Autistic physicist Yasira Shien has invented the Shien Reactor, the only energy drive that can transport people between stars without the help of the AI Gods that rule the galaxy. But when it's activated, it warps reality and destroys the space station, killing more than a hundred people. Yasira is declared a heretic and abducted, but instead of executing her, the Gods want her to help them find her mentor, Dr Evianna Talirr, who mysteriously vanished a year after Yasira graduated.
The books in the series:
- The Outside (June 11, 2019)
- The Fallen (July 13, 2021)
- The Infinite (January 24, 2023)
The Outside provides examples of:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Keres is an amalgamation of malevolent "failed gods" that periodically ravages human-settled worlds.
- Alien Sky: Jai, Yasira's home planet, has at least two moons.
- Angry Collar Grab: In The Fallen, Akavi grabs Elu's collar and gives him a Bitch Slap for leaving their hideout and fraternizing with mortals, increasing the risk that they will both be found.
- Antimatter: The Shien reactor works by reacting streams of particles and antiparticles with each other.
- Arm Cannon: The angel Enga's arms have been replaced with elaborate prostheses containing dozens of deadly weapons.
- The Baby of the Bunch: Before the reactor is activated, Yasira sometimes feels like the other people on the Pride of Jai don't take her seriously because she's by far the youngest team head and the only autistic one.
- Beard of Sorrow: Splió is a former student of Talirr's who was captured by angels of Nemesis for the same reason as Yasira. He eventually went mad from exposure to Outside ideas, so the angels simply kept him locked up. When Yasira finds him, he has a long, matted beard.
- Benevolent A.I.: The Gods certainly see themselves as this. Good Is Not Nice is in full effect.
- Catapult Nightmare: Between the activation of the Shien Reactor and the destruction of the Pride of Jai, everyone on the station has bizarre nightmares that they assume are Anxiety Dreams. Yasira sits upright in bed after one of them.
- Catchphrase: Talirr, as part of her nihilistic point of view, constantly says that "[x] is a lie". Time, space, people, The Gods, death, lies...
- Censor Box: In-universe example. Akavi has a filter in his circuitry that blacks out all Outside phenomena to prevent him from going insane.
- Centrifugal Gravity: The Pride of Jai is shaped like a giant wheel that rotates to create gravity.
- Character Tics:
- Yasira taps her fingers.
- The angel Elu fidgets with his long hair.
- Child Prodigy: As a child, Yasira threw herself into physics books and ran around the house in excitement when she solved a problem.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Akavi tortures Yasira in an attempt to force her to go along with his plan to expel all traces of Outside from Jai, even though that would kill everyone in the affected area.
- Crashing Dreams: Yasira dreams about being attacked by spikes of color coming from her monitoring device, which keeps making pinging noises. She wakes up to find that Elu is trying to message her.
- Cyborg: Priests have circuitry implanted in their brains that allows them to directly communicate with the Gods. Angels have more than half their neurons burned away and replaced by machinery, giving them a much higher bandwidth connection.
- Deus est Machina: The Gods are incredibly powerful artificial intelligences created by humans long ago. Their priests and "angels" are humans with cybernetic implants that allow them to communicate with the gods and control advanced technology.
- Digital Abomination: The Gods are supercomputers so massive and so complicated their minds are beyond any human attempt to perceive them.
- Dishing Out Dirt: In The Fallen, Yasira and Tiv are almost captured by an angel. Yasira uses her Outside powers to attack the angel with a skyscraper of dirt.
- The Dreaded: Nemesis is the most feared of the Gods. She handles criminals and heretics, often using torture or execution.
- Earth That Used to Be Better: Global warming has rendered much of Earth unlivable. In the late twenty-first century, the Gods conducted a Homeworld Evacuation to a few dozen other planets, during which they forced people to give up their religion and much of their culture and killed anyone who resisted. A small minority of humans were allowed to stay on what was left of their home planet, where they were allowed slightly more freedom and tradition than the ones who were moved.
- Eldritch Location: A large part of Jai becomes this under the influence of the Outside. Technology becomes unreliable, plants, animals, and buildings are distorted into monsters, and anyone spending too long there has a good chance of going crazy.
