Hell's Heart

Earth is dead, and what remains of humanity drifts among the stars beneath the fractured rule of corporations, cults, and scavenger collectives—the broken remnants of civilization. With every conventional source of energy long depleted, life across the solar system now depends on spermaceti, a volatile, hallucinogenic substance harvested from the minds of immense whale-like Leviathans that roam the storms of Jupiter.

Stranded planetside with no money and little purpose, the narrator signs onto the hunter-barque Pequod, a ship bound for Jupiter’s depths in search of the precious substance. But once aboard, she falls under the spell of the vessel’s captain, a brilliant and obsessive woman known only as “A,” whose relentless pursuit of the Leviathans begins to blur the line between conviction and madness.

As the Pequod descends deeper into Jupiter’s violent, monster-filled atmosphere, the narrator is drawn into the strange, intoxicating world of Leviathan hunting—and into the captain’s growing delusions. Her only tether to reality may be Q, a mysterious woman born from the ruins of Old Earth, whose holographic skin flickers with lost histories and memories no one else can recall.

Part cosmic horror, part fever dream, this is a haunting voyage through obsession, memory, and the remnants of humanity at the end of the world.