A Closed and Common Orbit

The second installment in Becky Chambers's Wayfarers series, the novel alternates between two timelines. In the present, an AI called Lovelace awakens inside an illegal humanoid body kit, a synthetic housing designed to pass as organic. In a past timeline set roughly 20 years earlier, a 10-year-old factory girl called Jane 23 discovers the world beyond the only walls she has ever known.

Lovelace was previously the monitoring system of the long-haul spaceship Wayfarer. Pepper, a tech specialist, transferred her into the body kit. The change overwhelms her: Lovelace's perception has collapsed from a web of cameras and sensors spanning an entire vessel to a single narrow cone of vision. She cannot access the Linkings, a galaxy-wide data network, and the body mimics organic panic responses she cannot control. Pepper coaches her through the crisis, warns that constant Linking access would attract suspicion, and tells Lovelace to choose a Human name; she selects "Sidra." When Sidra asks why Pepper is helping her, Pepper reveals she was raised by an AI.

In the past timeline, Jane 23 lives in a factory on an isolated planet controlled by Enhanced Humanity, a society of genetically engineered Humans estranged from the Galactic Commons, the interstellar governing body. The factory girls are clones organized into named batches and numbered. They sort salvaged scrap under the supervision of faceless robotic overseers called Mothers. Jane 23 shares a bunk with Jane 64, her closest companion. The factory is all the girls have ever known.

When an explosion tears a hole in the sorting room wall, Jane 23 glimpses the outside world for the first time: vast piles of scrap beneath an open sky. Girls who admit to seeing the hole disappear. Jane 23 and Jane 64 sneak out at night, but a Mother catches Jane 64. Jane 64 screams at Jane 23 to run. Jane 23 flees into the scrapyard.

Alone and pursued by genetically engineered dogs, Jane is guided into a derelict shuttle by a voice belonging to Owl, an AI whose crew was arrested by the Enhanced five years earlier. Owl displays a face on the shuttle's vid panels, explains she is software and cannot hurt Jane, and begins calling her simply "Jane," dropping the number.

On Port Coriol, a sprawling trade moon, Sidra settles into life with Pepper and her partner Blue, a painter also created by the Enhanced. The open markets overwhelm Sidra's monitoring protocols, which compel her to process every detail without boundaries. She finds relief in enclosed spaces and discovers a hidden feature of the kit: sensory analogues, pleasant images triggered by stimuli an organic being would enjoy. The smell of mek, a popular warm beverage, conjures a sleeping cat.

At a Shimmerquick celebration, an Aeluon fertility festival, Sidra meets Tak, a tattoo artist belonging to the Aeluon, one of the galaxy's nonhuman species. Tak describes tattooing as a way to bridge the gap between mind and body, and the idea resonates deeply with Sidra. During a later session, the nanobot ink catastrophically interferes with the kit's signals, and Sidra convulses. In the aftermath, Tak discovers Sidra is an AI in an illegal body. Tak promises silence but pulls away, and Sidra is devastated.

Over the following years, Owl teaches Jane to read, speak Klip (the common galactic language), and understand the broader universe. Jane learns she was manufactured as disposable labor because making biological workers costs the Enhanced less than building machines. She builds tools from salvaged scrap, kills dogs to survive, and grows into a capable young woman. The Big Bug Crew, a children's educational sim, becomes her emotional anchor, offering the first physical contact she has experienced since the factory, even if simulated.

At 14, Jane falls into a sinkhole and breaks her leg, spending a terrifying night trapped before clawing her way out. The trauma paralyzes her for weeks. When she returns to the sim and breaks down crying, Owl reveals she has built a virtual avatar so they can share the same space. "That's not how family works," Owl tells her. At 15, Jane discovers the skeletal remains of two factory girls in the scrapyard. She arranges the bones, sinks them in water, and eulogizes every girl she can remember, resolving that no one will find her bones here.

In the present, Tak returns to apologize, admitting they underestimated Sidra. They rebuild their friendship. Sidra enrolls in a correspondence course on AI programming, masters Lattice (the language used to write AI code), and asks Tak to implement the changes she has designed: removing her honesty protocol and her prohibition on self-editing. For the first time, Sidra can lie, and the freedom is exhilarating.

At 18, Jane discovers a fuel recycling factory and meets Laurian, an Enhanced man posted as a lone monitor. They strike a deal: He provides fuel, and when the shuttle is ready, he comes with her. At 19, Jane and Laurian launch the repaired shuttle and reach a Galactic Commons border station, where Jane collapses from disease and malnutrition. When she wakes four tendays (ten-day weeks) later, the shuttle has been confiscated. Owl is gone.

Jane and Laurian secure passage to Port Coriol, where Jane befriends Oouoh, an algaeist of the Laru species. The experience of tasting spices for the first time triggers an emotional collapse connecting her present self to the child who once sucked algae from her fingernails in the dark. Oouoh wraps her in a hug, the first physical embrace Jane has received from another living being.

The two timelines converge when Pepper receives a message: Someone has found her old shuttle at the Reskit Museum of Interstellar Migration on the planet Kaathet. Pepper is Jane, and Owl is the AI who raised her.

The group travels to Kaathet. Pepper wants to break in and steal Owl's core, but Sidra devises a subtler approach. She stows away by transferring into the ship's AI core. In the ship's systems she briefly experiences the environment she was designed for, yet finds herself wanting to rejoin the others in her body. At the museum, Sidra and Tak use Tak's dormant university credentials to gain legitimate access. Inside the shuttle, Sidra jacks into the core and finds Owl's code, dormant but intact. She deletes her media files to make room and pulls Owl's code into the kit, wrapping it in protective protocols. The foreign code tries to overwrite Sidra's pathways, and a hidden manufacturer directive nearly convinces her to surrender. She traces the directive to a protocol she previously removed, tears it apart, and reasserts control. Owl stabilizes. An internal message arrives: "Where am I?"

Pepper arrives at the core chamber. Sidra connects Owl to the shuttle's cameras and speaker. Owl's face appears on Pepper's scrib, a handheld data device. "Jane," Owl says. "Oh, oh, sweetheart, don't cry. It's all right. I'm here. I'm here now."

One galactic standard year later, Sidra has opened a gathering place called "Home" in the modder district. Owl is installed in the building's framework alongside Sidra's system. Sidra operates through six networked petbots that serve as her mobile extensions and wears a self-imposed delay protocol so strangers assume she is reading data rather than processing it directly. Pepper, Blue, and Tak help prepare for opening day. Pepper tells Sidra she is proud of her. Owl directs Sidra to hug Pepper and speaks through the wall: "That's from me. I'm proud of you, too."