The Noah: a city-sized ship, half-way through an eight-hundred-year voyage to another planet. In a world where deeds, and even thoughts, cannot be kept secret, a man is murdered; his body so ruined that his identity must be established from DNA evidence. Within hours, all trace of the crime is swept away, hidden as though it never happened.
Hana Dempsey, a mid-level bureaucrat genetically modified to use the Noah's telepathic internet, begins to investigate. Her search for the truth will uncover the impossible: a serial killer who has been operating on board for a lifetime... if not longer.
And behind the killer lies a conspiracy centuries in the making.
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No one on the Noah knows how or why or when the Earth went to hell—only that it did, and if humanity is to stand the slightest chance of surviving, the monolithic generation ship that these several thousands souls call home for the moment must succeed in its ambitious mission: to populate the planet Canaan.
In the interim, mimicry:
Look up at the fake sky with its fake moon and fake stars. Beyond the skyline of the tall crystal towers of Edo Section is a horizon. It is how the night might look back on Earth if it were not just a blasted wasteland, with a toxic atmosphere too thick for light to penetrate, and no one and nothing left alive to see it. Almost always a gentle breeze goes through the city, generated by carefully designed ventilation ducts behind the simulated sky, interacting with thermal radiation from the warmer street level. There are seasons too in the Habitat, also patterned after Earth.
The Noah has days and nights because humans evolved with all these things, with a sun, with a moon and stars, with weather and seasons, and biologically, we do not do so well without all these environmental signals related to the passage of time. (pp.12-13)Even the best laid plans have a habit of unravelling, however, and 800 years yet from its eventual destination, unrest in on the rise aboard the Noah.
City planner Hana Dempsey has been out of it for a bit at the beginning of David Ramirez's dizzying debut—on breeding duty, which every man and woman must do. But after nine months of deep sleep she comes to, feeling blue. Preoccupied by the fate of her baby, taken from her before before she awakened, Hana struggles to do her job properly, and her high-flying friends are hardly helpful. Instead, she seeks solace in the arms of a wolfman by the name of Barrens: a sensitive detective who has been there for her before, never mind his animal inclinations.
But Barrens has his obsessions as well, and as the relationship between he and Hana deepens, the pair share their secrets. She wants to know what happened to the child she took to term, while he is haunted by thoughts of his former boss, the remains of whose body Barrens saw.
Considering that Callahan's terrible death is on the record as a Retirement, he hasn't informed management of what he witnessed, for fear having his memories manipulated. He hasn't given up, however; he hopes his imminent transfer to Long Term Investigations will free him up to investigate the Callahan case, but the answers he happens upon only beg bigger questions.
In time, "a terrible pattern can be discerned. People are being erased from the system. As if they had never been born. Others have had their files modified, evidence of falsified Retirement." (p.45) It becomes clear that there's a murderer aboard the Noah—Mincemeat, our couple christen him, or her, or it—or perhaps a cabal of killers, because, quite impossibly, these deaths seem to have been happening for hundreds of years.