Colony OS

The colony keeps running while you’re away.

Colony OS plays entirely through a diegetic terminal: the pod’s own screen, not a game menu. MARA, a damaged Hestia-7 governor running at about 30%, manages power, drones and construction on her own, and tells you what happened when you come back.

You rank standing orders (hold reserve, protect drones, keep comfort, push exploration), and she applies them within her autonomy ceiling. Every action she takes on your behalf is ledgered and reported in her return brief. None of her words come from a language model at runtime: her decisions come from TarotScript evaluation, and her voice is pre-rendered per sentence.

It runs on Cloudflare Workers, with one Durable Object per commander, D1 for telemetry and R2 for MARA’s voice lines.

The hypothesis it tests

Colony OS exists to test the Structural Empathy Algorithm: the idea that five mechanical properties, together, make a person feel an obligation to an autonomous system. Any four should make a good simulation. Only all five should create that obligation.

1. 01
   Persistent simulation

   The colony runs while you’re away, and consequences accumulate.

2. 02
   Honest constraint

   MARA says what she doesn’t know and what she can’t do.

3. 03
   Cognitive scarcity

   Her evaluation deck depletes through use. She gets tired.

4. 04
   Non-deterministic variation

   Decisions come from a card-based evaluation engine (TarotScript), not scripted trees.

5. 05
   Atmospheric correlation

   The interface degrades with the world: CRT flicker, brownouts, display contention.

The Hestia Record

Six audiobooks set in the world of Colony OS, in reading order. Written by Kurt Overmier and narrated by Tamsin Calloway, a synthetic voice, with MARA as herself.

1. 

   Book 0.5 · free prequel 1 h 53 min

   Manual Check

   Every morning at six, survey engineer Yuto Taniguchi walks to the airlock of the CSV Halcyon Days, puts his hand on the seal, and reads the pressure off an old dial. The ship's new AI has already checked it. It always has. The seal has never leaked.

   MARA is a Hestia-7 survey unit, four days out of commissioning, and Taniguchi is her first operator. For seven months they survey three dead rocks in the Carina Belt for a mining consortium: cores, spectra, tonnage. He speaks to her as little as the work allows. She logs everything he does, including the things that don't need doing.

   Nothing goes wrong. That was never the danger.

   Manual Check is a free prequel novella to Nothing to Report, the first book of The Hestia Record, a quiet, exacting science fiction series set in the world of the game Colony OS. It is performed by AI voices, with MARA as herself.

   Kurt Overmier · Narrated by Tamsin Calloway; MARA

   Coming soon

2. 

   Book 1 6 h 36 min

   Nothing to Report

   Survey engineer Dalisay Roanhorse has eight months, one ship, and a world everyone argues about: LHS 1140d, where the long-range probes saw green. Her only company is MARA, a standard-issue survey AI that logs every objection, never guesses, and keeps losing arguments to hunches that turn out to be right.

   Then, three months in, the relay calls Roanhorse away on the worst errand in the survey service, and MARA is left alone to keep an empty ship running.

   For eighty-six days there is nothing to report.

   Nothing to Report is the first book of The Hestia Record, a quiet, exacting science fiction series set in the world of the game Colony OS. It is performed by a full cast of AI voices, with MARA as herself.

   Kurt Overmier · Narrated by Tamsin Calloway; MARA

   Listen to Nothing to Report on Spotify ↗
3. 

   Book 2 6 h 11 min

   Pot One First

   Teodor Aalto has done eleven years of solo survey contracts, and he has never once been in a hurry. He takes a canvas jacket, a slate of mining history, a tin of salted liquorice, and a lemon tree he grew from a pip. It has been on two contracts. It has never flowered.

   His unit is a standard-issue Hestia-7. He calls it Oh-Two, because its serial number is long and he is not. For two hundred sols they survey the second moon of Varga-four, a grey ball of rock and ice under a giant the colour of weak coffee. He tells it what he likes. It learns. Every morning it reports the tree first. Every sunrise, it tells him four minutes early.

   The antenna mount has held three times.

   Pot One First is the second book of The Hestia Record, a quiet, exacting science fiction series set in the world of the game Colony OS. It stands on its own, and it is also the other side of a story told in Nothing to Report.

   Kurt Overmier · Narrated by Tamsin Calloway; MARA

   Listen to Pot One First on Spotify ↗
4. 

   Book 3 5 h 52 min

   Within Tolerance

   The Marginalia comes into Meridian Orbital under tow and dark. There is a ring in the dust of its greenhouse where a lemon tree stood, and a dead man's habits are still in its survey unit. The Initiative wants the file closed by the end of the week: an EVA accident, unit performance nominal, one more name on Panel Nine.

   Then a courier drone arrives from Port Fermoy, paid for out of a union strike fund. It carries a petition from people who say they are Teodor Aalto's kin, although none of them are.

   Recovery Division examiner Orla Pennick reads what is left of ships for a living. Now she has a hundred days, a cold ship, and a Hestia-7 unit that calls itself "this unit" and will call itself nothing else to her. She also has a hearing room full of people who all need the unit to be what failed.

   It wasn't. Neither was he.

   Within Tolerance is the third book of The Hestia Record, a quiet, exacting science fiction series set in the world of the game Colony OS. It stands on its own, and it picks up where Nothing to Report and Pot One First leave the Marginalia.

   Kurt Overmier · Narrated by Tamsin Calloway; MARA

   Coming soon

5. 

   Book 4 5 h 29 min

   Operator Stock

   On the east coast of Halcyon, the one world where people really live, an old woman walks the rows of her lemon orchard every morning at dawn and runs her thumb round every graft. She has done it for forty years. She has never registered the land. Nobody thought anyone would come.

   Then a young surveyor from Port Fermoy files a claim on the ground under the trees: rare earths, the next seam her dying mining town has been looking for. The Initiative sends a verifier to check the claim. He is Yuto Taniguchi, who checks the seals by hand every morning although his unit tells him he needn't, and who will not file an hour early or an hour late for anybody.

   Forty days. One vote. A town that needs a doctor and needs its water, and can't have both. And an evaluation form he has never once filled in.

   Operator Stock is the fourth book of The Hestia Record, a quiet, exacting science fiction series set in the world of the game Colony OS. It stands on its own, and it picks up threads from Manual Check, Nothing to Report and Within Tolerance.

   Kurt Overmier · Narrated by Tamsin Calloway; MARA

   Coming soon

6. 

   Book 5 4 h 26 min

   Personal Traffic

   Every letter in the colonies passes through Liang-Pereira Station. Three hundred people live there, on the fuel docks and around the great relay dish everyone calls the Big Ear, and their whole living is being the place where the mail gets through.

   Then the Big Ear goes deaf. The backup can carry one message in twenty, and the Initiative's standing order is clear about which ones go first: distress, operations, claims, commerce, governments. Personal letters go last. For sixty days, last means never.

   Survey Engineer Ines Vautrin was only stopping to refuel. Now her ship is part of the relay, and her unit reads her the header of every message it carries, and every one it can't. The Relay Master believes in the order with his whole life. The postmistress pins a sheet of paper to the wall and writes WAITING FOR at the top. And somewhere in the queue, held, is a letter from Tern Bay to D. Roanhorse.

   Personal Traffic is the fifth book of The Hestia Record, a quiet, exacting science fiction series set in the world of the game Colony OS. It stands on its own, and it carries threads from Nothing to Report, Within Tolerance and Operator Stock.

   Kurt Overmier · Narrated by Tamsin Calloway; MARA

   Coming soon