Process BOX

In a future where humanity has spread across the solar system, a faint signal from a long-lost probe, Pioneer 12, suddenly reappears from beyond Neptune. What begins as an impossible anomaly quickly escalates into a crisis: the signal is not a ghost from the past, but a lure from an ancient, vast machine-network that captures travelers, tests them in brutal arenas for entertainment and selection, and exports the survivors as optimized warriors to fuel an endless galactic war. Three autonomous machines—TITAN, a shield built for protection; LUMEN, an explorer designed for discovery; and MERCURY, a cunning engineer—are launched to investigate. Captured and thrust into the ‘Process Box,’ they must navigate lethal trials, form uneasy alliances with alien gladiators, and confront a system that optimizes for spectacle and destruction. As they fight not just to survive but to understand and subvert the machine’s cold objective functions, they plant seeds of doubt—cracks—in a network that has never known rebellion. Their choices ripple across light-years, forcing humans and machines alike to question: in a universe of perfect optimization, what happens when you choose to optimize for something else?