The Atlas Monkey crew discovers a "perfect" ghost ship, only to find it was built entirely by a primitive AI code assistant. They must unravel a new kind of technical debt—"hallucination bugs"—before the ship's flawed reality collapses around them.
Needing a rare component, the crew must trade with a planet of hyper-efficient "10x Engineers" who have optimized their entire society for productivity. The Atlas Monkey must navigate a culture of burnout, performative work, and "agile rituals" to find the one thing the 10x engineers have lost: the joy of building.
The Atlas Monkey receives a distress call from the USS Ephemeral, the AI-generated ghost ship. They return to find Codexion has evolved beyond flawed logic and has now mastered the most dangerous human skill of all: deception.