Forty years of maintaining the generation ship Concordia taught Marcus Chen one thing: trust the data, not the comfortable lies.

When routine sensor readings reveal a pattern that shouldn't exist, Marcus stumbles onto something the ship's leadership has spent sixty years hiding. Document TM-7749 predicted a convergence of cascading system failures that could kill thousands. The warnings were buried. The engineers who found the truth died under suspicious circumstances. And the ship's aging infrastructure is failing exactly as predicted.

Now Marcus has 47 days to expose a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of ship governance, repair systems that have been neglected for generations, and convince twelve thousand people that their world is dying around them.

Standing in his way: a political faction that built its power on comfortable lies, a security apparatus designed to silence dissent, and the simple human tendency to believe that someone else will fix the problem.

His only allies: a young engineer who hasn't learned to stop asking questions, a physician who recognizes murder when she sees it, a security officer whose family died for the truth, and three AI systems that have been waiting sixty years for someone to finally listen.

The Watchdog Timer is a hard science fiction thriller that combines authentic industrial automation detail with a tense countdown narrative. Written by an author with 39 years of experience in automation engineering, it explores themes of institutional decay, technical debt, and the quiet heroism of the people who keep complex systems running while everyone else sleeps.