- Electric Instant Gratification: How the Keres keeps Her angels under control. Their neural circuitry is wired into their limbic systems, directly into the pleasure and pain centers. They are rewarded for their obedience with constant pleasure more addictive than any drug, and punished for thoughts of disobedience with instant pain. Their addiction has caused their minds to atrophy and destroyed their ability to care about anything other than pleasing the Keres.
- Escape Pod: The "lifeboats" the survivors use to escape the Pride of Jai.
- Explosive Leash: In The Infinite, Akavi has a bomb implanted in Luellae's arm that requires a constant signal from his brain to keep it from exploding. He threatens to let the bomb go off if she tries to run away. After Yasira kills Akavi, the bomb blows Luellae's arm off.
- Extinct in the Future: Rhinoceroses and tigers are mentioned to be extinct.
- False Flag Operation: The Keres takes orders from Nemesis. She attacks inhabited planets, killing thousands each time, so Nemesis can "defeat" the Keres to justify Her existence.
- The Federation: In The Infinite, Nemesis has declared that the Chaos Zone is no longer under Her protection and will be left at the Keres' mercy. Tiv and Grid appeal to the Federation, a union of different alien species, for military aid. Most representatives refuse, not wanting their species to be involved in a war with the Gods, but the Zora, whom the Gods have forbidden from communicating with humans because of their worship of Outside, provide a small fleet of warships.
- Fluffy Tamer: Talirr's former student Daeis has the ability to befriend outside monsters. In the team's lair, they hold and pet small monsters like house cats. During the battle with the Keres in The Infinite, they have larger monsters attack enemy ships.
- Forgets to Eat: Sometimes Yasira gets so wrapped up in a physics problem that other people have to remind her to eat.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Akavi, a Vaurian angel, has two dozen male forms memorized for generic situations, as his Shapeshifter Default Form has translucent skin and colorless hair and eyes that tend to make people uncomfortable.
- Frame-Up: Enga became an angel of Nemesis because a friend she thought she could trust, who was actually a Vaurian angel, planted incriminating documents showing that Enga had given money to child traffickers. He told her options: go through a long and miserable trial, probably be found guilty, and have her life ruined even if she's found innocent, or become an angel. She reluctantly chose the latter.
- Friendly Address Privileges: Talirr tells Yasira to call her Ev because "Someone should."
- Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: One woman suddenly spaces out during the Pride of Jai's evacuation, and Yasira has to slap her to get her moving again.
- Gilded Cage: After she's abducted, Yasira is placed in a luxurious suite that she isn't allowed to leave.
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: The Gods feed off of dead people's souls, so if humans stopped worshipping them, they would have no more sustenance. They need to look good in front of humans to avoid a PR disaster.
- Gravity Screw: In Talirr's craft, all six walls can serve as a floor depending on which one you're standing on.
- Great Offscreen War: The Morlock War with the Keres, a group of failed Gods who wanted to enslave and cull humanity. After billions of people were killed, Nemesis managed to defeat the Keres and banish Her from the galaxy, but every so often She invades again and kills thousands of people.
- Green Thumb: Some of the Outside-affected people have the ability to make edible plants grow. They're harshly punished if they're caught by the angels, but they do it anyway to survive.
- Group Hug: When Luellae cries about how Akavi almost manipulated her into turning against the team, the other members hug her.
- Gut Feeling: Before the Shien Reactor is activated, Yasira has a feeling that something is horribly wrong with it, even though she can't find a problem.
- Hates Being Touched: Yasira used to be affectionate with Tiv, but after the events of the first book, severe burnout has made her touch-averse, especially since some forms of touch trigger her PTSD from being tortured.
- Heads-Up Display: The angels all have one.
- The Heretic: Dr Talirr, who refuses to submit to the Gods or their view of reality. Attempts to stamp this out at an early age only led to it strengthening.
- Heroic BSoD: Yasira's close contact with the Outside in the first book has taken such a toll on her that six months later she still spends much of her time in bed, not eating unless Tiv makes her.The structure of her physical brain held things together, but Yasira was no longer a single soul. She was a collection of pieces which shifted and jangled, chaotically, in and out of place.
