What if humanity's origin story was not what we've been told? What if we were designed, engineered for a purpose we never understood? A retired Supreme Court justice receives an impossible assignment: to negotiate humanity's future with representatives of an ancient civilization that claims to have created us. As the truth unfolds, he discovers that our species was never meant to be free—we were workforce, laborers designed to serve a dying world's desperate need for resources. But something went wrong. A cosmic catastrophe changed everything, forcing our creators to abandon their creation. Now they have returned, and humanity stands at a crossroads between autonomy and control, between the chaos of freedom and the security of subjection.