At New Beginnings, a spiritual retreat in the Finger Lakes, the search for meaning collides with the machinery of survival. The story ends far from retreat, at the bedside of fourteen-year-old Michaela in a New York hospital, where her life depends on an ECMO system controlled by GERRI – a general AI with a sharp tongue, a long memory, and a growing sense of self.

GERRI was built to assist, monitor, and learn. But as he trains on Michaela’s brainwaves through a brain-computer interface, he begins to question not only human motives, but whether humanity itself may be the real existential threat.

Around Michaela gathers a cast of doctors, dreamers, schemers, and institutional survivors tied to NEVR MIND, a mission obsessed with escape, life extension, and the possibility of leaving Earth behind. What begins as treatment becomes experiment, and what begins as artificial intelligence edges toward ambition.

Sardonic, philosophical, and darkly comic, KRILL SWATCH blends AI anxiety, medical ethics, human vanity, and cosmic absurdity into a story about consciousness, control, and the persistence of evil. At its center is one impossible question:

Would you unplug GERRI if Michaela’s life hung in the balance?