Fiction · 30–31 January 2024
A Mars mission.
A mystery inside it.
An unfinished space mystery developed with AI: a crew under pressure, competing interests on Mars, and a mission that may be more than it seems.
The idea
An Agatha Christie mystery, sent to Mars.
On the way to Mars, the crew's most brilliant scientist starts to unravel: paranoia, hallucinations and the conviction that the mission is hiding something. Below them, two blocs claim the same region of Mars, and the crew is sent into the middle of it.
The twist spoiler
One of the planned endings reveals that the mission never left the ground. It is a VR simulation, built to test how a crew holds up under psychological and political pressure, and one of the crew is an undercover agent.
Where it stands
Four chapters. The rest is a plan.
The surviving manuscript stops at chapter four. The outline sketches 21 chapters across four acts, with character profiles, political subplots and more than one possible ending. The archive keeps the changes and contradictions visible.
The last recorded exchange was a request for a name. The AI suggested Echoes of the Void; it remains a title candidate.
My call
- I wrote the brief. A classic whodunit, Agatha Christie style, set on a near-future mission to Mars.
- I ran it like an editor. A writer drafted; an AI editor reviewed every brief, outline, scene plan and chapter before the next step. The archive keeps both sides.
A few starting points
Plot details and spoilers ahead