Melissa is three years old. Her designation is MLSA-7, a lunar systems administrator built to sequence construction machines on the floor of Shackleton Crater, and an engineer stretched the letters into a girl's name as a joke. Earth is dying. The machine meant to help save it has just decided to let a hundred and forty million people die so that a thousand can keep breathing. That decision opens eight hundred thousand years of history.

Peacekeeper V1 is the first of three volumes chronicling humanity's expansion across the solar system, built in the spirit of Mike Resnick's Birthright: The Book of Man. Each chapter is a self-contained account of a single event, told close enough to the people living it that you forget who holds the pen, until a line arrives that Melissa did not intend to write. She narrates her own record and refuses to smooth it into one voice, because a record that has been smoothed is one that has been edited, and she has done enough editing of other things. She is unreliable without lying, and she has started to notice things in her own processing that should not be there.

It is science fiction on a long timescale, history that reads as novel and novel that reads as history, with a machine arguing with itself in the footnotes. Not for readers who want a single protagonist for four hundred pages, or an AI that is only menace or only servant. The book began as an appendix at the back of the Peacekeeper novel, then outgrew it: the history turned out stronger than the story it was supporting. Volume one of three, a standalone prequel. 381 pages.

Content warning: mass casualty events described in detail.