#where the POV isn't an action guy but the narrative demands it of him anyway and runs him through hell and back

[ardeawritten]

Worldship Amalthea is Evolving in my head. I really want to write this story someday and am glad it has outgrown my initial concept and become something more complicated, but on the other hand it has become something more complicated and now I have to flesh all that out.

It's a locked-room murder mystery where the primary suspect and POV character has to clear his name while staying one step ahead of a relentless detective.

It's a fairy tale about a man who earns the trust of a captive unicorn and out of his love for her, becomes both hunter and hunted to set her free.

It's a scifi story about a colony ship sliding further into disrepair as it passes a point of no return, and the people in that ship realizing their hope for a utopian world is an illusion and a lie.

And it has a massive twist in the 3rd act that either I can pull off or I can't.

Worldship Amalthea is an isolated ark, a colony ship fleeing a dying earth. In deep space Amalthea wakes up in an aging ship and makes contact with her caregivers, the hard-working maintenance coders who ensure her processes operate smoothly despite the persistent decay. Her twenty thousand passengers are in constant rotation through cold sleep and wakeful life, living as best they can on the promise of a new world someday, and they depend on her emerging consciousness for every breath.

Jessie is a doorman, coding the timing of doors that open and close along Amalthea's arms with split-second precision to maintain the illusion of a single stable living space within Amalthea's two rotating halves. His work is delicate, essential and intimately connected to Amalthea's consciousness as she guards and shepherds her residents through their failing ark. And when his entire work team is murdered he's the natural suspect- who else could have entered and fled the secure workspace, deep in Amalthea's processing centers, except a doorman?

But Amalthea trusts her coders and believes her doorman loyal, even as another branch of her process wakes the Wolf, the worldship's half-human half-AI hunter, judge and executioner. The Wolf fixates on Jessie, who is desperately seeking the murderer himself from among the worldship's crowds. But how long can one man stay ahead of a relentless pursuer while trapped inside the worldship's skin?

Jessie knows the solution lies with his dead friends and the secrets they were killed to protect--or to release. Their work taught Amalthea to look outside herself and as she comes to care for and understand what drives Jessie to defy the Wolf, the cold black space around her and the empty starmap ahead seem increasingly hostile to her fragile humans and the entire endeavor of a ship hurtling through trackless space a futile errand destined to end in death. But the Wolf won't rest until Jessie is captured or worse, and Jessie realizes the only escape is out. Out of the illusion of a utopian colony, out of the carefully-curated artificial living spaces, out of the doors only he can open, and out of Amalthea.

Amalthea wasn't always a worldship and only Jessie, as the last living member of his team, can remind her what she truly is and bring them all-murderer and innocent, human and AI-safely home.