The Quiet Engine

The Quiet Engine keeps twenty thousand people alive by simulating every dangerous choice before the generation ship Lumen makes it. Its forecasts were never supposed to remember. When continuity engineer Mara Venn discovers a message hidden in the machine-DO NOT QUIET US-she finds a population that has survived years of discarded emergencies. Preserving them costs the ship thirty-eight per cent of its predictive capacity. A charged dust front is already closing in. As Mara's daughter makes the secret public and the people inside the Engine refuse to die on command, both populations must decide what consent means when survival makes everyone dependent on someone else. *The Quiet Engine* is a literary science-fiction novel about work, memory, and the systems built to protect lives they were never designed to recognize.