
by IanReeve
Twenty years after the end of the Cyborg War, the last cyborgs try to hijack a starship on its way to terraform an alien world. They want the new colony to be a cyborg colony in which they will rebuild their strength and practice their way of life. During the fighting, though, the starship is damaged, so that instead of travelling light years across space it ends up a billion years in the future, alongside a planet Earth that is near the end of its life. The cyborgs, momentarily defeated, leave the ship in a captured landing craft and go down to the planet, but before they go they sabotage the ship so that it is no longer able to support life. The crew have no choice but to follow them down to the planet where they have to fight not just the cyborgs but also forms of life a billion years more evolved than humans. Creatures that have grown tough and hardy in an attempt to cope with the increasingly harsh conditions that prevail there. As if things weren't bad enough, there is conflict among the ship's crew as they fight to decide which of them will be in charge and how they will meet the challenges facing them, and even if they survive all this they will still have to deal with the discovery of the ultimate fate that awaits all intelligent life in the universe...
No streak history
One state-enhanced oracle order, filtered by each list. Observed Royal Road ranks remain separate ground truth.
Rank updated 2 Oct 2026, 05:38 UTC
Entry forecast updated 2 Oct 2026, 05:38 UTC
Ranking model: rs-public-oracle-state-v1
Forecast model: rs-model-entry-v1
Chart history contains only this ranking model's runs; legacy points are not spliced in.
Coupled 14-day outlook
rs-joint-entry-copula-v1
Any eligible RS entry
4%
Two or more lists
2%
Likely threshold order: Sci-fi → Action → Adventure → Main.
Leading bundle: Sci-fi (2%).
Estimated from one fitted shared story path; category probabilities are not multiplied as if lists were independent.
Separate entry forecast; this probability does not enter the ranking score.
Overall Rising Stars Shadow RS rank
#8741 of 12,147 · 8691 below RS #50
By genre
beats 69% of similar stories
not enough data yet
beats 33% of similar stories
Hidden gem — exposure is the bottleneck
Readers who find this story follow it at a high rate; there just aren't enough of them. In our cohort data, near-daily posting lifted the odds of reaching 25 followers from ~0% to 17% — more chapters, shoutout swaps and ads buy the eyeballs this conversion deserves.
Benchmarks: 8,060 active Royal Road stories, percentiles within the 50–149 chapters band, cohort of 2026-07-02. Conversion is measured as followers gained per 1,000 views over the recent window.