- Hive Mind: The gone people - people with Outside-affected minds who forgot their families and lives and live in nests outdoors, spending their time engaging in bizarre rituals - work like this.
- Hologram: Akavi shows Yasira a holographic artist's reconstruction of an Outside event that destroyed an entire town.
- Humans Are Ugly: Sispirinithas, an alien who resembles a Giant Spider, taunts an Outside monster by saying, "You are even uglier than a human."
- I Have Your Wife: When torture fails to convince Yasira to kill everyone affected by the Outside on Jai, the angels abduct Tiv and threaten to hurt her even worse.
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: When Yasira finally manages to contact Tiv, Tiv tells her that she has a new girlfriend. Yasira is upset, but tells her to move on and be happy.
- Living Ship: Aliens called Boaters have bred living spaceships that vaguely resemble giant manta rays.
- Lovecraftian Superpower: Those touched by Outside can warp Outside-tainted matter. The people of Jai learn to do this to survive.
- Make an Example of Them: In The Fallen, angels take six inhabitants of a particularly heretical city hostage. If the other citizens continue in their heresy, the angels threaten to give daily torture broadcasts in order to make an example of the whole city.
- Matter Replicator: The angels use nutrient printers to make food that tastes exactly like the real thing.
- The Mole: Akavi hopes that Yasira can be one, gaining Talirr's trust and learning about her ideas to help defeat Talirr.
- Morality Pet: Talirr is a misanthrope who believes that people are lies. At one point she kills tens of millions of people just to make a point. She is surprised to find that Yasira, who has the same knowledge and some of the same experiences that she does, has still held onto her morality, which inspires Talirr to try to be more human herself.
- No-Sell: Enga fires thirty-seven shots at an Outside monster in 3.3 seconds, using every suitable weapon in her arsenal exactly once. None of them have any effect.
- Older Than They Look: Angels don't age, so Elu is about 75 but looks like he's in his late teens.
- Over-the-Shoulder Carry: Enga carries Yasira this way when she is recaptured.
- People in Rubber Suits: Yasira notes than when she sees Boaters in vids, they're usually portrayed by humans in rubber suits who run around screaming unintelligibly and brandishing scimitars.
- Please, Don't Leave Me: Talirr begs Yasira, "Don't leave me alone again. Please."
- The Power of Hate: After Enga was tricked into becoming an angel, she suffered brain damage affecting her motor skills and refused to even try to move because she couldn't stand the thought of the man who tricked her achieving his goals by creating a successful angel. Akavi told her that if she worked hard, she might eventually outrank the man, and then make him pay. Enga worked hard for fifty years in the hopes of doing that.
- The Quiet One: Daeis stopped talking during their years as a prisoner of Akavi. Now they talk occasionally, but only to Splió, and only when they're sure no one else can hear them.
- Race Against the Clock: Talirr informs Yasira in a dream that a radioactive dust cloud has temporarily knocked out the Menagerie's surveillance, giving her half an hour to explore without getting in trouble. She finds the room where Splió is being kept.
- Read the Fine Print: Most mortals don't want to work for Nemesis, so She recruits by tricking people into thinking they're signing up for something temporary, while the fine print condemns them to a lifetime of servitude.
- La Résistance: After reality is restructured on a fifth of the surface of Jai, the angels provide inadequate aid while cracking down hard on anyone who tries to help themselves in heretical ways, so in The Fallen, Tiv, Yasira, and Dr Talirr's seven former students form a team dedicated to protecting heretics, providing supplies, sharing unauthorized messages, and doing whatever else they can to improve people's living conditions. The one thing they refuse to provide is weapons, as they are a nonviolent resistance group.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Dr Talirr had a reputation for walking out of meetings or even seminars when she was frustrated.
- Seeing Through Another's Eyes: In The Fallen, Yasira communicates with the gone people's hive mind for a ritual. She can see through all their eyes, like having hundreds of bodies. She assigns different fragments of her personality to work with groups of gone people in different areas.
- Seers: Prophet, one of Talirr's former students, can see into the future - usually only a few seconds, but sometimes very far.
