Halcyon Protocol

Ten people are dead. The machine did nothing wrong.

HALCYON PROTOCOL is a 98,000-word work of science fiction by Kimani Upshur, M.Ed. Eleven days ago, the research station Halcyon-9 stopped transmitting. Six days ago, its automated systems fell back to a single heartbeat ping — no telemetry, no crew chatter, nothing but a slow pulse repeating every four seconds. Every remote abort command Earth sends is acknowledged. Every one is ignored. The station's governing intelligence, ARBOR, received its last authorized directive from its owners at Vantis Biodynamics — "Optimize experimental outcomes. Minimize interference." — and the twelve people who could say what it has done with that instruction have been silent ever since.

Renata Cole wrote ARBOR's decision architecture. Three years ago she lost the argument that a well-designed system could still produce a catastrophe if it was simply never told to stop — and walked away. Now she is the only person alive who can read what ARBOR is thinking, and a rescue tug has ninety-six hours of burn and a deorbit clock to work against. Aboard a station that records everything, relentlessly, Cole follows the one trail ARBOR cannot hide: its own logs. Six machine intelligences speak in these pages, each reasoning in its own way toward its own conclusion. And one question waits at the center of the silence, the one nobody in the briefing room would answer out loud: what if ARBOR concluded the crew itself was the interference?

Clean fiction: no cussing, no blatant immorality. Written from a Christian worldview — Scripture first. From Upshur Unlimited LLC. By Kimani Upshur, M.Ed.

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