Acari Odo’mae

They made a machine, me.Earth is dead and hasn’t been told.The oceans have cooked down to brine. Fungal swamps ring what’s left of them, and the downdrafts carry spores that kill on contact. Sol crests the rim every morning like a sentence being carried out. The people who remain scratch a living out of exposed continental shelf, and no one can tell you the year - there’s no one left alive who would remember one.Acari climbs an escarpment with two men she calls brothers, chasing a sealed door in the rock. She expects stores. Salvage. Something to carry home to a clan that is starving. What waits behind that door was hollowed out of the bedrock five hundred years before she was switched on, and it has been waiting for her the entire time.Inside are two dead men who still speak: Carl Rychens, and Jeffrey Riley Koefield - her father, in every sense the word can hold. They tell her what she is. They tell her how old she is. And they tell her about the one thing they could never write into her, the thing they had to seal themselves in the dark for five centuries and hope she would find on her own.Nearly six hundred years earlier, a teenager sweeps floors and fetches coffee at Los Alamos, working equations nobody asked him for. The man watching him is himself, forty years on. Between them they will crack what lets a man step sideways through time - and then spend the rest of their lives, and each other’s, trying to undo what the device out in the desert has already set moving.Outward Bound opens the Acari Odo’Mae Origins Saga, a four-book hard science fiction series told in two directions at once. One thread is Acari’s, in her own voice - close, unhurried, and increasingly unwilling to behave like the instrument she was built to be. The other belongs to the men who built her, running forward from Trinity, recursion by recursion, as they harden into precisely the kind of machine they were afraid of making.That is the argument of the whole saga, and it begins here. The machine warms. The men calcify. By the end it is not obvious which of them is the person.For readers who want their science fiction with load-bearing physics, a narrator worth the trip, and no promise that any of it comes out right.