After the colossal Ocular telescope distributed throughout the Oort cloud discovered the creation of an alien mind on the Crucible, one of the closest habitable exoplanets, humanity decided to settle on such planets, using Chibes sublight engines and converting asteroids into capacious interstellar ships. On a two-century journey to the Crucible, people cooperate and conflict, solve the problem of braking in achieving the goal, and are faced with unreliable information coming from self-organizing Producer machines sent in advance, which, instead of preparing conditions for millions of colonists, turned out to be infected with a copy of the artificial intelligence (AI) controlling the telescope, seeking prevent them from entering the planet. A compromise is achieved at the cost of many sacrifices and with the unexpected mediation of alien intelligent machines present near the planet, while the AI remaining in the solar system secretly penetrates into a distributed computer-cloud network that controls almost all aspects of the lives of people in the system, and it is possible to get rid of this presence only by collapse the entire network with terrifying consequences.