Abandoned on Alpha Centauri's second planet, our inadvertent colonists have to contend with monstrous storms, clouds of plastic-eating insects, mysterious animals haunting the coastline, and a thick forbidding jungle hiding a secret. Resilience looks like it might be in short supply as they face a planet which is both more inviting and dangerous than it first appeared.

The worst enemy might be themselves, however, and when the rogue AI returns carrying a grim message and an unknown payload from the nearby star, they must either hide or fight. Their tiny outpost seems to be splitting into a dozen factions, and they are busy with their own tasks even as they begin to question the programming which led them to build a colony amid the wreckage of the Deccan Traps.

The next step in their establishment of a colony is planning a future. Do they remain in a virtual paradise disconnected from the world around them, become robots with only a vague sense of what it means to be human, or find some way to recover what they lost when they signed away their freedom with the Corp contract? Whichever choice they make, they have to confront whether they are in control of their own programming or make peace with the fact that they might be merely puppets on strings.