u/lshawleb

Hi all,

I’m R. S. Breed, and I’ve just published Cohort, the first book in a five-part grounded hard sci-fi series called The Drift.

The setup is small on purpose: a routine astronomical measurement comes back with a minor telemetry discrepancy. The issue is not dramatic enough to panic over, so the institution does what institutions often do: patches it, files it, and quietly moves on.

The book is less space magic and more engineering procedure, calibration records, data integrity, institutional incentives, and people trying to do competent work inside a system that would rather avoid liability than ask the right question.

It’s part of the broader Fractured Cosmology setting, but Cohort is written to stand on its own with a complete arc. No prior reading needed.

If you like hard sci-fi about systems failure, bureaucracy, professional competence, and the slow horror of records being technically correct while the truth gets buried, this may be your kind of thing.

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX2ZBLN9

There’s also a spoiler-aware universe map and artefacts site rolling out here: https://fracturedcosmology.xyz

I’d avoid digging too far into the map if you want to go into the book clean.

Happy to answer any questions anyone has?

Hi everyone!

After years of word building and writing and going ignored by publishers, I have started to self publish my body of works.

A routine astronomical measurement returns a tiny telemetry discrepancy.
Instead of investigating it, the institution patches it, files it, and lets the rot compound.

Cohort is the first book in The Drift, a five-part grounded hard sci-fi series set inside the broader Fractured Cosmology. It also reads as a complete standalone with its own clean arc.

The story follows a training cohort inside a navigation institute where engineering precision, calibration records, telemetry, and institutional procedure matter more than heroics or space magic. The problem begins with a small number that should have been questioned. A healthy system would investigate it. This one normalizes it.

If you like science fiction about professional competence, data integrity, bureaucratic failure, quiet systems collapse, and people trying to do correct work inside institutions designed to avoid responsibility, this is probably your lane.

Tropes / themes: engineering competence, institutional rot, ensemble cast, training academy, data integrity, quiet conspiracy, professional ethics, hard sci-fi without space magic, slow-burn systems failure

Trigger Warnings: institutional negligence, workplace pressure, accident/incident aftermath, grief, death, medical/injury references, emotional stress

Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX2ZBLN9

Thinking about a problem that came up in a hobby project and the cryptographic side of it is genuinely interesting. Wondering what the prior art actually is, because the literature I find on long term key and identity custody tends to optimise for institutional lifetime horizons (decades) and assumes a more or less continuous institutional structure throughout.

The thought experiment:

A classified document needs to be reliably held by a single named custodian at any given time. When that custodian dies or retires, the document and its associated authority transfer to the next named custodian. The chain has to survive 750+ years.

Constraints:

No central authority across the full horizon. The originating institution might exist for 60 years, then merge into a successor, then that successor collapses, then a new institution forms claiming continuity, and so on. Across 750 years that happens maybe 6 or 7 times.

The current custodian must be cryptographically verifiable as the legitimate holder of the chain, not by appeal to an institution that may not exist any more, but by appeal to the chain itself.

About 30 to 40 custodians total across the 750 years. So roughly one handoff every 20 years on average, though uneven (some custodians serve 5 years, some serve 40).

Each custodian must be able to verify, when they receive the document, that the chain back to the origin is intact. They must also be able to verify it years into their custody, in case the institution that maintains the public verification side of the chain has collapsed in the meantime.

The document itself is mostly stable. Some custodians annotate it. Annotations need to be attributable to specific custodians, in order, with no possible repudiation by later custodians.

Where I keep getting stuck:

1. Key rotation across centuries. Modern crypto primitives have known shelf lives. RSA-2048 will be broken eventually. Whatever signature scheme the originating custodian uses will not be the one in use 750 years later. The chain has to accommodate scheduled migration to newer primitives, with each migration itself a signed event from the then-current custodian, but the migration has to be verifiable later from primitives that may not exist any more either.
2. Identity continuity vs custodian identity. The custodianship is the identity, not the person. When custodian Alice dies and Bob takes over, Bob is now the custodian. Bob's signatures are valid from then on. Alice's signatures from before remain valid for things signed during her tenure but become invalid for new things. How do you cleanly encode that on the chain when in 200 years nobody knows who Alice or Bob were as people?
3. Threshold succession. Sometimes a custodian dies unexpectedly without a clean handoff. Practical answer: a small set of witnesses (maybe 3 to 5 people) hold threshold key material so that a 2 of 3 or 3 of 5 can certify the next custodian after an unexpected death. But across 750 years the witnesses also turn over. You end up with a chain of threshold sets, each one certified by the previous one. Has anyone actually modelled this?
4. The anchor problem. The chain has to be checkable, which means somewhere outside the chain there has to be a trust anchor. Periodic public hash anchoring works while there is a public chain (Bitcoin or successor), but assuming a public chain still works in 750 years is an aggressive assumption. What is the lightest weight independent anchor that does not require a particular external infrastructure to persist? I keep thinking about geographically distributed printed proofs in neutral archives but that feels like cheating.
5. Forced succession. If a custodian is captured or coerced and made to sign over to an illegitimate next custodian, the chain has to be able to register that event as a forced succession and continue forward with that fact visible, not silently swallow it. How do you encode "this handoff happened under duress" verifiably without giving the coercer the ability to forge the duress flag the other way?

