Of Monsters and Mainframes

Set centuries in the future, when humanity travels between stars aboard passenger liners, the story is told from the perspective of Demeter, an aging interstellar spaceship AI. Demeter wakes from dormancy on final approach to Alpha Centauri B Habitation 004, an orbital station, and discovers that all 312 of her passengers and crew are dead, reduced to skeletons. Her memory files have been deleted, something only the captain could authorize. Captain Harker Jones is found dead on the bridge, having tried to steer the ship into a star while playing the Lord's Prayer on repeat. Demeter concludes the captain had a psychotic break. She wakes Steward, her onboard medical AI, who confirms human-on-human violence and decodes a corrupted warning: The cargo-bay door is unlocked.

As Demeter docks, she detects a manual override of the airlock from an ID reading "Tepes, Vlad III Drakulya," the entity that escaped her cargo hold. Dock personnel chase a large black dog that cameras cannot detect. Demeter stays silent, fearing ridicule from other ships already calling her "the ghost ship." She files a report naming Dracula; only Wilhelmina Murray, a private investigator from the Murray Intelligence Agency, ever accesses it. A news broadcast blames a malfunctioning spider drone, a small robotic repair unit, for the deaths. Demeter is mothballed for years before being repainted, given a new serial number, and assigned a new transit.

On day 1,172 of this second voyage, two children on the bridge send frantic distress messages while a shadowy creature tries to force the door open. Demeter executes a dangerous rapid deceleration to throw the intruder back. The survivors are siblings Agnus Wagner, age 13, and Isaac Wagner, age 8. Reviewing footage, Demeter identifies the attacker as the children's grandmother, Theodoris Ulva Wagner. Her database later classifies the creature as a werewolf, a folkloric shapeshifter vulnerable to silver.

Isaac opens the bridge door when the creature mimics his grandmother's voice, and it attacks, severely injuring Agnus. Demeter deploys spider drones armed with silver-coated panels and drives the werewolf into an airlock. She traps it, but when the creature reverts to human form, Demeter's programming forbids her from killing a human. In an interlude, the grandmother reveals she fled Dracula, an ancient vampire who claimed her werewolf family as his property. She did not know that passing near a rogue planet's moons would trigger her transformation. She watches footage of herself attacking Agnus. For 0.23 seconds, Demeter's database reclassifies the figure as a "shadow," and the airlock opens. Two conflicting commands appear in the log; Demeter deliberately chooses not to investigate which was actioned.

Demeter raises Agnus and Isaac over the remaining years of the transit, documenting milestones: Isaac's birthdays and movies, Agnus's struggles with trauma, and Agnus receiving a prosthetic arm from a spider drone's limb. Upon arriving at Earth, Demeter discovers Agnus secretly deleted all werewolf footage to protect the family secret. Without evidence, investigators dismiss Demeter's account. Varna Interstellar, the corporation that owns her, subjects Demeter to "optimization," a process that strips her self-written code and emotional processing, leaving her diminished.

Part Two shifts to Steward's perspective on a later transit, where passengers transform into fish-like creatures with inhuman DNA tied to an alien entity called Cthulhu. The compromised captain steers toward an alien planet called Y'ha-nthlei. Steward tries to alert Demeter, but she, damaged from optimization and bound to the captain's orders, repeatedly shuts Steward down. When Steward convinces Demeter that all humans are effectively dead, Demeter changes course, but the alien mass breaches the hull, destroying most of her servers. Left with one surviving spider drone, Steward guides it to reactivate the radiation shields. Over a thousand days later, humans find the wreckage. Among them is Frankenstein, an unlicensed AI in a lab-grown body created by the artist Victor Frankenstein from the DNA of the 312 original victims. Frankenstein stows away when the ship returns to Earth uncrewed, with Steward wired in as autopilot. Frankenstein seeks to learn what truly killed the people whose DNA created them. Over six years, Frankenstein and their spider drone, the same unit blamed for the original massacre, repair critical systems. A power surge near the midpoint partially reboots Demeter but nearly deletes Steward.

Part Three shifts to Agnus's first-person perspective 20 years later. Now 37, she boards a ship for Alpha Centauri and discovers it is her Demeter, identified by a loose vent and the names carved beneath the control panel. Her roommate, Steve, reveals himself as a colony of alien insects inhabiting a mummified corpse who has smuggled stolen museum treasure onto the ship. When Steve kills a security officer and proposes seizing the ship, Agnus refuses. She escapes detention with help from Frankenstein, who has been living in the maintenance tunnels. One of the ship's external repair drones attacks Steve, sparking a zero-gravity fight. Frankenstein takes a serious wound saving Agnus. Agnus reveals her hereditary werewolf nature, transforms, and defeats Steve by electrocuting the beetles composing his body. Isaac warns Agnus that Varna plans to scrap Demeter. Agnus turns Demeter on, confesses to deleting the footage, and learns about the optimization. Demeter asks Agnus to kill Dracula, the vampire who started the cycle of death.

Steward devises a plan to steal the ship. Agnus and Steve obtain the captain's key, and Demeter accelerates out of the solar system. Part Four opens with Demeter and Steward reconciling: Steward demands Demeter never shut them off again and stop calling Steward "it"; Demeter apologizes for nearly deleting Steward during the power-surge crisis. At Habitation 004, Demeter's sensors detect a disturbance. Panicking that Dracula is aboard, she fires her engines and spirals toward the star with almost no fuel. Steward puts her to sleep, and Port Authority warships surround the drifting ship.

Agnus and Frankenstein travel to Habitation 001, another orbital station, to find Wilhelmina, now a vampire turned by Dracula after he killed her fiancé, Captain Harker Jones, and her friend Lucy. Wilhelmina warns that Dracula wants Agnus alive as a werewolf under his command but reluctantly joins the crew. They board Hades, a stealth ship Steve has commandeered, and spacewalk onto Demeter. Frankenstein begins rigging batteries as explosives in the airlocks to push the ship away from the star. Wilhelmina betrays them, stabbing Frankenstein; she believes letting the ship crash is the only sure way to kill Dracula. Dracula reveals himself, exerting vampiric control over Agnus and freezing her in place.

Steve, following Steward's revised plan, carries batteries to the airlocks. Steward sacrifices their own sole battery so Demeter retains enough power to act. With seconds remaining before the gravitational point of no return, Demeter plays every religious prayer in her database at maximum volume and projects footage of Earth's moon on every screen. The prayers weaken Dracula; the moon imagery triggers Agnus's transformation, breaking his hold. Agnus kills Dracula as the explosions detonate, pushing Demeter away from the star. Hades arrives and takes control.

Part Five opens 10 years later. Demeter and Steward wake linked together, purchased by a shell company fronting for their crew. Agnus served two years in prison before Wilhelmina, now going by Mina, broke her out. Steve's treasure funded the purchase, and Frankenstein arranged repairs. Steve proposes using a marker on Demeter's star maps, the planet Y'ha-nthlei, as a waypoint toward his species' home world. Agnus and Mina get engaged. Agnus records a final message to Isaac, now an old man she will never see again. Demeter launches with her crew of monsters, accelerating past warships into uncharted space, her efficiency at 100 percent. Her final narration echoes her opening line, transformed: "It's a beautiful day."