Project Chronos: The Observer

Every person who has ever lived on this planet died believing it was just their time. It wasn't. Kael-7 has known the truth for over three hundred years. He is one of the Aeleon, the species that created humanity by removing three genes from their own genome and watching what a civilization does when it knows it is running out of time. The Aeleon had grown stagnant across their eight-hundred-year lifespans. They wanted to know if urgency was what made a civilization create, love, and push against the limits of existence. Forced to build in one tenth the time, humanity became the answer to a question the Aeleon were too comfortable to ask of themselves. His assignment is to observe. His mistake is falling in love. Dr. Faith Martin has spent six years trying to understand why humans age. She is consumed by a question she does not yet know is the wrong one. Not why do humans age, but why were they designed to. Her mother spent a lifetime composing music and left more unfinished than finished. Faith has spent her career determined to understand why time runs out before people are done with it. She is about to discover the answer is not what she expected. When Kael breaks centuries of protocol to tell her the truth, the Aeleon who have managed that secret for six millennia respond the only way they know how. They erase her from his mind. Every conversation. Every late evening. Every moment that had quietly become everything. Faith is left with his blood, his secret, and the proof that could give humanity back its stolen years. She spends months building the case that could change everything humanity believes about itself. Kael is returned to circulation carrying feelings he cannot explain, a laugh he keeps hearing in his sleep that he cannot place, and a pull toward Boston he cannot resist. He does not know what he is looking for. He only knows he has to find it. When an institution will go to any length to keep a secret, the only question that remains is what survives, if anything, when they take everything away.