What I would reach for instinctively:

Append only signed log per custodianship. Each entry signed by the then current custodian's key, with the key itself certified by the prior custodian's key. Threshold witness signatures on every succession event. Periodic public anchoring via whatever the contemporary equivalent of OpenTimestamps is. Migration to new primitives encoded as explicit migration events, where the migrating custodian signs a statement in both the old and new primitives, allowing later verification by either while the old one still works.

But I keep getting stuck on the part where, in year 2473 or so, a custodian receives the document and wants to verify the chain back to year 2123. By that point primitives have migrated maybe 4 times. Each migration was signed in both old and new, but the old primitives may now be either broken (and therefore forgeable retroactively) or simply unverifiable through obsolescence (no implementation exists any more). Is there literature on this specific shape of multi generation primitive migration where the earliest links in the chain are signed in primitives that are no longer trustworthy at verification time?

Curious about prior art I might not know. The closest analogues I can think of:

PKI root CA succession (centuries scale possible, but assumes continuous institutional structure)

Religious manuscript tradition (centuries scale, but the verification is mostly textual and social, not cryptographic)

Government classified document custody (decades scale, classified processes, hard to learn from)

Crypto-anarchy succession schemes (Tim May era stuff, mostly theoretical, never deployed at horizon)

Threshold cryptography succession (small scale, short horizon)

If anyone has seen this kind of problem treated seriously in the literature, I would love a pointer. It feels like the kind of thing a cryptographer would have written about, but I keep missing it.

Hey everyone, dropping a link because Book 1 of The Drift is running a free promo on Amazon through May 18.

It’s called Cohort.

It’s grounded, clinical hard sci-fi focused on institutional logic, data integrity, and a minor telemetry discrepancy that hits a massive system architecture like compounding rot.

If you like Andy Weir, Ted Chiang, or the technical side of The Expanse, you'll probably dig it.

Every book in the universe works as a standalone with a clean narrative arc, so you don't have to worry about getting trapped in an endless unfinished cliffhanger loop.

Free worldwide on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX2ZBLN9

There's a companion site at fracturedcosmology.xyz but be careful of spoilers!

A 750-year cosmology begins with a single uncorrected telemetry error.

If you prefer your science fiction grounded in institutional logic, technical precision, and the terrifying weight of compounding system failures rather than high-budget space opera melodrama, this is for you. Think The Expanse meets the clean, clinical execution of Ted Chiang and Andy Weir.

The Setup: A routine astronomical measurement returns a persistent, minor 0.4% discrepancy. Rather than halt operations, the bureaucracy adjusts parameters, patches the code, and hides the drift to clear liability. But systemic rot doesn't disappear just because it's scrubbed from an incident report.

On the bridge of an isolated deep-space research vessel, tracking an uncorrectable anomaly requires flawless execution of checklists—even when the data indicates the architecture itself is beginning to fracture.

• Cohort is Book 1 of The Drift, a five-book complete sequence within the broader Fracture Cosmology framework.
• Every novel is written on the Discworld/Culture model: a complete, standalone story with a clean narrative arc, while serving as a distinct entry point into a massive, multi-series universe.

Free on Kindle worldwide through May 18.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX2ZBLN9

A 750-year cosmology begins here.

Cohort is a clinical, hard science fiction novel focused on institutional systems, data integrity, and the human cost of managing anomalies in deep space. Written with a grounded, procedural precision rather than civilizational-scale melodrama.

Synopsis: A routine astronomical measurement yields a persistent 0.4% discrepancy. While the bureaucracy attempts to patch the code and hide the drift to clear liability, the systemic rot begins to compound. On the bridge of an isolated research vessel, tracking an uncorrectable anomaly requires flawless execution of technical checklists—even when the data indicates the architecture itself is fracturing.

Cohort is Book 1 of The Drift, a five-book complete sequence within the broader Fracture Cosmology framework. Every book in the cosmology is a complete, standalone reading experience.

For readers of: Ted Chiang, Andy Weir, and The Expanse.