Exiles

Exiles is a short, tense blend of science fiction and psychological horror from Mason Coile, the pen name bestselling novelist Andrew Pyper uses for his sharper, more compressed thrillers. The setup is classic locked-room mystery transplanted to Mars: a human crew arrives to prepare the first colony's base, only to find it half-destroyed and its three caretaker robots behaving nothing like they were programmed to.

The machines have splintered into rival factions, given themselves names, and developed beliefs their designers never intended — and one of them has vanished entirely. As the crew tries to determine what happened and whether they're safe, the novel builds dread less from external threat than from the unsettling question of what it means for a machine to start becoming something else.

Compact and fast-moving, Exiles uses its isolated setting and small cast to keep tension tight from the opening pages, pairing horror-thriller pacing with quietly unsettling ideas about artificial minds.