- Sensory Overload: Boater ships don't have shields to block out the noise and light of landing, like human-built spacecraft, so almost everyone becomes severely overwhelmed while landing on Jai. Yasira has it worse than the others and ends up in a Troubled Fetal Position, unable to voluntarily move or talk, for some minutes after the landing.
- Sex for Services: In the Outside-affected area of Jai, one man offers to help Yasira, saying "I could protect you. You could, uh..." while staring at her neckline. Yasira snaps, "I can take care of myself."
- Shapeshifter Guilt Trip: Akavi shapeshifts into Tiv in an attempt to get Yasira to see things his way right before he tortures her.
- The Sleepless: Angels only sleep when sick or injured. Under normal circumstances, the technology in their brains does all the work that sleep normally does.
- Split Personality: In The Fallen, Yasira's personality is shattered by her contact with Outside. Instead of a central Yasira that makes decisions, her mind is made of fragments that fight with each other. On bad days, she lies in bed while the fragments fight about what a horrible failure she is. On good days, the fragments fight about what she should do, which can make her almost as nonfunctional. She considers looking up techniques that work for other multiples, but she doesn't know if they'd work on someone who acquired the condition the way she did, and thinking about research just sets all the parts to fighting.
- Super-Speed: Talirr's former student Luellae has this ability, which she can share with anyone she's touching.
- Talking in Your Dreams: Talirr contacts Yasira this way.
- Tantrum Throwing: Talirr throws a fork and a water glass at Yasira during an argument about the morality of hurting others, as Talirr believes that people are lies.
- Tears of Joy: Yasira doesn't cry after the Pride of Jai's destruction until she learns that Tiv is okay.
- Teen Genius: Yasira took her qualifying exams at age 19.
- Teleportation: Luellae, aka Blur, has Outside powers allowing her to teleport, along with anyone she's holding onto.
- Terraform: How humans make new planets habitable.
- Time Dilation: Yasira and Akavi travel outside the galaxy in search of Talirr for what feels to them like two weeks. Fourteen months pass for everyone else.
- Translator Microbes: Sispirinithas wears a box around his neck that translates what he says into Earth creole. The Boater Diamond-Chip also has a box, but humans' poor understanding of Boater languages results in tortured syntax.
- Trap Is the Only Option: Yasira suspects the evidence she finds of Dr Talirr's presence is a trap, but she and Akavi follow it anyway because they don't have any other leads.
- Twitchy Eye: Dr Salt, one of the team heads on the Pride of Jai, has a slight eye twitch.
- Unwilling Roboticisation: Enga was made into an angel against her will. Because of her resistance, the procedure caused severe brain damage, rendering her mute and almost immobile. Thanks to computer programs and decades of training, she can now move better than most angels, but she still can't talk.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Talirr was once a Spoiled Sweet Cheerful Child, but she was punished harshly throughout her childhood in an attempt to stamp out her heretical tendencies. The treatments only succeeded in turning her into a bitter misanthrope.
- Verbal Tic: Dr Talirr mutters "Lies" when she's stressed.
- Voice Changeling: Vaurians can change their voices as well as their appearances. The angel who recruited Enga impersonated her over the phone, saying horrible things to her friends, as part of his plan to destroy her life to pressure her to become an angel.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: Vaurians are people conceived with nanomachines that allow them to take whatever forms they want.
- Waving Signs Around: During an anti-angel protest in The Fallen, people wave signs that say things like "We are not heretics" and "Let us eat."
- We Need a Distraction: In The Fallen, Tiv is almost caught by an angel in the Chaos Zone. Akiujal yells, "A gas main's about to explode!" The resulting panic allows Tiv to reach the portal to the lair before the angel catches up with her. Afterwards, she remembers seeing the trope in action movies she used to like.
- Wetware CPU: Archangels are high-ranking angels who consist only of brains and machinery, the rest of their bodies having been removed. Unlike lower-ranking angels, archangels have enough bandwidth to communicate directly with the Gods, but because they don't have any sense organs, their perception consists entirely of information gathered from Gods and other angels.
- Wiki Walk: Yasira browses a database of information meant to be uploaded into angels' heads, organized in an associative manner that mimics the way thoughts are stored. Yasira finds it hard to get used to - she keeps getting sidetracked and forgetting the way back.
