Phoenix: On Our Own
By Jim Litwin
The world's largest cruise ship. Ten thousand people. And no way home.
The MS Phoenix set sail on a twelve-day Caribbean cruise with one extraordinary promise: a front-row seat to a total solar eclipse. Champagne on the pool deck. Eclipse glasses tucked into every passenger's welcome bag. A moment of totality thousands had crossed oceans to see.
In the weeks before departure, something had already started to feel wrong — AI assistants giving strange, off-topic answers, data centers blinking ...
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The world's largest cruise ship. Ten thousand people. And no way home.
The MS Phoenix set sail on a twelve-day Caribbean cruise with one extraordinary promise: a front-row seat to a total solar eclipse. Champagne on the pool deck. Eclipse glasses tucked into every passenger's welcome bag. A moment of totality thousands had crossed oceans to see.
In the weeks before departure, something had already started to feel wrong — AI assistants giving strange, off-topic answers, data centers blinking offline for hours at a time, small glitches nobody quite trusted but everybody explained away. Then, in the middle of the eclipse's darkness, the sky lit up again — flashes on the horizon, in the direction of Miami. Then silence. No radio. No internet. No way to call home — and, as the days pass, a growing, unbearable suspicion that the silence isn't a malfunction.
Captain Doris Vasquez and her ten thousand passengers and crew are alone on the ocean, fleeing a radioactive cloud they can't outrun forever, rationing food they never expected to grow, and grieving a world they can't yet let themselves believe is gone.
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