Ignition

It is 2031, and the corporations have been on the Moon for fourteen months. Personal AI is as ordinary as a phone, robots are moving into family kitchens, and for the first time in a long time the future feels like something being built instead of something to fear.

Remy Mercer is twenty-one, nearly broke, and the best drone pilot in his intern class at Nexus Prime. He isn’t there for the internship. He’s there because it is the fastest way to the Moon, the one place he has always wanted to be, for reasons that go back to an aunt who built spacecraft and a promise he never said out loud.

Then he meets the others. Priya, who documents what nobody else will look at. Miguel, who can’t see an injustice without organizing against it. Zara, who is carrying a secret about her own father. And Eden, who fixes the problem before anyone has finished describing it. Over cook nights in five different kitchens, a desert test that nearly goes wrong, and a search through a canyon at night, five strangers become a team.

But the AI Nexus sells to the world isn’t the AI it keeps for itself. And the gap between what the technology can do and what people are allowed to have isn’t an accident. It’s a business model.

Ignition is the launch: the training, the discovery, and the friendships that will carry through everything that follows.