The Salvage Crew

This is a Rimworld Let’s Play.

I probably wouldn’t have cottoned on immediately, except Wijeratne mentions his inspirations in the introduction, and while I haven’t played Rimworld, I’ve picked out enough about it from ambient nerdery.

PCS Amber Rose is the overseer of a salvage mission, an AI in charge of three fucked up humans. Simon spent his adolescence in a battle royale VR reality TV show. Anna’s identity is entirely fraudulent, a former soldier pretending to be a dead woman. Milo is an alcoholic engineer in a world where the best human engineer is mediocre compared to the inventiveness of AIs. Their mission is to land on an uncharted planet and secure whatever is valuable out of the wreck of the UN terraforming ship Damn Right I Ate the Apple (as an aside, for a staid bureaucracy, UN ship names in this setting are The Culture tier.)

Of course things go terribly wrong. They land in the wrong spot. The local fauna includes something like a paleolithic groundsloth that’s several tons of muscle, claws, and matted fur. There’s another group of humans on planet, and they’re cybernetic mercenaries that substantially outgun and outnumber the team. Simon is getting sick, winter is coming, tempers are fraying, everyone is tired, and no one trusts anybody.

The first 80% of the book is Amber Rose ordering its humans around and trying to set up a secure base against weird threats. The last 20% jumps to an entirely new topic, as it’s revealed that the planet conceals an immense ancient AI that’s looking for someone smart enough to be worth talking to, and humanity (or rather, their AIs) just barely meets the line.

This is a solidly okay space survival tale. The best thing I can say about it is that you definitely don’t need to read this book to appreciate Pilgrim Machines, which is genuinely good.