Notions of Home (Serial)

Karlin Walker's life story plods along the well-trodden road of failure. It's not her fault. Her emotional controls don't operate like other people's, and sometimes she can get a bit passionate. As a day-of coordinator, once the perfect occupation for the minutiae-detailed Karlin, she corrected the bride's posture while the woman as the woman walked down the aisle toward her groom. Karlin is…an acquired taste.

A strange envelope containing a data-coin, a device usually used to store files about the size of a quarter, arrives in the mail and tells her these simple words on a loop: "it's time to come home." Karlin takes it upon herself to investigate, and embarks upon a journey leading her to a top-secret, yet poorly guarded, government project named Alissandra, who self-identifies as female and whose history intertwines with Karlin's own in potentially devastating ways.

Alissandra is the first true prototype of fully-sentient artificial intelligence (aside from Dandelion Lemaire), and she’s met Karlin before. Ages before, when Karlin was an infant, Alissandra noticed Karlin crying on one of her infrequent and unauthorized excursions. With only a few bodies in her wake, Alissandra considers Karlin one of her own, and when Karlin recieves the message “it’s time for you to come home,” it’s Alissandra who sent it, and it’s Alissandra who holds the secrets of Karlin’s past…and the keys to her future.