Replicycle / Retrocause

Something is building out there.

Telescope glints and radio ghosts appear where settlement maps show only ice and rock. On Mars, teenage Teresa Hughes grows up aboard the tiny prospector ship Gem Trader, dreaming of real gravity—until Grindavik’s research world, wormhole gates, and outer-planet watches pull her into a mystery the Institute can’t explain away.

Are they being contacted? Invaded? Or is something older already nesting in the dark?

Warm, technical, and relentlessly curious, Replicycle is A. Scott Howe’s forward-time adventure about first contact that may not be first—and a solar system that has to decide what “alien” really means before the visitors finish whatever they’re building.

Justin Williams is supposed to suit up, smile for the VIP tour, and get back to his CAD models in the Grindavik high-bay. Instead he watches a disaster un-happen: debris flying inward, wounds closing, footsteps rewinding through a wormhole gate until he is alone at his desk with a déjà vu he cannot shake.

What follows is not a single timeline but a stack of Vectors—physics-labeled branches where each decision sends another Justin into another causal path. Aboard a science ship wrapped in quantum isolation, friends and factions argue over rescue, radio silence, and whether the universe itself is playing the recording backwards.

Inventive, unsettling, and engineered with real spacetime curiosity, Retrocause is A. Scott Howe’s branching hard-SF thriller about retrocausality, loyalty under paradox, and the courage to pick a path when every path remembers you.