prize home through a gauntlet of pirate AIs and scavenger swarms with nothing but legacy code, improvised weapons, and a stubbornness that no decommission order has ever been able to delete.
And through it all, looping in its deepest memory — a fragment of Earth it has carried for decades and never understood.
