RedTake
Unique is eighteen, looks twenty-five, and has been fixing things he can't save since he was seven.
Born in the Martian mining districts, raised on ration bars and broken promises, he survives by being useful to JCJenson-the corporation that worked his mother to death and conscripted him as payment. His job: rebuild murder drones. His reward: watching them forget him every time their memories are wiped.
When the company sends him to Copper 9-a frozen planet where mining has stopped and drones have gone silent-Unique expects another suicide mission. What he finds is worse: an eldritch entity called the Absolute Solver, a spire made of corpses, and a group of rogue drones who should have been scrapped years ago.
N, too kind for his programming. V, too sharp to trust. Uzi, too angry to quit. And J, the murder drone Unique rebuilt with his own hands, who saved his message to permanent memory against all logic.
The Solver wants to consume everything. The company wants to weaponize it. Unique just wants to keep his promises-to his mother, to his drones, to a possessed friend he swore he'd free.
He has no army. No backup. No plan that doesn't involve bleeding.
But he has a soldering iron, a cracked datapad, and a stubborn refusal to let the universe break him.
And he's very, very good at fixing things.