This longshot has for some perverse reason been brought to mere orbital velocity in the trojan point of a habitable system. Presumably the habitats would have been expected to build a launch laser to kick it back up to intersteller speed. Unfortunately, the habitats and starship have been abandoned, the ships AI (a crippled primitive one, barely deserving of the name) and one crew-pack (Argent) maintaining the life-support in one small sealed-off part of one of the four habitats.
Argent believe the longshot is real, and spends most of their time there. The timeslips that occasionally strand them outside the flow of time, so months pass while Puzzlebox changes not at all, or isolate the longshot for weeks of outside time while nothing passes within, well, they can probably be explained without invoking time travel. Causality isn't all it's cracked up to be, after all.
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