An alien observer embedded in a small Colorado town begins to question his mission to evaluate humanity for termination, just as a battered housewife across the street dares to defy the man who’s been destroying her life, one watches, one awakens, both are running out of time.

For over elven thousand years, the being known only as The Shepherd has watched humanity evolve. His role is simple: monitor population growth, behavioural drift, and deviation from acceptable parameters. Once the data is complete, the system decides. Earth is not the first planet to be judged. It may not be the last. Disguised as a quiet UAV salesman, the Shepherd embeds himself in Montrose, Colorado, a quaint town of rhythms, secrets, and rot beneath the surface. Among the townspeople, one woman catches his attention: Belinda Shapcott, the dentist’s wife. Outwardly composed, inwardly broken, Belinda endures a life of domestic tyranny under her controlling husband, Jim. Her pain is not loud, but it runs deep, and unlike others, she sees through masks. As the Shepherd's drone begins its final survey, triggering the countdown to humanity’s potential erasure, his observations are interrupted by something unexpected: empathy. He finds himself drawn to Belinda, not romantically, but existentially. Her resilience challenges his conclusions. Her small acts of rebellion suggest an intelligence and strength that defy his models. But the system does not tolerate hesitation. Meanwhile, Belinda senses something strange about the man across the street. His quiet, precise behaviour. His eyes that seem too ancient. When her journal is compromised and her husband’s surveillance intensifies, she realises her only ally might not be from this world. In the novel’s climax, as a storm descends and the Shepherd’s final report looms, Belinda is given a chance to choose, for herself, and perhaps for the future of all humankind. But the Shepherd must also choose, obey his directive, or defy everything he was created to do. The Shepherd is a haunting, slow- burn sci-fi thriller about surveillance, abuse, alien ethics, and the power of human resilience. It asks a single question: What if the only thing that saves us is someone who was never one of us? FASTER THAN LIGHT UNIVERSE In a universe where faster-than-light travel is possible, the traditional divide between Einsteinian relativity and topological manipulation must be reconsidered in light of a deeper shift: the idea that spacetime itself is not fundamental. Instead, it may be emergent, the visible surface of a more abstract structure rooted in relationships, entanglement, and quantum information. Einstein’s framework treats spacetime as a smooth, four-dimensional manifold, with objects moving through it along paths constrained by the speed of light. This relativistic model defines causality, simultaneity, and motion, and has been remarkably successful at describing the macroscopic world. However, it assumes that space and time are the fixed stage upon which matter and energy act. Topological physics offers an alternative, where the structure of that stage can be reshaped, reconnected, or bypassed entirely. Travel becomes less about motion and more about altering the framework itself. In topological models, faster-than-light effects become possible not by violating physical laws, but by circumventing them. A vessel may not cross space at high speed in the usual sense. Instead, it modifies the connections between points in spacetime, creating a path that bypasses conventional distance. This is often described as folding or rethreading space, changing how points relate rather than physically moving between them. The shift between this domain and the relativistic one involves reconciling different structures. When a vessel exits its topological path and re-enters classical space, any imbalance between the two frameworks must resolve, which can result in metric shockwaves, energy release, or temporal distortion. More radically, recent theories suggest that space and time themselves are not the foundation of reality. They are instead the outcome of more fundamental entities, such as quantum correlations or networks of mutual information. In this view, relationships come first. Objects and locations are emergent features, not fundamental components. This idea is sometimes called information-theoretic realism. It challenges our deepest intuitions. We are wired to think in terms of physical things located in space and time. But nature, it seems, may operate from a deeper substrate. Within this interpretation, travel through space becomes an act of rewriting the underlying network of relations. Rather than moving a ship from one location to another, it is more accurate to say that the informational links that define the ship's place in the universe have been altered. The transition from topological to relativistic frameworks is then a change in how reality is expressed, not how it is traversed. This has consequences. Any system based on stable geometry or fixed coordinates may fail when confronted with a restructured fabric of reality. Guidance systems, communication protocols, or weapons platforms could lose coherence. Their understanding of space would no longer apply. In such a universe, the frontier is not velocity but structure. The future belongs not to those who move fastest, but to those who best understand how to shape the hidden framework beneath what we call space and time.